Touch Me if You Can: Intimate Bodies at Cuddle Parties

Abstract

This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork, focusing on the processes and practices of cuddle parties. Data was collected from a combination of participant-observation, interviews, and diaries aimed to understand and interpret this unique form of intimate interaction. By disentangling bodily disciplines and dramaturgical (self-)presentations, this study explores how and to what extent cuddle party participants embody safe and nonsexual touch experiences in forms of “playful” interaction rituals. Alongside the chance for participants to explore bodies, with permission, this study concludes that cuddle parties are experiential, bounded playgrounds where both intimacy and touch are (re)created in the context of loosened normative, relational, and sexual constraints.

Decoupling touch from sex: gender(ed) representations of physical intimacy in the cuddle industry

“…To date, sociological literature on professional cuddling seems quite limited. It has been used as a case study to explore how non-normative intimacies raise anxieties and hostilities that “illuminate various facets of normalization and their role in the regulation of affect” (Szegheo-Lang, 2015 ; p. 21) or how boundaries are negotiated in similar settings (Mayr, 2023 ). With the present study though, it is my aim to explore how professional cuddling sessions, albeit structured around hegemonic understandings of masculinity (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005 ), still have the potential to resist (and perhaps transform) gender norms through the enactment of alternative scripts.…”