Session 1: Big Questions on Intimacy
Chair: Alejandro Cervantes-Carson

What is Intimacy?
Pauline Johnson
Department of Sociology, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

‘Homebodies raise the drawbridge to avoid an out-of-control world’ declares Julian Lee marketing editor to the Sydney Morning Herald (November 6, 2006). Can a burgeoning sociology of private life help us to reflect upon what these retreaters from a damaged public and an alienating commercial life might expect to find? This paper will look two significant features of the contemporary sociological literature. First, I will investigate the turn from a ‘family studies’ approach to an exploration into the meaning of intimate life. Over the last 15 years the trend in the sociological literature has been towards a preoccupation with intimacy as a distinctive but many-sided cultural need that might be invested in a spectrum of relations (parent /child, same and other sex romantic/sexual love, friendships and so on). So, taken as a whole, a sociology of intimacy might suggest that a many-sided need for intimacy might be the focus for new enthusiasm for a fulfilling and differentiated personal life. The diverse and unsettled character of the field offers a rich kaleidoscope of reflections on the complex, ambiguous, sometimes conflicting meanings that contemporary individuals might invest in their search for intimacy. Singly, however, the various theories frequently respond to the seeming ‘crisis’ of meaning that has issued from the disembedding of intimacy from its former semi-automatic identification with the family by offering to model a new, ‘authentic’ intimacy. We are, for example, told that friendship is the new paradigm of intimate life, alternately that romantic love is our new ‘secular religion’, or that we need to disavow a heady romance for a sober ethics of love. This confusing array of options seems to offer a spectrum of partial, selective, and so finally unconvincing, portraits. My paper will critique the project embraced by these major trends that seem determined to ‘manage’ the crisis of meaning of a disembedded intimate life. I will suggest that more is to be learnt from the field as a whole as an inquiry into a variegated and ambiguous meanings of contemporary intimate life.

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Challenging the Idea of Intimacy as Intimate Relationships: Reflections on Intimacy as an Analytical Concept
Jessica Mjöberg
Department of Sociology, Uppsala University, Sweden

Our understanding of intimacy – lay as well as scientific – is often associated with the notion of “the intimate relationship” understood as the close or primary relationships found within families and between friends and lovers. In this way intimacy is perceived as an empirical phenomenon within a certain empirical field. The social scientific interest in intimacy has indeed increased most recently, but thorough analyses of what we actually mean by intimacy are still missing. This clearly bears consequences for how we can understand and where we look for intimacy. As many empirical branches of the social sciences, the phenomenon to investigate – in this case intimacy – is taken for granted as existing empirically without a following phenomenological understanding of its specific qualities as a phenomenon as such. The qualities of intimacy are so to speak taken for granted rather than defined through problematization.
In this paper I discuss some differences in understanding and using intimacy as an analytical versus an empirical concept. My analysis could be seen as an attempt to re-think the idea of intimacy, not to be understood as the lay notion of intimate relationships, but rather as a certain quality in interpersonal relationships. As a quality, intimacy could be found in long lasting relationships as well as in temporal aquaintances, in close relationships as well as between strangers, in love as well as in hate.
With a social psychological (interactionist) perspective I suggest some meanings of intimacy as a quality that dwells on the line between the subject and the intersubjective, between the self and the other, the most personal and the jointly, between closeness and distance.