Session 1: Narrative Constructions of Intimacy
Chair: Alejandro Cervantes-Carson


Writing Intimacy: Literary Scenes of Sex
Jennifer Cooke
Department of English and Drama, University of Loughborough, United Kingdom

Representations of physical intimacy have moved a long way from the evasions, allusions, hints and half-saids of Victorian literature so that now, at the other end of the historical and literary spectrum, there is an open use of sex as a promotional tool for popular novelists such as Jilly Cooper. Yet books like Cooper’s are dismissed as non-literary low art, in part because of their transparent exploitation of titillating sex scenes, while ‘literary’ sex remains problematic for writers, as is attested to by the British ‘Bad Sex in Fiction’ annual award.  Recent nominees have included such seasoned and respected novelists as Salman Rushdie and John Updike. This indicates the difficulties writers have in representing sexual intimacy, which appears strange: intimacy is one of the mainstays of our lives.
Using examples from late twentieth-century fiction, including J. G. Ballard’s soulless conjunction of sex, machinery and intimacy in his infamous Crash, this paper investigates literary representations of sex and particularly seeks to interrogate why they so often fail to convey loving intimacy.  Violent sex, scenes of rape, coercion and physical harm seem to present fewer problems for novelists. This suggests an inherent problem which lies in language: intimacy, by nature, is usually private and singular, unique to different people and relationships, whereas the language of intimacy is limited. Furthermore, the harmony of style and content become important in the writing of sex: a misplaced word, much as in reality, can spoil the fictional scene. Added to this is the subjectiveness of what constitutes intimacy, and the challenges provoked by a third person narrator, who is a ‘secret’ onlooker to the scene and makes the reader complicitous in this voyeurism. The failures and the successes of writing intimacy starkly reveal to us the ways we culturally position, value and practice our intimate relationships.

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‘Civilizing Sex’: The Whiteness of Love in the Darwinian Romances of the Anglo-American Empire
Carla Hustak
University Of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin’s publications on The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man indicated that the future of a species depended on the adaptation to environmental conditions and the wise selection of mates to reproduce superior qualities.  The legacy of Darwinism persisted into the early twentieth century, shaping the practices of intimacy among white middle class sex reformers in Britain and the United States.  Late nineteenth century concerns over nervous, weakened middle class bodies led to an increased importance on sex-instincts as vital forces in upholding civilization.  However, the capacity for love operated as a category of racialization, separating sex among the civilized from sex among the savage.  In the climate of a growing eugenics movement on both sides of the Atlantic, the affective potential of a body to produce love after cultivating sex-instincts came to mark class and racial status.  My paper, “Civilizing Sex:  The Whiteness of Love in the Darwinian Romances of the Anglo-American Empire” will contribute to the conference by demonstrating the politics of love that shaped colonial relations.   This paper probes the boundaries of metopole and colony, public and private, and the body and the social.  My work builds on historiographical trends in colonialism that consider intimacy and sexuality as sites for shaping colonial politics but have failed to look at love as an important strategic category in colonial projects.  My paper will focus on American journalist couple, Hutchins Hapgood and Neith Boyce, and British couple Bertrand and Dora Russell to demonstrate how commitments to sex reform ideals on love forged bonds on the basis of a shared affective potential of an Anglo-Saxon racial character.  This case study will explore the historical production of love through three sites: the affective inscription of the body, eugenic formations of loving families, and the imagining of an affective race of Nietzschean supermen in a future civilization.    

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Constructing Intimate Acts and Intimate Meanings through Self-Reflexive Storytelling
Dan Mahoney
School of Nutrition, Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Gay men’s intimate life worlds have been the topic of some empirical inquiry in the late twentieth century. In spite of the gains made from these investigations, the readers of these texts have no sense of the storytelling, intimacy construction and process of discovery that took place in these inquiries. As such, more creative, self-reflexive ethnography must be sought to enliven the classic representations and claims to authority to gay men’s intimate lives. Using my collaborative storytelling methodology, this study investigates how gay men come to characterize and give meaning to their intimate relationships through the stories they tell about the people they love. The investigation produced a set of thematic intimate frameworks from these experimental texts.
The construction of intimacy between these gay men and their loved ones was primarily portrayed through a series of discrete, but incremental intimate acts or moments between them. The sum total of these social acts brought them closer together and help to define the context of their relationships. These actions were more often than not told to me in the guise of everyday moments, exemplars and subplots in the overall storyline. Many of my research collaborators went about constructing these serial acts of intimacies in reaction to the loss (or absence) of a safe gay intimate space in their life. The act of constructing these intimacies was about (re)building a private interpersonal space that had been previously unattainable, denied, or in some cases, taken away from them. These everyday moments and occurrences defined this new (shared) intimate space. In every sense, these serial acts very much resembled a reflexive, ever changing set of processes that follow out of the everyday accomplishments of loving, caring and otherwise being intimately involved with other people.

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