We usually think about intimacy as to do with our private, personal lives, as describing feelings and relationships that are most inner, most āinward to oneās personhoodā (McGlotten 2013, p. 1), and concerned with relationships that are most important to us. Sociologists have theorised intimacy as centrally involving mutual self-disclosure (Giddens 1992), time spent in co-presence, physical affection, and acts of practical care (Jameison 2011). But, as queer theory and sexuality studies tell us, intimacy is very much socially sanctioned, defined by institutions, laws, and normative social pressures (Berlant 1998; Plummer 2003). The sociology of intimacy helps illuminate what, specifically and empirically, is involved in the doing of intimacy in different places and cultures, and for different genders, classes, and social groups. Queer and feminist critical cultural theorists like Berlant have explained how, in late modern cultures, having a ālifeā has become equated with having an intimate life (Berlant 1998, p. 282). Further, as Cefai and Couldry note, āWhat queer theory has taught us is that heteronormativity shapes what can appear to us as āintimateā even in settings where questions of sexual identity are typically not articulated as suchā (2017, p. 2). Understandings of intimacy are culturally and socially specific, rather than āglobalā or āuniversalā (Jameison 2011). However, in many places right now intimacy names āthe affective encounters with others that often matter mostā (McGlotten 2013, p. 1). From the perspective of poststructuralist queer and feminist theory, producing intimacy can be understood as part of subjectification processes that centrally involve the hierarchical ordering of relationships and psychic concerns, in socially legible ways, in order to make sense of ourselves and those around us. How social media figures in such processes of psychically and materially ordering relationships and shaping what appears as intimate is part of what we consider in this collection. In this chapter, and this collection more broadly, we are interested in how social media practices challenge and disrupt, as well as how they reinforce and concretise (hetero)normative notions of intimacy as a concept that creates boundaries around certain relationships and ethics of care. Social media are now centrally involved in processes whereby pedagogies of intimate life as life itself are learnt, reproduced, given value , contested, and exploited.
Theorising Digital Intimate Publics
Excessive and Ambivalent Publicisation
Shaka McGlotten (2013, p. 2) argues that social concerns and ātechnophobic panicsā about the impact of new technologies on our lives have always turned on questions of intimacy. These concerns are intensified by the ubiquity of smartphones, social media , and hook-up apps. āVirtual intimaciesā, McGlotten suggests, are often publicly constructed as āfailed intimacies that disrupt the flow of a good life lived right, that is, a life that involves coupling and kids, or at least, coupling and consumptionā (2013, p. 7). Other scholars of digital intimacies have observed similarly derisive cultural attitudes towards digital, mediated, and āvirtualā forms of intimacy as potentially ādiminished and dangerous corruption[s] of the real thingā (McGlotten 2013, p. 7; see also Attwood 2006; Chambers 2013; Jamieson 2013; Hobbs et al. 2016). However, intimacies mediated via contemporary social media platforms need to be understood not only in relation to moral panics over the potential weakening of social ties and intimate relations in the digital age, but also in relation to the commodification of relationships built into social media platform infrastructure ; that is, in relation to privately owned platforms as places where (hetero)normativities and āgood livesā are represented, circulated, constituted, and sold (back) to us (Bucher 2012; Dean 2010; Van Dijk 2013; Marwick 2013; Duffy and Hund 2015). In short, digital intimate publics , like the intimate publics Berlant (2008) describes as constituted via other kinds of mass media address and representation, are complex and āambivalentā (Banet-Weiser 2012) in their aesthetics and politics.
Berlant (2008) describes the creation of intimate publics through mass media discourses and texts as scenes of mass intimacy, identification, and subjectification. An intimate public operates, she suggests, āwhen a market opens up to a block of consumers, claiming to circulate texts and things that express those peopleās particular core interests and desiresā (2008, p. 5). Intimate publics create shared worldviews and shared emotional knowledge. They are āa space of mediation in which the personal is refracted through the generalā (2008, p. viii). An intimate public, she writes, āflourishes as a porous, affective scene of identification among strangers that promises a certain experience of belonging and provides a complex of consolation, confirmation, discipline, and discussion about how to live as an āxāā (2008, p. viii). Intimate publics can be understood as scenesācentred around media and cultureāof the commodification of intimacy, self, and political identities; pedagogical discipline about normativity and normative intimate desires for different groups of subjects; as well as cultural scenes that promise and generate feelings of belonging and consolation.
Such scenes now play out across social and mobile media , as the chapters in this collection illustrate vividly. Social media, as Hjorth and Arnold (2013, p. 125) argue, āconstitute a new socio-technical institutionalisation of public intimacyā. Some scholars have suggested that new modes of intimacy and visual sexual practices are emerging due to a confluence of social, historical, material and design āactantsā (Race 2015; Dowsett 2015; Cover, this volume; Hart, this volume). In more mundane, less spectacular ways, the social and cultural meaning of āintimacyā is currently being contested and struggled over via debates about and use of social media . Media commentary about social media frequently air concerns about the āexcessiveā publicisation of intimate relations and experiences. Are people āoversharing ā information deemed personal (see Kennedy, this volume)? Do they speak too publicly, too frequently, or share too many images documenting aspects of everyday life deemed pedestrian, mundane, uninteresting or crass? Concerns frequently revolve around the possibility that social media makes it possible for people to: document the routines of their everyday lives (Kofoed and Larsen 2016); fashion themselves as micro-celebrities and seek āattentionā (Senft 2008; Marwick and boyd 2011; Abidin 2016); view and share images of sex and bodies (Mulholland 2013; Albury 2015; Dobson 2015); and, that young people in particular are harmed by sharing images of their own bodies and sexuality (Ringrose et al. 2013; Albury 2015; Dobson and Ringrose 2016; Dobson and Coffey 2015). Such concerns are symptomatic of cultural contestations over the meaning of intimacy in the era of social media . These concerns revolve around the moralisation of certain āexcessesā: of personal information, images, bodies, self-images, emotions (Hendry 2014). Further, public self-telling and display are coded as āexcessiveā and pathological for some bodies, while celebrated for others in ways that are deeply structured by gender , race , and class (Senft 2012; Skeggs and Woods 2012; Pitcan et al. 2018).
The theoretical frame of āintimate publics ā helps us think about how contestations over power play out in the generative, liminal space where the public and private intermingle. Berlant and Warner (1998) advocate for a publicisation of the intimate that speaks against privatisation, in the sense of both space and property, with an understanding of the deep connection between the prioritisation of private property rights and private (heteronormative) spaces and familial relations. In their account, the politics of intimacy in public, beyond seeking safety and acceptance of a range of sexual and gender practices and identiti...