Domesticity and the construction of intimacy: Producing the erotic body and self within ‘the love nest’

Abstract

Following recent academic attention on the neoliebral self, in this article, we situate the construction of the sexual self and body as part of an ongoing, neoliberal ‘aesthetic entrepreneurship’ and argue that people draw on various material and cultural resources in order to put these entrepreneurial selves together. Drawing on 40 open-ended interviews with young Greek adults aged between 20 and 33, conducted between 2018 and 2019, we explore the cultural and material resources people use in order to create the intimate self. We situate our work within an analytical framework about the ‘aesthetic labour’ people invest themselves into within neoliberalism and argue that such work contributes to the growing body of work on self-surveillance and the articulation of an ethical self.