Sociology Of Intimacy

Pardis Mahdavi’s Crossing the Gulf is based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Arabian Gulf that investigated immobilities and mobilities as well as familial love in the lives of migrant workers. Although her data concentrate mainly on Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), her arguments are relevant to other countries in the area with a signifi- cant presence of domestic workers. The book offers a deeply original reading of migration and intimacy.

For most people, privacy is just one of those rights that is debated in the context of cyberspace and big data, something threatened by the commercial platforms, in name defended by the government, but not something of fundamental importance. In this article it is argued, that privacy (and the shared privacy in intimacy) is far more important, that it affects our inner world, our imagination, our ‘forum internum’. Privacy and autonomy are cornerstones of our identity, in the formation of who we are, in our learning and freedom to make mistakes, change our mind and grow, it's an essential factor in the agency of our selfhood.
This is not how privacy was seen historically, but lately the importance of privacy as an enabling factor in personal growth and creativity has been recognized, and this is impacting the importance and rank of the right of privacy among other human rights. It emerges as an essential right, a fundamental necessity.

Legújabb könyvében Eva Illouz francia-izraeli szociológus azokat a társadalmi változásokat és feszítőerőket elemzi, amelyek hatására gyakran már az ismerkedés sem jut tovább a szexuális igények kölcsönös kielégítésének fázisánál. Miközben a szexualitás szabaddá válik és lehasad az érzelmekről és a kapcsolatokról, férfiak és nők között egy újfajta egyenlőtlenség jön létre.

In this article I explore the contemporary normative meanings of friendship, unpacking the subject through two different questions: “what is a good friend?” and “what is an intimate friend?” Drawing on survey data from a national representative sample (n = 1142), the topic is explored in the context of a southern European country (Portugal) that represents an interesting case study, for its characteristics of late, though abrupt, entrance into late modernity. Statistical analysis of the results enabled the construction of an exploratory typology of representations of friendship, according to the meanings ascribed to friends: family-oriented; trust-oriented; self-oriented; and presence-oriented. Results inspire a two-folded interpretation. On the one hand, they point to a pervasiveness of hegemonic representations such as friendship as trust and self-disclosure, namely among the younger and more educated. On the other hand, they highlight the pervasiveness of kinship ties in the definition of friendship, namely among the elderly and less educated. This suggests that patterns of suffusion may not only refer to more individualized and plural arrangements of personal life, but also to the persistence of more traditional representations and practices, characterized by an ideological commitment to the family in its more institutional forms.

Co wiemy o polskich parach mieszkających razem bez ślubu? Tekst oferuje krótkie podsumowanie wiedzy płynącej z dotychczasowych badań ilościowych, wzbogacając je o wyniki badań przeprowadzonych w 2011 roku w Poznaniu. Przy tej okazji, omówione zostają problemy tego typu badań i pułapki na poziomie zbierania oraz intepretowania danych. Stają się one tym bardziej widoczne, jeśli przyjrzymy się wynikom badań jakościowych pochodzących z Warszawy i Poznania, zaprezentowanych w drugiej części artykułu. Pokazują one, że obok mieszkania razem istnieją liczne formy „pomieszkiwania” oraz różne stosowane przez pary intymne sposoby oddzielania od siebie kolejnych etapów instytucjonalizacji związku. Dzielenie przestrzeni i materialności jest doświadczeniem i etapem rozwoju będącym udziałem bardzo wielu związków, jednocześnie jednak istotnym punktem odniesienia jest dla nich ceremonia ślubu, która ma „przypieczętować” związek oraz dokonane wybory, nadać mu społeczną legitymizację oraz „wyczyścić” wcześniejszy etap mieszkania razem z cechujących go ambiwalencji.

This chapter explores the creators and potential consumers of sex robots. With Realbotix as our case study, we take a closer look at the language and sentiments of those developing the technology and those who are testing, consuming, or showing an interest in it. We do this by means of website and chat forum analysis, and via interviews with those involved. From this, we can see the motivation for developing a sexual companion robot places the emphasis firmly on the companionship aspect, and that those involved in creating and consuming the products share an ideology of intimacy and affection, with sexual gratification only playing a minor role.

