Introduction: Affective Intimacies

This Special Issue offers a novel platform to rethink intimacies through the lens of affect theories. In particular, it introduces new ways of understanding affective intimacies, encompassing explorations that tap into the questions of what affect theories and methodologies can provide in terms of their theoretical and methodological potential to renew feminist debates concerning intimacy. The authors of the six ground-breaking articles of this Special Issue offer alternative ways of researching and understanding these topics by not only grasping affective intimacies as a locus of their inquiry, but also by developing analytical tools to reassess the entanglements of affect and intimacy—in particular by considering affective intimacies through their multiple matterings and by carefully locating their studies in different disciplinary and interdisciplinary settings. As a whole, this Special Issue on Affective Intimacies maps the potential of affect theories in renewing feminist debates concerning intimacy.

Such meaningful questions as those introduced above originally lay at the core of the Academy of Finland-funded research project ‘Just the Two of Us? Affective Inequalities in Intimate Relationships’. The final event of the project was an international workshop entitled “Affective Intimacies: A Workshop with Sasha Roseneil and Kinneret Lahad” which was held at Tampere University on 18–19 November 2019. It consisted of two public keynotes by Professor Sasha Roseneil (University College London, UK) and Dr Kinneret Lahad (Tel Aviv University, Israel) followed by commentaries from the project’s principal investigator Tuula Juvonen (Tampere University, Finland) and Professor Susanna Paasonen (University of Turku, Finland), principal investigator of the research consortium Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture. The event also entailed a two-day workshop where participants’ work-in-progress papers were commented on by the keynote speakers, organizers and fellow participants. This Special Issue also has its origins in the abovementioned event, as Marjo Kolehmainen and Annukka Lahti were members of the organizing team, and Kinneret Lahad was a keynote speaker. During the preparations, we three decided to edit a Special Issue dedicated to the challenge of recognizing and utilizing the potential to imagine intimacy and affect in alternative ways, without starting from the already familiar terrains, theories and conceptualizations.

Bearing this challenge in mind, we sought submissions that address the embodied, affective and psychic aspects of intimate entanglements. We invited submissions that may include but were not limited to the following themes: affect, intimacy and power; collective becomings; emerging intimacies and queering affects. The call proved highly popular with 57 abstracts submitted in total. Unfortunately, we were only able to accept a small portion of the most promising abstracts for further processing, and even had to exclude several of high quality and with fascinating themes. Yet, we are very pleased to introduce the six excellent articles that made their way into this Special Issue. The different papers accepted the invitation to reconsider or depart from the assumptions that there are a priori affective domains, such as care or sexual relationships, or alternatively that intimacy is only about what is private and special (Kolehmainen & Juvonen, 2018; Latimer & López Gómez, 2019). Thus, rather than assuming that we could parse affect and intimacy together in a predefined way, this Special Issue asks how the study of affect would enable us to rethink intimacies—what affect theories can do to the prevailing notions of intimacy, and how they might renew and enrich theories of intimacy.

While pioneering in scholarship on both intimacy and affect, feminist scholars have recognized intimacy as an important issue and advanced the field of affect studies. Yet there is often an association of intimacy with “positive” closeness, even if this is highly problematic from a feminist point of view as intimacy also takes normative and even violent forms (Zengin, 2016). For example, affect theory provides important insight into how bodies are conditioned and condition themselves to one another in a set of unequal and uneven relations of power (Zengin, 2016), pinpointing how proximity and closeness are not neutral practices (Kinnunen & Kolehmainen, 2019). This kind of re-thinking of affective intimacies hence opens up novel perspectives on the politics of power, but also refuses to centre solely on human-only notions of affective intimacies. In this way, post-humanizing both affect and intimacy is crucial (Lykke, 2018) as intimacies surface and wither in networks of human and non-human actors (Paasonen, 2018). Furthermore, the lens provided by relational affect theories enables scholars to resist such depoliticizing, neoliberalist stances that rely upon individualizing rhetoric and choice-driven logics, and that foster the idea of bounded, sovereign and human-only subjects. Thus, the political potential of affect lies in the ways in which thinking with affect helps to address co-constitutions and interdependencies as a condition of life.

