Precarious Intimacies

Drawing on and responding to the writings of theorists such as Judith Butler, Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, and Lisa Lowe, this book proposes the notion of “precarious intimacies” to navigate a dilemma: how to recognize, affirm, and value love, touch, and care while challenging the racialized and gendered politics in which they are embedded. Twenty-first-century Europe is undergoing dramatic political and economic transformations that produce new forms of transnational contact as well as new regimes of exclusion and economic precarity. These political and economic shifts both circumscribe and enable new possibilities for intimacy. Many European films of the last two decades depict experiences of political and economic vulnerability in narratives of precarious intimacies. In these films, stories of intimacy, sex, love, and friendship are embedded in violence and exclusion, but, as Maria Stehle and Beverly Weber show, the politics of touch and connection also offers avenues to theorize forms of attention and affection that challenge exclusive notions of race, citizenship, and belonging. Precarious Intimacies examines the aesthetic strategies that respond to this tension and proposes a politics of interpretation that identifies the potential and possibility of intimacy.

In a time of increasing social and economic inequality, this book illustrates the precarity experienced by millennials facing both rising rents and wage stagnation. Featuring the voices of those with lived experience of precarity in north-east London, MacNeil Taylor focuses on intimacy, reproduction and emotional labour. The book widens readers’ understanding of a middle-class ‘generation rent’ beyond those locked out of anticipated home ownership by considering both social and private renters. Situated in a feminist and queer theoretical framework, the book reveals the crucial role of British policy-making on housing, welfare, and immigration in exacerbating inter- and intra-generational inequality.

By exploring the concept of the tender gaze in German film, theater, and literature, this volume's contributors illustrate how perspective-taking in works of art fosters empathy and prosocial behaviors.

Violence and intimacy were critically intertwined at all stages of the settler colonial encounter, and yet we know surprisingly little of how they were connected in the shaping of colonial economies. Extending a reading of ‘economies’ as labour relations into new arenas, this innovative collection of essays examines new understandings of the nexus between violence and intimacy in settler colonial economies of the British Pacific Rim. The sites it explores include cross-cultural exchange in sealing and maritime communities, labour relations on the frontier, inside the pastoral station and in the colonial home, and the material and emotional economies of exploration. Following the curious mobility of texts, objects, and frameworks of knowledge, this volume teases out the diversity of ways in which violence and intimacy were expressed in the economies of everyday encounters on the ground. In doing so, it broadens the horizon of debate about the nature of colonial economies and the intercultural encounters that were enmeshed within them.

Western neoliberalism is a predatory outgrowth of late capitalism that overvalues competition, transferring the laws of the market to human relationships. This book advances the argument that anti-neoliberal cinemas of Europe, the United States, and the Russian Federation imagine and visualize alternatives to the non-sovereign realities of a neoliberal workplace that unequivocally endorses dangerous risk-taking, self-optimizing neoliberal subjects, and corporate 'entrepreneurs of self.' Always at stake in the examination of neoliberalism's consequences is a human being who is indexed by race, gender, nation, ability, and economic performance. Drawing on film theory, transnational social histories, critical race theory, and Marxist and Foucauldian interpretive models, this book rediscovers a cinema that imagines a social contract focused on the common good and ethical standards for the social state. Anti-neoliberal cinema empowers the viewer as agentive through narratives that detail resistance to Western neoliberal modes of living and working. These filmmakers dramatize the labor of making solidarity across different groups.

This book takes the globally recognised phenomenon of drag king performances as an opportunity for critical inquiry into the rise and fall of an urban scene for lesbian and queer women in Sydney, Australia (circa 1999-2012). Exploring how a series of weekly events provided the site for intimate encounters, Drysdale reveals the investments made by participants that worked to sustain the sense of a small world and anchor the expansive imaginary of lesbian cultural life. But what happens when scenes fade, as they invariably do? Intimate Investments in Drag King Cultures is unique in capturing the perspective of a scene at the moment of its decline, revealing the process by which a contemporary movement becomes layered with historical significance. Bringing together the theoretical tradition of scene studies with recent work on the affective potentialities of the everyday and the mobile urban spaces they inhabit, this book has appeal to scholars working across gender, sexuality and culture.

Ambivalent Transnational Belonging in American Literature discusses the extent to which transnational concepts of identity and community are cast within nationalist frameworks. It analyzes how the different narrative perspectives in texts by Olaudah Equiano, Catharina Maria Sedgwick, Henry James, Jamaica Kincaid, and Mohsin Hamid shape protagonists’ complex transnational subjectivities, which exist between or outside national frameworks but are nevertheless interpellated through the nation-state and through particular myths about liberal, sentimental, or cosmopolitan subjects. The notion of ambivalent transnational belonging yields insights into the affective appeal of the transnational as a category of analysis, as an aesthetic experience, and as an idea of belonging. This means bringing the transnational into conversation with the aesthetic and the affective so we may fully address the new conceptual challenges faced by literary studies due to the transnational turn in American studies.

A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOK OF 2021 LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE 2021 READS AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER A BEST BOOK OF 2021 FROM Washington Post, Vogue, Time, Oprah Daily, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Atlantic, Kirkus and Entertainment Weekly “Intimacies is a haunting, precise, and morally astute novel that reads like a psychological thriller…. Katie Kitamura is a wonder.” —Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward and Eat the Document “One of the best novels I’ve read in 2021.” – Dwight Garner, The New York Times A novel from the author of A Separation, an electrifying story about a woman caught between many truths. An interpreter has come to The Hague to escape New York and work at the International Court. A woman of many languages and identities, she is looking for a place to finally call home. She's drawn into simmering personal dramas: her lover, Adriaan, is separated from his wife but still entangled in his marriage. Her friend Jana witnesses a seemingly random act of violence, a crime the interpreter becomes increasingly obsessed with as she befriends the victim's sister. And she's pulled into an explosive political controversy when she’s asked to interpret for a former president accused of war crimes. A woman of quiet passion, she confronts power, love, and violence, both in her personal intimacies and in her work at the Court. She is soon pushed to the precipice, where betrayal and heartbreak threaten to overwhelm her, forcing her to decide what she wants from her life.