""Largely based on pre-theory that ties high testosterone (T) to masculinity, and low T to femininity, high T is mainly studied in relation to aggression, mating, sexuality, and challenge, and low T with parenting. Evidence, however, fails to support this, and the social variability in T is better accounted for by a competition–
nurturance trade-off as per the Steroid/Peptide Theory of Social Bonds (van Anders et al., 2011). Four key domains are discussed: adult–infant interactions, sexual desire, sexual behavior, and partnering. Empirical engagements with gender/sex are shown to lead to important insights over assumptions about masculinity–femininity. Humans are discussed within a comparative framework that attends to cross species principles informed by human insights alongside human-specific particularities like social constructions, which are critical to evolutionary understandings of the social role of T. This paper thus integrates seemingly orthogonal perspectives to allow for transformative approaches to an empirically supported social phenomenology of T.""

In this article I conceptualise BDSM (Bondage, Domination and Submission,
Discipline, Sadism and Masochism) practices within the frame of contemporary intimacies. This article draws from an empirical research in Milan, involving qualitative interviews and participant observations. Initially, I present a definition of BDSM drawn from contemporary sociological and anthropological literature. Then, I focus on the literature on intimacy, the public/private divide, the marketization of intimacy, and kinship and queer studies of the last decades, to
frame BDSM practices among contemporary forms of intimacy. These include practices and identities beyond the heterosexual monogamous couple, such as non-heterosexual or reconstituted families, polyamorous or bareback practitioners, singles, and others; and move outside of the primacy of the sexual realm, by shifting the attention from the supremacy of the sexual sphere and the sexual intercourse. Intimacy is here primarily intended as access to the Other; to its inner and most secret parts. In order to widen our perspectives on intimacy,
I provide examples from my empirical research of how practitioners intend
and conceptualise BDSM as intimacy both as a risky and unsafe activity when dealing with violation of consent, and in a positive and constructive way as a qualitatively different and rich relationship with their play partners.

El artículo analiza problemas teóricos y críticos en relación a la escritura de la intimidad en los Diarios de Katherine Mansfield y en las crónicas del Jornal do Brasil de Clarice Lispector. En primer lugar, aborda la relación entre género literario y género sexual y entre feminismo y autobiografía. En segundo lugar, analiza la constitución de la voz en los géneros íntimos y problematiza la idea de intimidad tomando como punto de partida la teoría psicoanalítica. Luego, propone el análisis comparativo de ambas escritoras en torno a la idea de literatura periférica y a la de relación entre obra literaria e intimidad exhibida. Finalmente, se pregunta por el rol de la imagen de mujer y la comunidad femenina en su textualidad.

The article presents selected results of research conducted within the project „Women in intimate relationships. The empirical and critical study”. The Author characterises practices involved in the process of constructing intimacy in relationships from the women’s perspective. The important components of this process are discursively shaped partnership-family rituals. They are presented as the analysis of research material derived from in-depth individual interviews. The identified rituals are of two types: universal, used in many relationships and individual, created for only one relationship. The rituals of the first type include the ritual of sacrifice for children, the ritual of family activities, the ritual of dating, the sharing of meals, the kisses of “good morning” and “good night”, giving presents, “having a good cry” and sex. On the other hand, the second type of ritual is the evening “assessment”. The presented rituals most likely have their origins both in the intergenerational family relations of socialisation and in the public discourse.
Keywords: discursiveness, intimacy, ritual, gender.

Despite contemporary acceptance that children are active agents in their own socialization, that causality between parents and children is bidirectional, and that context matters, basic concepts used in socialization research continue to reflect an underlying mechanistic. In this chapter it is proposed that a dialectical relational systems conception of the transaction model provides direction for future advances in the study of dynamic parent-child socialization processes with an emphasis of intergenerational change, not only continuity. The chapter begins by exploring dialectics as a framework underlying an organismic-contextual metatheory for understanding the transactional model of human development. The chapter then outlines social relational theory as a framework for translating four assumptions of a dialectical ontology including agency, holism, contradiction, and synthesis to reformulate major transactional processes in parent-child relations and socialization. The chapter ends by considering implications for application and methodology informed by dialectics.

