Intimacy: sexuality, gender, kinship
Our researchers address questions of sexuality, gender, and kinship in relation to wider domains of social, economic, and political life. In recent decades, intimacy has become not only a salient “engine of mobility”—animating various forms of movement across the globe—but also a key modality for assessing belonging and citizenship and for producing race, ethnicity, and class. Ethnographically comparing these dynamics across different regions, we address how sexuality, gender, and kinship inform and are shaped by the political economy of late capitalism.
We explore how intimate domains of life inform emerging forms of governance and surveillance, commodification and consumption, attachment and imagination; how diverse ideas of sexuality, gender, and kinship unfold in the shadow of the normative; how anxieties over labor, money, social reproduction, or bodily and collective wellbeing often find expression in debates over the sexual and gendered body; and how the intensification of both global mobility and ethno-nationalist attempts to close down local world deploy the intimate in unexpected ways.