Sociology Of Intimacy

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

The sexual adventures of television characters. Dating websites for married women. News reports on raids of polygamous communities. Reality shows about polyamorists. It seems that non- monogamy is everywhere: in popular culture, in the news, and before the courts.

In Fraught Intimacies, Nathan Rambukkana delves into North American society’s fixation with monogamy and its attendant fascination with non-monogamy. Drawing on media coverage, popular culture, and recent court cases, he examines how polygamy, adultery, and polyamory are represented in the public sphere and the effect this in having on intimate relationships and aspects of contemporary Western society.
As this book demonstrates, although monogamy is considered and presented as the norm in Western society, many kinds of sexual and romantic relationships exist within its borders. Rambukkana’s intricate analysis reveals how some forms of non-monogamy are tacitly accepted, even glamourized, while others are vilified and reviled. By questioning what this says how about intimacy, power and privilege, this book offers an innovative framework for understanding the place of non-monogamy in Western society, particularly in relation to race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, and citizenship status.

Timely and controversial, this book makes a stimulating and sophisticated argument for why we need to reconsider how we talk – and think – about non-monogamy.

This paper draws from research on small-scale maize production in Mexico’s Central Highland region to discuss the geopolitical implications of everyday agricultural practices. An overwhelming majority of maize farmers in this region, as well as in the country more broadly, continue to cultivate locally-adapted maize varieties they have bred themselves – criollo maize is the vernacular term – despite decades of concerted government attempts to effect the widespread adoption of commercially-bred and licensed hybrid varieties. This state effort to restructure agricultural systems and food security according to nationalist and capitalist priorities is one tactic in a long and violent struggle for control over peasant land and labor in Mexico. By integrating feminist scholarship in geopolitics and in political ecology, I am following the lead of geographers who regard the materialities of everyday life as a foundation for political tensions and conflicts that are constantly unfolding along intersecting lines of difference. Though geopolitics has rarely turned its attention directly to theories of intimate socio-ecological relations, I argue that the field has much analytical and political leverage to gain by engaging with political ecology, and that feminist geographic imaginaries provide a crucial space in which to do so.  This approach allows for an analysis of how a dominant geopolitics of land and agriculture is being undermined through the routine production of criollo maize, revealing new potential for creating broad political alliances with social movements that are currently working toward alternative visions of agriculture and food security.

""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.""

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.

(German translation available under "Translation" section of author's site.) Provides an overview of how "intimacy" is being used as an analytical term in feminist/queer transnational analysis, as a way to bypass the pitfalls of identity categories and to capture the relational effects of capitalism, racial history, and colonialism.

PhD Thesis, Social Anthropology Department, University of Edinburgh 2017
Passed with no corrections
Supervisors: Dimitri Tsintjilonis and Maya Mayblin (University of Edinburgh)
Examiners: Andreas Bandak (University of Copenhagen) and Magnus Course (University of Edinburgh).

In a culture where compulsory monogamy is largely accepted as necessary, if not entirely desirable, what enables a shift in consciousness, individually and culturally? In this chapter, I examine this question in connection with a problematic in anarchist politics: how to shift from Statist to anarchist(ic) forms of social organisation. Inspired by feminist critiques of hierarchical separations of the personal from the political, and currents within anarchist/poststructuralist thought on the State as a pattern of relationships rather than an institution, I argue that these two questions have more in common than one might expect. In making this argument, I draw upon interviews with 16 people who described their experiences of intimate relationships which crossed borders of sexual orientation identity. In the most painful aspects of their stories, I saw the State in the form of policing and borders, in the form of representation: claiming the authority to speak for others, to tell them who they are and what they (should) want. Reminding me of my reading in and direct experience of anarchism, I also saw the roles of empathy and imagination in their empowerment and resistance. In contrast to frequent patterns of identity politics, the people who shared their stories with me were not necessarily nonmonogamous in their resistance to compulsory monogamy. Rather, they imagined different choices and made an effort to develop sexual arrangements with their partners that met the needs of both (or all) involved. This process is at the heart of my understanding of anarchism; utilising empathy and imagination, people get together to directly develop social arrangements (economic, political, sexual, aesthetic, etc) in order to meet everyone's needs. Saying that, this ideal is not always put into practice; anarchist political culture has not entirely escaped the patriarchal context which separates and prioritises the political over the personal. In conclusion, this chapter argues that struggles to resist compulsory monogamy and struggles to resist the State have much to offer each other: intimate relationships are more likely to flourish in a general atmosphere of autonomy and anarchist practice would benefit from greater attention to love, sexuality and intimacy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"The aim of this paper is to confront two different accounts of contemporary transformations of intimacy. The first account, represented mainly by Anthony Giddens and Brian McNair, concentrates on processes of democratization and emancipation; simply speaking, this approach suggests that modern intimacy contains higher amount of freedom than the pre-modern one. The second account emphasizes significance of processes of commercialization and rationalization of intimacy; according to this approach intimacy becomes more and more dependent to the capitalistic market. This point of view is represented by social scientists like Ulrich Beck, Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Eva Illouz and Arlie Russell Hochschild. The aim of the article is to analyze abovementioned accounts not as opposite, but as complementary perspectives, which enables to notice highly ambivalent character of modernization of intimacy and modernization in general.