This Special Issue thus builds upon and contributes to the theoretical and methodological horizons of feminism and gender studies in a myriad of ways. By attending to (in)capacities to affect and become affected, and thus engaging with visceral and embodied intensities, the articles provide important glimpses onto situated, contextual experiences of marginalized groups that are often not recognized. Building on feminist research traditions, this Special Issue also calls attention to the presence of a range of intersecting inequalities such as gender, race and class. Yet it also departs from the assumptions of differences as inherently hierarchical (Lykke, 2018); advancing a processual and relational take on intersectionality (Tiainen, Leppänen, Kontturi, & Mehrabi, 2020). We apprehend that the study of affective intimacies enriches feminist thought by contributing to the further exploration of mundane experiences of exclusion and injustice, where differences are also affectively made and unmade (Kolehmainen, 2019; Lahti, 2018). We thus perceive this Special Issue as an invitation to shift the analytical gaze to the socio-material constitutions of intimacy (Latimer & López Gómez, 2019) and to employ alternative ways of noticing the social as it happens (Lury & Wakeford, 2012; Stewart, 2007). These lines of inquiry guide us to consider the affective, material and psychic forms of injustices and inequalities as they unfold in everyday lives.

This Special Issue also advances the value of interdisciplinary perspectives in thinking in terms of affective intimacies. The diverse articles introduce topical themes and contribute to current topics across disciplinary boundaries: from gender studies, sociology and cultural studies, to race and ethnicity studies, migration studies and queer death studies. Theoretically, the articles present significant perspectives: the re-evaluation of the uses of attachment theory, re-examining feminist debates on vulnerability, opening up a novel field by introducing the notion of material intimacies in the field of Black studies, and providing novel perspectives to post-mortem forms of intimacy that depart from the association of intimacy with physical proximity. They also address the moral aspects of affective dynamics, such as the shifting boundaries of new parenting cultures, and provide methodological inspiration that, for instance, invites us to reconsider the affective relations and the ethics involved between a researcher and the researched. The attunement to experiences that are not afforded recognition, that remain ordinary or unspoken and invisible, is characteristic of all the six articles; thus, they enrich the study of the workings of power by addressing the under-the-radar operations of power (also Kolehmainen & Juvonen, 2018). In this way, by addressing racism, colonialism, sexism and classism they also make the political aspects of affective intimacies visible, yet they avoid any shorthand explanations of power (Latour, 2005; Stewart, 2007) in their nuanced, vivid and rich elaborations of interdependencies and vulnerabilities across different sites from intergenerational to transnational.

Thrusting us into the world of Afro hair salons in the UK, Sweta Rajan-Rankin’s article explores the socio-materiality of Black hair care practices. By tapping into affective touch and the materiality of hair, the article opens up a new research field by insightfully bringing together affect theory, feminist new materialisms and race and ethnicity studies. In “Material Intimacies and Black Hair Practice: Touch, Texture and Resistance”, Rajan-Rankin examines Black women’s relationships with their hair in everyday life, alongside a parallel reading of the classic text Cassie’s hair by Susan Bordo. For Rajan-Rankin, hair biographies highlight the intimate entanglements by which the ambivalence of Black belonging is negotiated. Hair is both highly visible, as well as intensely personal and political in terms of the ways it is worn and seen. By drawing on the concept of “touch biographies” (Kinnunen & Kolehmainen, 2019) the article illuminates how textuality, rhythmicity, touch and carceral meanings are imbued in Black hair practices. Rajan-Rankin offers a multi-layered appreciation of the material entanglements of collective intimacies in sustaining Black identity in diasporic contexts. The article develops the idea of material intimacies, where affective belonging is (re)produced.

The article by Lene Myong and Mons Bissenbakker, “Attachment as Affective Assimilation: Discourses on Love and Kinship in the Context of Transnational Adoption in Denmark”, beautifully initiates a critical dialogue on the way in which popularized notions of attachment theory have become taken-for-granted ideals for successful transnational adoption. Their analysis shows how widely accepted yet restricted notions of love and attachment influence the practices of adoption. Attachment becomes shaped by a number of requirements based on an expectation of affective assimilation for the adoptee, namely the adoptee’s ability to attach themselves to the adoptive family. In this way, investment in the production of love through attachment generates affects that defuse the political and racialized implications of transnational adoption. The article underlines how the collapsing of attachment and love enables certain forms of affective intimacies, foreclosing others. While the article focuses on transnational adoption, the study makes a significant introduction to the study of affective intimacies that extend beyond adoption practices, since it offers a novel critical reading of attachment as affect, which simultaneously produces and is produced by social domains.

The article “Studying Intimacies that Matter: Affective Assemblages in Research Interviews with Forced Migrants” by Johanna Hiitola both presents novel insights into the study of migration and transnational family relationships and enriches feminist discussions of intimacy. This important article explores methodological challenges in studying intimacies and focuses particularly on affective knowledge production. Seeing affect inherently as material, Hiitola taps into embodiment as a methodological and ethical issue. The empirical data entails interviews with forced migrants in Finland, and Hiitola discusses two interview situations in particular that are conceptualized as affective assemblages. Despite their differences, both highlight how empathy plays a significant role in research encounters. The first story stresses how empathy moves the researcher to the extent that the difference between the researcher and the two interviewees unfolds, and the second story illustrates how the differences between a researcher and the interviewee could not be felt away through empathy. In this way, the article shows how the differences between a researcher and the interlocutors come to matter in situational encounters. Beyond its methodological innovativeness, the article also highlights how affective intimacies cannot be understood only by the spectrums of here and now, but they transcend and travel across different borders.