What might it mean to think of 'the single' as a potentially queer subject and in what ways does singleness pose a challenge to heteronormative conceptualizations of the lifecourse and household formation? In this paper I explore some of the contested meanings of ‘home’ for those who are single; and examine how single people have created new forms of home and new spaces of at-homeness with those with whom they are not biologically (or romantically) related. I conclude by asking how we might help foster, build and create new forms of dwelling that might better match single people’s imaginings and desires for a home outside of heteronormative coupledom. Ultimately the paper argues that the exclusion of the figure of the single is one of the key omissions in the work of those interested in challenging the geographies of exclusion and inequality.

Gunnarsson, Lena (2014) ‘Loving him for he is: the microsociology of power’, in A.G. Jónasdóttir and A. Ferguson (eds) Love – a question for feminism in the twenty first century. London: Routledge, pp. 97-110.

The chapter theorizes the tension inherent in contemporary western heterosexual love between, on one hand, norms of gender equality and freedom to choose and, on the other, persisting gender inequality. Focusing on the empirically documented asymmetry in love ‘exchanges’ as such between women and men, I ask how this tendency comes about despite the fact that mutual love is the raison d’être of the relationship, that the ideological context prescribes gender equality and that there are no salient external factors that stop women from breaking up in case they are not satisfied.

Ese artículo es parte de un estudio sobre las relaciones entre la cultura, la economía y el amor romántico.  Hay un propósito para que el mantenimiento de ese tipo de amor esté presente en la actualidad en detrimento de otros, y la verdad es que es una creación bastante atractiva económicamente y un buen mecanismo de control. El placer de las mujeres y las relaciones homosexuales fueron poco a poco prohibidos y el amor monógamo y heterosexual fue condenado. Las prácticas culturales y los discursos son herramientas útiles para reglamentar los comportamientos, así como el amor es utilizado como modo de perpetuar la violencia de género y mantener la sociedad en una cultura de miedo.

The rise of psy discourse has been the subject of considerable academic attention, but one of its most popular and visible forms, the self-help book, has received comparatively little attention. This article provides a Foucauldian analysis of a selection of relationship manuals; it examines the ways in which they set up a relation of the reader’s self to itself, and it explores the ethical valorizations and teleologies therein. The emphasis on the relationship with the self, and the development of mastery over the emotions advocated in the books, is related to the values held in liberal democratic societies.

During the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) movement, parents generally supported government efforts to maintain order while their adult children allied themselves with the protesters. Conventional literature on social movements—particularly for Hong Kong—tends to focus on macropolitical aspects such as the causes of the social movement, evolutionary processes, and macro-political structures. This article suggests that “practices of intimacy” can supplant hierarchical power relations in the family, enabling both parents and children to resolve problems of intergenerational conflict. By analyzing the results of 63 in-depth interviews and three focus groups between the parents and young adult children, this article identifies the stresses in family relationships and then highlights ways to relieve them through the lens of restored intimacy. This research may offer clues for Hong Kong policy makers to reestablish social cohesion.

