Governing Intimacy

Abstract

Intimacy is personal.It is also, therefore, political.This commonplace insight has received renewed attention over the past decade in a growing strand of anglophone scholarship on liberalism and subjectivity (eg Berlant, 1998;Briggs, 2002;Eng, 2001;Povinelli, 2006;Shah, 2001;Stoler, 2002;2006).Typically working at the intersection of feminist, queer, and postcolonial studies, these scholars take it as given that the intimate is a coproduction with the public, and collectively they further undo the primordial status of intimacy in two characteristic ways.The first is by unfixing its scale.Whether by emphasizing intimacy's national, media-based performance (eg Berlant, 1997) or outlining its global, diasporic determinations (eg Povinelli, 2006) öto mention just two approachesöthey show how intimate relations cannot be considered synonymous with the body or the household, locations which then simply mirror larger social relations through their capacity to oppress or liberate at closer physical proximity.Instead, the closeness and belonging that intimacy affords (even when unwelcome) may operate at any distance, while isolation and estrangement may be very near.Second, this unfixing of scale has helped unfix identity in favor of a more nuanced sense of mutual production.In this literature, relations such as gender to the home, race to chattel property, or sexuality to the closet are implicated in fields of power large and small (Feder, 2007).Through these, plural intimacies are produced along with multiple differentiations of bodies and spaces, as in the case of Ann Stoler's (1995) exemplary complication of colonial domesticity.Intimacy becomes a matter of degree rather than kind, insofar as the bodies and spaces it marks, and is marked by, are processes rather than essences.Yet if intimacy has neither fixed geographies nor identities in this literature, it still has its object, a sense of self in close connection to othersöother selves or other thingsöthat inhabits that elusive space somewhere between a purely solipsistic `me' and a wholly subsuming `us'.Rather than straightforward liberation or oppression, then, what intimacy offers these scholars is subjectification.It is the sphere in which we become who we are, the space in which the self emerges.In this literature the intimate is still very much the personal, the close, that which refers to ``one's most inmost self'', in accordance with conventional usage and the OED.But it also underscores that the intimate self is a distinctly modern self, for `intimacy' only appeared in the English language in the 17th century.Such intimacy requires a topology of self that is, in Charles Taylor's words, ``radically reflexive'' (1989, page 176).The Delphic inscription ``Know thyself '' may have proposed a self as an object of knowledge, but it presumed no symmetrical self as the source of that knowledge ö such a ``disengaged'' (Taylor, 1989, page 176) or objectified interiority would be the legacy of Descartes.The intimate self not only knows itself in its fullness and authenticity; it also governs itself accordingly.Its association of this self-knowledge and self-control with bodily signs such as maleness and whiteness is well known (the female and nonwhite have been conflated with the intimate without the disengaged self ), and so too has been the critique of these political effects since at least the 18th century, as figures such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Olaudah Equiano sought inclusion within the unquestioned categories of the rational and the civilized.Although the modern, intimate self is one that relates to itself in a rational, selfgoverning fashion, it also entails a threshold for an other who may or may not enter Guest editorial

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