Intimacies: A New World of Relational Life

Description

In the last decade or so, there has been a shift in the popular and academic discussion of our personal lives. Relationships – and not necessarily marriage – have gravitated to the center of our relational lives. Many of us feel entitled to seek intimacy, an emotionally depthful social bonding, rather than simply security or companionship from our relationships. Unlike in a marriage-centred... Read more

In the last decade or so, there has been a shift in the popular and academic discussion of our personal lives. Relationships – and not necessarily marriage – have gravitated to the center of our relational lives. Many of us feel entitled to seek intimacy, an emotionally depthful social bonding, rather than simply security or companionship from our relationships. Unlike in a marriage-centred culture, intimacy is today pursued in varied relationships, from familial to friends and to romances. And intimacies are being forged in multiple venues, from face-to-face to virtual, cyber contexts.

A new scholarship has addressed this changing terrain of personal life – there is today a vast literature on cohabitation, parenthood without marriage, sex and love outside marriage, queer families, cyber intimacies and friendships. However, much theorizing and research has focussed either on the interior, subjective or sociocultural aspects of intimacies, not their interaction.

This volume aims to break new ground: Intimacies explores the psychological terrain of intimacy in depthful ways without abandoning its sociohistorical context and the centrality of power dynamics. Drawing on a rich archive that includes the social sciences, feminism, queer studies, and psychoanalysis, the contributors examine:

changing cultures of intimacy
fluid and solid attachments and intimacies from hook ups, to sibling bonds, to erotic love
a politics of intimacy that may involve state enforced hierarchies, class, misrecognition, social exclusion and violence
embodied experiences of intimacy and dynamics of endings and loss
a pluralization of intimacies that challenge established ethical hierarchies

This volume aims to define the cutting edge of this emerging field of scholarship and politics. It challenges existing paradigms that assume rigid hierarchical approaches to relational life. Intimacies will be of interest for psychoanalysts and for students or scholars in sexualities, gender studies, family studies, feminism studies, queer studies, social class, cultural studies, and philosophy.

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Introduction by Alan Frank, Patricia Ticineto Clough, Steven Seidman Part I: Changing Cultures of Intimacy 1. State and Class Politics in the Making of a Culture of Intimacy by Steven Seidman 2. "Let Me Tell You Who I Am": Intimacy, Privacy and Self-Disclosure by Linda Nicholson Part II: Between Fluid and Solid Intimacies: Hook Ups, Sex, Love 3. Unexpected Intimacies: Moments of Connection, Moments of Shame by Alan Frank 4. "Hey God, is that You in My Underpants?": Sex, Love and Religiosity Among American College Students by Roger Friedland and Paolo Gardinali 5. Queer Girls on Campus: New Intimacies and Sexual Identities by Leila Rupp and Verta Taylor 6. Intimacy and Ambivalence by Daniel Shaw Part III: Lateral Intimacies: Siblings, Surrogates, Families 7. Intimacy, Disclosure and Marital Normativity by John Borneman 8. Lost And Found: Sibling Loss, Disconnection, Mourning, and Intimacy by William F. Cornell 9. The Belly Mommy and the Fetus Sitter: The Reproductive Marketplace and Family Intimacies by Joshua Gamson Part IV: Unsettling Intimacies: Anxieties, Violence, Misrecognition 10. Intimacy, Lateral Relationships and Biopolitical Governance by Patricia Ticineto Clough 11. Intimacy Undone: The Psychoanalytic Dyad, Sexuality and Narratives of Defense by Jeffrey Prager 12. Who’s Your Daddy? Intimacy, Recognition and the Queer Family Story by Arlene Stein Part V: Phenomenology of Intimacy 13. The Search for Intimacy: Nearness and Distance in Psychoanalytic Work by Jane Kupersmidt and Catherine Silver 14. Finding the Addressee: Notes on the Termination of an Analysis by Anne Golomb Hoffman 15. The Intimacy of Objects: Living and Perishing in the Company of Things by Joseph Schneider