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’ workin-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 NORA—NORDIC JOURNAL OF FEMINIST AND GENDER RESEARCH 2021, VOL. 29, NO. 3, 147–151 https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2021.1948724