Contemporary western culture aligns sex, romance and coupledom. Asexuality is a self-identity movement that emerged in the early 2000’s, focused on people who do not experience sexual attraction. Asexuality therefore disrupts the first chain in the reaction to a normative partnership. My research questions are: How do asexual individuals navigate intimacies? Also, what can asexual narratives teach us about relational norms?
The data for this study were collected from two sources: online ethnography of asexuality message boards and in depth qualitative interviews with asexual-identified people. A thematic analysis was performed on all data. The narratives present in the data were concerned with three binary structures that govern intimate relationships: sexual/asexual, romantic/aromantic and coupled/single. Each of these binaries refers to a social value system in which one half of the binary is preferred over the other. Derrida (1972/1981) argues that deconstruction of a binary opposition requires the creation of a new concept, one that does not fit into the previous paradigm. This thesis explores each relational binary through the lens of deconstruction. Within, I propose that these three binaries work in tandem to create a relational norm, one which is rooted in the timeline of the normative life-course. Throughout life, people are expected to show sexual interest in others, fall in love, and enter coupledom, which includes a shared life with a partner. These three traits, which were brought up numerous times by asexual individuals in the data, are essential to the expected life course.
The results show that the majority of asexual narratives reaffirmed the current value system by trying to fit into it, despite their disadvantaged starting point. A minority of narratives refuted the hierarchy of the binary oppositions, arguing for equality of the sexual and the asexual, the romantic and the platonic, and the coupled and the single. An even smaller minority deconstructed the very distinction inherent to each binary, describing relationships and ways of living that render the existing binary system nonsensical. Lastly, the thesis explores the relational futures asexual individuals imagine for themselves, which mostly fall under normative romantic coupledom. It concludes that the majority of asexual individuals seek to fit in the current value system, while a minority of asexual individuals deconstruct it and produce alternative queer temporalities.

This dissertation is an ethnography of intimacy as it is transacted in the political economy and commodity culture of K-pop. I view both K-pop singers and fans as intimate laborers in the affective economy of global K-pop and explore how intimacy is commodified as a product in digital media. Popular music studies have often defined fan activities in the pop music sector as domestic, and thus feminine. However, female K-pop fans’ activities complicate the conventional dichotomies of domestic versus public, and feminine versus masculine, as their relationships with K-pop idols—male singers in particular—are built upon female dominance acquired through digital surveillance and fetishization of idol bodies. These activities have long been deemed abnormal, hysterical, irrational, and unintelligent; however, I see K-pop fans as active consumers who seek intimate solidarity through purchased feelings of pleasure, power, and ascendancy.
K-pop fandom is not phenomenal—it is performative.

Today, individuals can relatively easily meet and communicate with each other over great distances due to increased mobility and advances in communication technology. This also allows intimate relationships to be maintained over large geographical distances. Despite these developments, long-distance relationships (LDRs), i.e. intimate relationships maintained over geographical distance, remain understudied. The present thesis aims to fill this knowledge gap and investigates how intimate partners who live so far away from each other that they cannot meet every day make their relationship ongoing beyond face-to-face interaction.

Theoretically, this study departs from a symbolic interactionist viewpoint that invites us to study phenomena from the actor’s perspective. Conceptually, the thesis builds on the recent development in sociology of intimate lives that sees intimacy as a relational quality that has to be worked on to be sustained, and that focuses on the practices that make a relationship a relationship. Empirically, the thesis is based upon 19 in-depth interviews with individuals from Latvia with long-distance relationship experience.

The thesis consists of four articles. Article I studies the context in which LDRs in Latvia are maintained, focusing on the normative constraints that complicate LDR maintenance. Article II analyses how intimacy is practiced over geographical distance. Article III examines how long-distance partners manage the experience of the time they are together and the time they are geographically apart. Article IV explores the aspect of idealization in LDRs. Overall, the thesis argues for the critical role of imagination in relationship maintenance. The relationship maintenance strategies identified within the articles are imagination-based mediated communication (creating sensual/embodied intimacy, emotional intimacy, daily intimacy and imagined individual intimacy); time-work strategies that enable long-distance partners to deal with the spatiotemporal borders of the time together and the time apart; and creating bi-directional idealization. The thesis is also one of the few works in the field of intimate lives in Eastern Europe and analyses the normative complications that long-distance partners face in their relationship maintenance in Latvia.

