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Introduction: On Intimate Entanglements

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 January 2024

Sidra Lawrence
Affiliation:
Bowling Green State University, Ohio
Michelle Kisliuk
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
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Summary

When two hands touch, there is a sensuality of the flesh, an exchange of warmth, a feeling of pressure, of presence, a proximity of otherness that brings the other nearly as close as oneself. Perhaps closer. And if the two hands belong to one person, might this not enliven an uncanny sense of the otherness of the self, a literal holding oneself at a distance in the sensation of contact, the greeting of the stranger within? So much happens in a touch: an infinity of others—other beings, other spaces, other times—are aroused.

When two hands touch, how close are they? What is the measure of closeness? Which disciplinary knowledge formations, political parties, religious and cultural traditions, infectious disease authorities, immigration officials, and policy makers do not have a stake in, if not a measured answer to, this question?

–Karan Barad, “On Touching”

I like to think of this volume as a form of radical intimacy—the kind of intimacy that happens when we allow ourselves to be open, to be touched, to be vulnerable in our expressions. Willing to reveal and to explore dimensions of our desire to know, of our seeking, of our being that are rarely sounded. Some forms of intimacy revive us, they reaffirm our visions, our truths, our shared humanity. Not all intimacies are pleasing; there are forced and coercive intimacies that assume a closeness to which we or others have not consented. The chapters in this volume lay bare this range of vulnerabilities, and they do so with tremendous courage and a willingness to expose themselves and the raw and sometimes unpleasant realities of human engagement.

intimate entanglements originally emerged out of a Society for Ethnomusicology conference panel (2013) exploring erotic subjectivity in ethnographic research. Those papers addressed the myriad ways that erotics and intimacies shape our experiences as field researchers, as scholars, and within and beyond our institutions. We argued that these dimensions of our epistemologies are crucial to the knowledge we produce and are also regulated by gatekeeping mechanisms institutionally and disciplinarily. The chapters in this volume expand on those original concerns, widening the scope and also deepening the theoretical interrogation of the multifaceted relationships between erotics, intimacy, and trauma as produced through sound, movement, and embodied experience.

Type
Chapter
Information
Intimate Entanglements in the Ethnography of Performance
Race, Gender, Vulnerability
, pp. 1 - 22
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2023

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