Intimacy, home, and emotions in the era of the pandemic

Abstract

While much of the sociological scholarship on intimacy has been understood in the normative sense of foregrounding and supporting human closeness, this article points to the role intimacy has as a sociological concept to better understand regulatory ties between the subject and the institution. While subject and institution are treated by modernity as distinct entities, separated by the boundary between private and the public, the article elucidates their mutual engagements by reviewing the work on intimacy in the sociology of emotions. Discussing the scholarship on intimacy from this perspective enables us to understand private suffering as a social problem linked to the collective recognition of subjective feelings. To illustrate the point, the article briefly reflects the public discourse on home upended by world‐wide stay‐at‐home orders to contain the spread of coronavirus disease 2019. While this article neither analyzes these orders, nor judges their legitimacy, it takes the particular situation as a chance to review the sociological discussion on the emotional boundaries of home, foregrounding the concept of intimacy. Intimacy is presented as a key sociological category for understanding collective recognition of people's emotions, which impacts the way emotions are seen as relevant and legitimate in public discussions of social problems.

Disruption, Slowness, and Collective Effervescence: Children’s Perspectives on COVID-19 Lockdowns

“…Like you keep doing it over and over and over again when like before you didn't have to sanitize your hands as much or wash your hands as much. (Ruth, female, 10 years) Whilst social distancing, mask-wearing and hand sanitising involve the juridical and scientific disciplining of bodies (Durnová & Mohammadi, 2020, Pfaller, 2020, they are also examples of everyday etiquette, which link state imperatives with private responsibility in a way that expresses and affirms our self-understanding of being a private citizen belonging to a public collective. And because of children's constrained agency, everyday rituals of sociability cannot be underestimated in their importance.…”

Sound Feedback for Social Distance: The Case for Public Interventions During a Pandemic

“…However, the circumstances in which these are likely to occur are vulnerable to the spatial dynamics and physical distance between bodies [34,35]. These types of relationships fit into the social formation of indirect contact, which can take place seamlessly by way of intergroup behaviour, alleviating the pressures of face-to-face enactment [36] that are increasingly present in the midst of pandemic concerns [37]. While of course, many will long to reconnect with their peers during moments of close physical bonding, these new sociable spaces provide an enlightening deconstruction of proxemic acceptability where strangers and non-strangers are both welcomed into everyday social encounters.…”

Sound Feedback for Social Distance: The Case for Public Interventions during a Pandemic

“…However, the circumstances in which these are likely to occur are vulnerable to the spatial dynamics and physical distance between bodies [34,35]. These types of relationships fit into the social formation of indirect contact, which can take place seamlessly by way of intergroup behaviour, alleviating the pressures of face-toface enactment [36] that are increasingly present in the midst of pandemic concerns [37]. While, of course, many will long to reconnect with their peers during moments of close physical bonding, these new sociable spaces provide an enlightening deconstruction of proxemic acceptability where strangers and non-strangers are both welcomed into everyday social encounters.…”