[this is the developed version of conference speech "Cain inanimate objects be more sexually attractive than people?" expanded with the hypothesis of return of magical thinking as an explanation of anthropomorphizing attitude towards robots]
This chapter elaborates on the issue of loving dolls and robots. The topic has been already broadly discussed by academics representing diverse disciplines as well as implemented into mass culture – mainly due to the fact that people who have strong affections towards inanimate objects are already a part of reality and cannot be perceived as a matter of distant future or a part of some science-fiction scenario anymore. On the one hand, the chapter delivers a claim that people who engage into intimate relationships with inanimate objects cannot be seen simply as crazy social outcasts, since their activity is a result of tendencies and processes that are prevalent in contemporary Western culture. In other words, the chapter argues that doll lovers and robot lovers are not following some other path than the rest of society – not only do they pursue in the same direction but they also might be simply few steps ahead. On the other hand, it is argued that further continuation of that journey involves some serious risks. In other words, the fact that we are all heading in this direction, does not mean that the direction is appropriate. The main risk is that the solipsist who create their own subjective worlds in search for personal freedom will tend to objectify other human beings and in the end they will find themselves imprisoned in a kind of autistic reality. Finally, the paper presents hypothesis that the mental processes that are connected with intimate relationships with inanimate objects are – in specific sense – connected with return of magical thinking typical for so called primitive cultures. The analyses refer not only to philosophical, psychological and sociological studies but also to popular culture, e.g. to a documentary movie Guys and Dolls and a specific episode of TV series House M.D.

This book is a collection of quotes and some original ideas of my own which are used as lecture outlines and handouts in my Mysteries of Love: Climbing Mount Eros Seminar on the Psychology of Love. For, the past 36 years, since beginning my Ph.D. training in clinical psychology at the University of Washington, I have been developing a theoretical model that traces the possible evolution of love in the stages of the human life cycle. In this Mysteries of Love book, I will use the Climbing Mount Eros model of love as a conceptual framework within which to discuss various themes about love relationships. Please email me at geoaparks@earthlink.net, if you would like further information on mp3 audio files of my lectures or to book a lecture, workshop or seminar.

As images become more and more omnipresent our relation to them assumes new contours. Contemporary social networks place a singular emphasis in the optic apparatus challenging traditional networked media studies to take into account new objects and social processes.
This paper aims to bring contributions from visual culture studies into the research about social networks audiences and the relations they establish with the medium and with its users. It will argue that scopophilia may be a dear concept to evaluate how people socially interact in social networks. This scopophilic dimension transforms users into spectators. Spectatorship would be, then, a fundamental notion, not only to understand the social role of pictures and videos on social networks as also to understand how social networks contribute to the promotion of social organization and cohesion.
The paper will discuss how scopophilia and spectatorship lead to the formation of communities of vision and the redefinition of intimacy in contemporary societies

Despite a growing recognition that interpersonal friendship informs wider forms of solidarity, there is little systematic analysis as to how community members extend the logic of friendship and intimacy to broader organizational and societal context. Masonic organizational practices provide a useful model for this inquiry. Drawing on an ethnographic study of contemporary Israeli Freemasonry, I examine the intersections of interpersonal, public, and collective intimacy in members’ ritual activities and everyday life. The juxtaposition of mundane sociability and Masonic sacred rituals serves to rescale the distance between interpersonal friendship and communal solidarity. As members take on the roles of citizen, bureaucrat, priest, and president concomitantly, they partly collapse the distinctions between personal and collective ties, between the familiar and the revered. These intersections of intimacy are offered as a programmatic research strategy to study how institutionalized patterns of sociability inform civic and national attachments.

This article discusses relations between Foucault’s history of sexuality and the contemporary transformations of eroticism diagnosed by Wojciech Klimczyk. The Klimczyk’s studies are interpreted in the perspective of theoretical tools provided by Foucault and seem to lead to an interesting conclusions. Peculiarity of those conclusions is especially connected with the fact that they are opposite to the diagnosis provided by Brian McNair and Anthony Giddens. Simply speaking, Giddens and McNair claim that contemporary intimacy is emancipated from most of regulations and contains a high amount of freedom, while Klimczyk (with theoretical support of Foucault) argues that nowadays sexuality is strongly regulated by the outside conditions, especially by the market.