Miri Rozmarin makes a theoretical contribution to feminist discussions on vulnerability with her article “Navigating the Intimate Unknown: Vulnerability as an Affective Relation”. Rozmarin argues that affect theory in particular provides a productive framework for thinking about vulnerability beyond the ableist ideas of sovereign and self-mastering subjects that lead to reductive accounts of vulnerability as a failure. The article identifies two challenges related to theories of vulnerability. First, how to avoid notions of vulnerable subjects as living lessened lives while maintaining critical attitudes towards those harmful social formations that limit the possibilities for sustainable lives. The second challenge relates to the acknowledgement of vulnerability as an affective recourse for political subjects. The article asserts that vulnerability is a dual affective relation: it entails both the affective patterns that stem from being dependent on such institutional and cultural conditions that hinder one’s life, and the affective becoming of bodies that allow transformation and movement beyond fixed and stable subject positions. For feminist politics, then, the conceptualization of vulnerability as an affective relation offers a way of rethinking those political conditions that are entangled in the lives of women and gender minorities.

In her article “Tied Together by Death—Post-Mortem Forms of Affective Intimacy in LGBTQ People’s Stories of Partner Loss”, Varpu Alasuutari explores LGBTQ people’s stories of partner loss by taking a look at post-mortem forms of affective intimacy. By analysing such elusive and intangible, or haunting, forms of intimacy, this article provides novel insights that also renew the prevailing paradigms of bereavement studies. By re-thinking continuing bonds to the deceased through feminist and queer theories of affect and intimacy, Alasuutari produces new, nuanced knowledge on the entanglements of affects, intimacy and queer modes of living that shape those bonds. Her analysis shows how intimacy is not necessarily cut apart by death but can linger on affectively like phantom pain long after the person that one has been intimate with has passed away. The article depicts how objects, places and modes of (being in) the world, sticky with intense affects, maintain continuing affective bonds. The article illustrates how material and other-than-human elements can participate in producing post-mortem forms of affective intimacies and maintain the bereaved people’s affective attunements to the world once shared.

Armi Mustosmäki and Tiina Sihto’s article, “‘F*** This Shit’—Negotiating the Boundaries of Public Expression of Mother’s Negative Feelings”, takes as a point of departure the affective atmospheres that make discussing painful and complex feelings related to motherhood particularly challenging. Interestingly, they position their study in a cultural moment when representations of motherhood are becoming more diverse, leaving more space for complaints and disillusionment. Their insightful analysis starts with a discussion on a viral post in which the author discloses her difficult feelings as a mother of a newborn baby. The authors especially focus on analysing the Finnish “mamasphere”—a digital intimate public where responses to the blog post were aired—and explore how articulations of negative maternal feelings are negotiated, maintained and challenged. Their astute analysis highlights the affective dynamics within the digital sphere: while some online commenters exclaim that no negative feelings regarding motherhood should be made public, others provide support, thus widening the discussion about the difficulties in motherhood and family life. The authors make a great contribution to the study of affective intimacies by underscoring how affective articulations of anger, anxiety and exhaustion can challenge both the imperatives of compulsory happiness and the moral boundaries of good motherhood.

As the editors, we hope that the readers will find the articles of this Special Issue as fascinating, theoretically and methodologically engaging, up-to-date and ground-breaking as we do. We warmly thank all the authors who have made excellent contributions. We also wish to extend our thanks to peer-reviewers of the articles of this Special Issue as well as to editors and editorial assistants of NORA—without your help this issue would not have seen daylight. Many thanks to our fellow organizers of the Affective Intimacies event—Tuula Juvonen, Raisa Jurva and Tuuli Innola—and all participants, keynote speakers and commentators, especially Professor Sasha Roseneil and Professor Susanna Paasonen, as well as our dear colleagues at Tampere University (Finland), Tel-Aviv University (Israel) and University of Eastern Finland (Finland).

Additional information

Funding

Marjo Kolehmainen’s work was supported by the Academy of Finland-funded project Just the Two of Us? Affective Inequalities in Intimate Relationships [287983] and Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture, a research consortium funded by The Strategic Research Council at the Academy of Finland [327391]. Annukka Lahti’s work was supported by Kone Foundation and University of Eastern Finland.