Session 9: Intimate Theory?
Chair: Jennifer Cooke


The Boundaries of Intimacy: What Constitutes Intimacy and an Intimate Relationship?
Jacqui Gabb
Department of Sociology, The Open University, United Kingdom

Theorizing and contemporary research has shown that intimate relationships often extend beyond the adult-sexual couple and/or 'the family'. Openness and reciprocity are the structural principles around which affinities are fashioned with connections being forged through an intimate knowledge of self and other through intimate practices of care, attachment and a sense of belonging; practices which create social groupings such as extended families, families of choice, friendships – to name but a few. Within and beyond these contemporary conceptual and experiential formulations of interpersonal intimacy, I want to suggest that people are also creating meaningful intimate relationships with 'significant others'; 'relationships' that often fall outside or at best are marginalised within the sociology of intimacy. For example, some people form intangible affinities through communities of faith. Others invest in material cross-species relationships, with pets being a consistent repository and source of intimacy. For many, objects (such as keepsakes) and activities (such as gardening) provide emotional comfort and affective rewards. These various investments are not only experienced as relational metaphors and/or connectors between people but are also often experienced as emotionally significant in their own right. In this paper I aim to open out discussion on the boundaries of intimacy and show how relational lives extend beyond interpersonal relationships: to initiate dialogue around the meanings of intimacy and an intimate relationship. Through critical engagement with contemporary theorizing, illustrated by findings from original empirical research, I will demonstrate that by using a temporal lens to analyse multilayered understandings and practices of intimacy it is possible to cut across the categorical modelling of intimacy and familial affinities and in so doing open up the conceptual field.

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From Fragile to Resilient: Arendt and Ricoeur on the Connection of the Self to the Understanding of the Connection to Intimate and Social Others
Rachel I. Waterstradt
Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, California, USA

“If you had understood yourself and you had understood me you would not have killed me.”
- sign in Kinyarwandan over the doorway of Nyamata church, outside Kigali

“[Struggling] to understand what it is to be a person and what it means for persons to stand in individual, social and national relationships of intimacy, love, desire, and friendship” is the stated goal of this conference.  Many presenters may focus on the positive connectivity between persons in these relationships and the arguments for these bonds, yet I find these relationships most brought to the fore when everything goes horrifically awry, when the bonds between individual neighbors, friends, fellow citizens are tested and broken, often not proving as strong as our arguments portrayed them to be.  So then does the problem lie in a) the arguments for those bonds of love and intimacy between persons as individuals and citizens, b) in the bonds themselves and their fragility, or c) in our understanding of the arguments for the connectivity between persons?  This paper intends to argue, with the assistance of the work of Hannah Arendt and Paul Ricoeur, that the problem lies far more in b and c, than in a; in fact, no matter the arguments provided, however in depth, supremely complete, elegant and moving these may be, there is a dooming factor in that our lack of personal connection to those arguments makes them more fragile than tissue.  In the words of Arendt, discussing the persons who found it easy to work with the Nazi regime, “It was as though morality, at the very moment of its total collapse within an old and highly civilized nation, stood revealed in the original meaning of the word, as a set of mores, of customs and manners, which could be exchanged for another set with no more trouble than it would take to change the table manners of a whole people. … They simply exchanged one system of values against another.”  Further, the fragility of these bonds becomes glowingly apparent when based solely on feeling rather than understanding and argument which tie the action to the actor through personal imputation, responsibility, attestation and accountability.  As Ricoeur argues in The Just and Reflections on the Just, concerning the paradox of autonomy and fragility, these arguments are based on one’s own ability to speak, explain, argue and discuss, and these abilities may not have been developed by the individual; whether the opportunity to develop these is available to the individual will briefly be addressed, while my main focus will be on the refusal to develop these abilities and rest on either feeling or popular arguments to which one has no fundamental attachment and this refusal’s role in undermining any and all interpersonal relationships.
Ultimately, both thinkers help us focus on the detrimental effects of the lack of understanding of the self as a responsible actor whose actions impact, in myriad profound ways, the lives of those around her with whom she should have a connection or bond, intimate or social.

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Conceptual Geographies of Intimacy
Alejandro Cervantes-Carson
Director of Research and Projects, Inter-Disciplinary.Net, Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain

No abstract is presently available