A range of commercial mobile technologies are emerging which use psychophysiological sensors to monitor bodies and behaviour to produce new forms of knowledge about social relationships. In this paper I am concerned with how this kind of relationship tracking influences intimacy. I am specifically interested in what I call the " technicity of intimacy " , the cultural techniques which emerge through the historically contingent technologisation of intimacy. Based on archival research, I argue that relationship tracking promises to take up the intensive social labours associated with contemporary intimacy. Yet, the psychophysiological measurements these technologies rely on produce partial and ambiguous indicators of intimate life, gesturing toward an excess of intimate meaning which cannot be interrogated. The self-reflexive concern with this excess drives further tracking experiments and techniques. Yet intimacy remains a continuous mystery, and this problematises the value of self-tracking as a system dedicated to achieving meaningful self-knowledge and completeness.

This article explores affective and immaterial labor on the leading live-streaming platform, Twitch.tv, which boasts over one hundred million regular viewers and two million regular broadcasters. This labor involves digitally mediated outward countenance, including being friendly to viewers, soliciting donations, building parasocial intimacy with spectators, and engaging audiences through humor. We offer an examination of streamers broadcasting as a “character,” which we situate within the context of play becoming work, the labor of performance and acting, and the economic compulsions that shape cultural labor on Twitch. We draw on hundred interviews with professional and aspiring-professional game broadcasters conducted in 2016 and 2017 at gaming events across the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, and Poland, alongside ethnographic research. This inquiry into the dynamics of digital games and labor underscores the importance of studying live streaming as part of a wider critical investigation of contemporary digital work.

In this chapter, we will analyse the gender performances (Butler, 2007) and gender display (Goffman, 1979) conveyed on YouTube by boys aged 12 to 17, who author videos to problematise their relationship with physical or relational intimacy. As Judith Butler puts it, ‘gender is always a doing’ (2007, p. 34), and this activity ‘is performatively produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of gender coherence’ (ibid.). Our research objectively examines the modalities of self-presentation (Goffman, 1959) as a boy on YouTube. The starting point of our investigation is the statement of gender membership, and we focus our research on content in which adolescent boys specifically problematise their masculinity by using expressions such as ‘us guys’ and by staging a type of intimacy: corporeal, relational or subjective.

A central element of queer theory is the challenge to clear divisions of sexual orientation categories and the politics upon which they depend, both heteronormative and homonormative. This piece explores methodological issues in a queer research project inspired by the desires to understand how (some) people experience 'sexual orientation' and to imagine alternatives for political practice. With these desires in mind, I interviewed sixteen people in intimate relationships which crossed borders of sexual orientation identities; interviews focused on the areas of sexual identities, experiences, relationships and desires. Addressing these sensitive issues combined with my commitment to anti-authoritarian practice meant that issues of research ethics were central to this project. This chapter describes how overlaps and differences in autonomous Marxist, anarchist, feminist and poststructuralist thought, as well as queer theory, contributed to the development of the ethical practices in this project as well as how the emotional/embodied experience of interviews emphasised both concerns about the realities of doing intimate research from within the bureaucratic structures of universities and, consequently, the importance of care of the self. Queering any distinction between theory and data, as an additional aspect of research ethics, I describe my efforts to weave stories produced in interviews with other stories of queer, anarchist and feminist thought. In this piece, I further describe how I came to see these stories as narratives of policing, resistance and empowerment. Combining this storytelling approach with Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomic thought and a recognition of the significance of reflexivity, I examine the context of this research in four short stories on 1) my work in schools doing sexual health education, 2) changes in my own sexual identity and activism, 3) emotions and research and 4)my experiences of the mixed identity relationships. The chapter concludes with a call for letting go of demands for research to be justified according to a single value (i.e., validity) and instead to response to research to with respect to a multivalue consequentialism whereby the research is acknowledged to have multiple consequences which may or may not help the researcher and other participants (including readers) meet a variety of needs/values (i.e. integrity, autonomy, respect, community and beauty).