Keywords
intimacy, pure relationship, commercialization, colonization, rationalization, modernization"

New Desires, New Selves " is an exceptional study of the gendered, sexualized, and classed processes of self-making among the youth and offers a highly significant contribution to the sociological literatures on sex and gender and globalization, as well as youth and religion. Drawing upon interview, focus group, and survey data, the author explores the romance and sex narratives of Turkey's millennial youth who navigate a " fractured desire " (p.3) for seeking sexual autonomy while remaining connected to their families and larger communities in a country marked by a legacy of secularist state feminism and a present of religiously accentuated gender conservatism. This work constitutes the very first research-based, book-length sociological study on sexualities in Turkey and one of the very few in the larger Middle East. The book enriches our understanding of how gendered and sexual subjects, and the larger processes of subject formation, are transformed in an era of neoliberal globalization

Using the lenses of systemic family psychology and family sociology, this study explores the meanings of couple intimacy and the factors that have an impact on it. Through the qualitative analysis of 33 joint couple interviews, several links were found between current intimacy debates (ie, togetherness versus autonomy), which help to build a complex picture of relationship dynamics. The participants' perspectives provided three important results. First, couple intimacy was perceived as encompassing authenticity, sharing and trust, along with privacy, understanding and autonomy. Second, factors that have a negative impact on couple intimacy were related to the calibration of boundaries with other subsystems (especially work). Third, changing the everyday routine of couple life is the factor that influences intimacy in a most positive manner. These results allow us to provide a theoretical complexification and an empirical update of couple intimacy, as well as to contribute with relevant clues for couple therapy and preventive systemic interventions

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.

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.

Seamen’s wives know absence very well. Their lives are striated by it. Based on interviews with seamen’s wives conducted in Ilocos Norte, this article investigates the communicative practices obtaining amid absence and separation, and the wives’ activities that bring their husbands home and bring “home” to their husbands. It examines how new communication technologies, particularly the cellphone, have engendered new ways of becoming present and intimate. For seamen’s families, cellphone-mediated intimacy creates a space of imagined communion, which becomes the locus of the reproduction of family and affective ties and is itself the result of these emotional and material activities.

Research suggests that frequent pornography use holds consequences both for the marital experiences of devoutly-religious Americans and religious commitment itself. Extending this line of research, this study considers how pornography viewing influences the religious bonding of heterosexually married Americans by affecting the frequency with which they pray with their spouses. Longitudinal data are taken from two waves of the nationally representative Portraits of American Life Study. Multivariate findings show the net effect of earlier porn viewing on the frequency with which married Americans pray with their spouses is curvilinear. Married Americans who never viewed pornography report praying with their spouses more often than the average; those who used pornography at moderate levels report praying with their spouses below the average; and a small minority of respondents who used pornography at the highest frequencies report praying with their spouses more than the average. These effects are robust to controls for respondents' religious characteristics, moral beliefs about pornography, marital happiness, and sociodemographic factors. The study concludes by outlining the limitations and implications of these findings for research on religion, pornography use, and families.

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.

Abstract
This paper addresses Giddens’ assertion that self-help books are democratising, and may help to bring about a ‘reconciliation’ of the sexes. It investigates a selection of best-selling relationship manuals for their conceptions of love and their prescriptions and proscriptions for self-formation. It considers Giddens’ notion of democracy in the light of these, and suggests that this is a narrow and particular one. It is further argued that, by characterising love as a (biochemical) pathology, and men as being defective or dangerous, the relationship manuals in this study prescribe emotional detachment and self-mastery rather than ‘reconciliation’.

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.

Abstract in English: : Inspired by recent studies of Alberto Mario Banti and other Italian cultural historians, this essay explores the emergence of a new vision of love, of marriage, and of the relationship between romantic love, patriotism, and virtue in the writings of Ugo Foscolo, and more specifically in his novel Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis. The essay first considers the rise of this new vision in Rousseau and in Alfieri, whose theater, in contrast with most current critical opinion, deals with married love and family no less than with freedom and tyranny. The discussion then turns to the contrast between happy and unhappy families, those which are united and those which are divided, in Foscolo’s early novel; it is here argued that the private life of the hero, his delusions and sorrows in love, mirror the fate of the Italian nation. Foscolo’s novel founded the Risorgimento’s ethos and pathos for more than one generation of patriots. But at the same time it moves beyond a purely ideological and militant conception of literature to warn strongly against nationalism and violence.

