Tanima Sharma

This course will explore intimacy's connotations of love, care, feelings, sex, and personal connections in a transnational context, asking how its meanings come to be constructed and what their broader social significance could be. We will pay attention to the forms, institutions and labours that enable intimacy, from the couple to the family, domestic labour to sex work, queer socialities to art and aesthetics. In doing so, we will come to see how intimacy straddles the private and public, personal and political. We will read widely, with texts from Marxist feminism, queer and critical race theory that point to the intersection of intimacy with structural inequalities such as gender, race and caste, empire, globalization and capitalism, and themes of optimism, loneliness, and yearning. There will also be literary and artistic texts to ground discussion in each class. Authors include Sylvia Federici, Lauren Berlant, Yasmin Nair, Kimberly Kay Hoang, Hazel Carby, Saidiya Hartman, and Kim Tallbear. There will be short in-class writing assignments from time to time, along with a final paper. Art and design elements are also welcome as part of the final, alongside a written component.