Mucho se ha escrito desde las ciencias sociales y los estudios literarios sobre los viajes. De hecho, en las últimas décadas presenciamos un gran interés académico por los estudios de viajeros y cronistas. La quietud en movimiento es un caso raro dentro de esa tendencia contemporánea porque se dedica a un tipo muy poco convencional de viaje: el viaje por lo extremadamente cercano. No es relevante aquí el interés en las grandes travesías del capitalismo colonial durante los siglos XVIII y XIX que acompañaron el descubrimiento de fronteras transatlánticas desconocidas y transformaron la visión europea sobre los “otros” y sobre “si mismos”. Tampoco están en juego aquí los viajeros de tierra adentro que durante el siglo XIX imaginaban con sus crónicas la construcción de estados nacionales. Bernard Stiegler se adentra en la literatura de viajes hacia lo íntimo, lo cotidiano, lo cercano, que son la contracara de esos viajes por lo lejano y tan importantes como ellos para entender los vínculos entre viaje y cultura moderna.
Inaugurado por Voyage autour de ma chambre (1794) de Xavier de Maistre, el género del viaje intimo es una innovación cultural que le permite a Bernard Stiegler reconstruir una genealogía de la crónica sobre singulares viajes en donde los viajeros están quietos y no van a ninguna parte.

Immersive media is a hot topic, especially in the United States. The novelty value of Punchdrunk's Sleep No More, which became New York's hottest ticket in 2011 and 2012, has positioned the British company's trademark brand of "immersive theater" at the front of debate about new media and the future of storytelling. This work is supposed to "shatter" the fourth wall of traditional non-immersive theater, and spectators describe the experience as "mind-blowing." For audiences, the ability to interact physically with objects and the actors' bodies is the core of this hardcore theater experience. But it can be argued that Punchdrunk does very little to engage the fourth wall and that its commodification of the one-on-one encounter bypasses an opportunity to break down the distinction between audience and performer, the radical boundary crossing that immersive media is supposed to achieve. Both media pundits and performance scholars have been remiss in praising this sexy new theater. Comparing scope for theatrically significant audience-actor interaction here and in théâtre érotique, I propose that sex shows, while acknowledging their foundation in sex and voyeurism, may in fact produce a theater less compromised by voyeurism and audience neediness than Punchdrunk's theater of intimacy. The argument is not that SNM isn't serious theater because it's too much like a skin show, but that the skin show might do more as theater.

“Certain sounds, even when they are loud or heard from close by, conjure small sources.” Small sounds, as Chion (2016) describes them in this quote, usually appear in intimate or contained settings, where their relatively low strength will not be spoiled by the masking effects of a noisy public sphere. What happens, however, when they are shared with an audience in a concert venue? Privileging a distributive understanding of agency, I explore the interactions of instruments, techniques, and processes through which the composer Clara Iannotta (b. 1983) brings small sounds to the public space of the concert hall in the first minute of her composition Intent on Resurrection – Spring or Some Such Thing (2014). By articulating the technological means harnessed to allow for the qualities of small sounds to emerge, I reveal the conditions that are required for sound to be recognized and experienced as intimate. Along the way, I draw connections between the amplification aesthetics of Iannotta’s work and Hyperrealist art, and theorize the concept of the “grain of the instrument” drawing on ideas from Roland Barthes, Pierre Schaeffer, and Brian Kane.

Weaving together biography with poetry and political theory, this chapter addresses numerous themes including activist identity, domestic violence and care of the self. Centred around the practice of sex education with young people in schools, the piece asks questions about the nature of both sex and education.

This article explores the ways in which coupledom is promoted through contemporary family policy in the UK. It does this in the context of dominant political discourses suggesting that broken relationships are a major political problem and the cause of almost all that is wrong with British society today. The paper performs an analysis of recent family policies, revealing narratives claiming that stable coupled relationships are the foundation of a strong nation. The reverse of this narrative, therefore, is that to not be in—or even worse, to not even aspire to be in—a coupled relationship is not just a personal failure, but a failure for the nation as a whole. The article therefore argues that the UK government encourages a particular type of intimate relationship, despite an increasing recognition of ’diverse’ family forms. Build- ing upon Rich’s notion of compulsory heterosexuality, the article concludes that what we are witnessing in current British society is not compulsory heterosexuality, but compulsory coupledom.