Abstract in italiano: Ispirandosi agli studi recenti di Alberto Mario Banti e di altri storici culturali italiani, il presente saggio studia l’emergenza di una nuova concezione dell’amore, del matrimonio e del nodo amore-patria-virtù nell’opera di Foscolo e in particolare nelle Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis. Dopo avere brevemente mostrato la nascita di questa nuova visione in Rousseau e, per l’Italia, in Alfieri, nel cui teatro il problema dell’amore coniugale e della famiglia è non meno importante di quello della tirannide, il saggio si concentra sul contrasto fra famiglie unite e felici, e famiglie lacerate e infelici nel romanzo giovanile di Foscolo, contrasto in cui si riflettono le sventure e le speranze d’Italia. La vicenda privata del protagonista, le sue pene e le sue illusioni amorose, diventano così emblema del destino di un’intera nazione. Col suo romanzo, Foscolo fonda l’ethos e il pathos del Risorgimento per varie generazioni di patrioti, ma nello stesso tempo, sollevandosi al di sopra di una letteratura puramente ideologica e militante, lancia il più drammatico ammonimento contro la violenza e il nazionalismo.

A striking contrast between the profusion of official discourses on the transatlantic slave trade, and pervading silences on local (or African) slavery, is evident in Benin today. On the one hand, periodical public initiatives of commemorations of the Atlantic trade multiply, memorials are erected, and diverse projects (including the local UNESCO’s “Slave Route” project) occupy the field of the memory of the Atlantic trade. On the other hand however, the question of the presence of slave descendants in many lineages in southern Benin remains a lineage issue par excellence, a “closed calabash” as a local expression puts it, and the domain of lineage intimacy. Drawing on fieldwork conducted since 2001 in the regions of Abomey and Ouidah, two towns that were at the heart of the slave economy in nineteenth century southern Benin, this paper will explore the dynamics of these different legacies, as well as the current interplay between these various forms of memory.

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.

This article reflects on the significance of cosmopolitan socialities and intimacies following disasters, and the opportunities and risks they offer for restorative and reparative action for survivors and their communities. Reporting in particular on the experiences of LGBTQ Filipinos in post-Haiyan Tacloban, I discuss how the presence of foreign aid workers in everyday social spaces provided opportunities for queer identity expression and social attachments. I argue that cosmopolitan socialities, including new connections initiated via mobile dating platforms, were embraced by LGBTQs for their potential to share and repurpose wounds after rupture, especially in a conservative small-town context where LGBTQ identities have been historically repressed. This article attends to the opportunities and risks of queer cosmopolitanism as an uneven experience between middle-class and low-income LGBTQs.

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

Domestic spaces are full of things that are no longer used; these things range from the deliberately stored away in an attic through to those which have accidentally ended up at the back of a drawer. This chapter explores these ‘dormant things’ – things which have accumulated but are not currently in use – as a route into widening out the study of consumption beyond the purchase or use of things.  Outlining an ongoing empirical project into dormant things, the chapter draws from a material culture approach to highlight the centrality of objects in the enactment of everyday life (Miller, 1987), culture and relationships.  It builds upon understandings of relationships as constituted through practices (Morgan, 1996, Finch, 2007) that surround everyday material culture in the home (Hurdley, 2006). Dormant things are considered in their relational, spatial and material dimensions to highlight their centrality in the organisation of everyday lives.

German translation of "Intimacy: A Useful Category of Transnational Analysis," abridged. Feministische Studien. Vol. 32 Issue 1: 63-77.
For another German translation of my work, see https://www.academia.edu/5319694/Sexuelle_Gerechtigkeit_und_die_globalisierungskritische_Bewegung_Translation_and_reprint_of_Sex_at_the_Forum_._.

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 paper studies how seventeenth-century writers in Spain elaborated different conceptions of interiority in connection with the intimacy they imagined between the king and his favorite or privado. Authors in the days of Lerma, Uceda and Olivares portrayed the relation between king and privado in terms that generally relied on inherited notions of ideal friendship, which nonetheless would clash with concerns about the ubiquity of deceit, simulation and dissimulation at the court. This seemed to set boundaries to the unlimited transparency and trust expected between friends. I will address three issues. First, the way writers imagine the favorite’s access to the king’s secrets, as well as the nature of these secrets. Second, the space of intimacy and shared loneliness in which they conceive the friendship of king and privado to materialize. Third, the transformations that take place in the favorite’s interiority as a result of his relation with the king and his position at the court. //

“Manosear los corazones reales”: interioridad y privanza (1598-1643). Este trabajo estudia la elaboración en el siglo XVII español de diferentes nociones de interioridad vinculadas a la intimidad que los contemporáneos imaginaron entre el rey y su favorito o privado. La relación entre rey y privado se describió a menudo, en tiempos de Lerma, Uceda y Olivares, en términos de amistad ideal, lo cual entraba en conflicto con inquietudes relacionadas con la omnipresencia en la corte del engaño, la simulación y la disimulación, poniendo límites a la transparencia y confianza ilimitadas esperables entre amigos. Trataré tres aspectos: primero, cómo se imagina en la literatura de la época el acceso del privado a los secretos del rey, así como la naturaleza de estos; segundo, el espacio de intimidad y soledad compartida en el que imaginan tener lugar la amistad entre monarca y privado; tercero, las transformaciones que ocurren en la interioridad del favorito como resultado de su relación con el rey y de su posición en la corte.