Mediated intimacies: bodies, technologies and relationships

Abstract

In Ken Plummer’s groundbreaking study on intimacy, he notes that the word intimacy first appears in a Western dictionary in 1632 to mean ‘inmost or innermost thoughts and feelings’ (Citation2003, p. 11). This coincides almost exactly with the emergence of René Descartes’ rational subject of modernity, equipped with his distinctive interior life (1637/Citation1927). Over the course of modernity, various discourses of intimacy have evolved to designate types of relationship that the modern subject [implicitly male, white, heterosexual, bourgeois, reproductive] might establish with a variety of others. ‘Traditional’ discourses of intimacy have referred to physical contact, sex, romance or passionate love, invariably with a spouse. Newer discourses of intimacy have emerged that refer to the non-sexual relationships of family life (Chambers, Citation2013). More recently, a range of social and cultural theorists who have theorized the relationalities that became possible in the conditions of late modernity, have argued, in different ways, about the democratization of intimacy. ‘Elective intimacy’ (Chambers, Citation2013; Davies, Citation2014), ‘pure relationships’ and ‘plastic sexuality’ (Giddens, Citation1992), non-normative, casual and promiscuous intimacies (Berlant & Warner, Citation1998: Reay, Citation2014) have become the focus of interest, as have forms of intimate labour (Boris & Parrenas, Citation2010) that involve personal care, physical closeness, or familiarity and private knowledge (Bernstein, Citation2007; Boris & Parrenas, Citation2010; Constable, Citation2009; Ehrenreich & Hochschild, Citation2003; Wolkowitz, Citation2006; Zelizer, Citation2005; see Burke, Citation2016 for a discussion). These have drawn attention to the expansion of the range of others that late modern subjects can legitimately be intimate with, as well as the modes of intimacy they might practice. They trace the development of ‘the sphere in which we become who we are, the space in which the self emerges’ (Oswin & Olund, Citation2010). At the same time, while the sphere of the intimate excites considerable fascination and attention, it continues to be seen as relatively unimportant within the wider scheme of political and public life. This is partly because of the division between the capitalist sphere of production and the site of social reproduction, upon which capitalism depends but does not necessarily support or sustain (Fraser, Citation2016). Yet politics, economics and intimacy remain profoundly interconnected.