research notes: #2
I’ve been reading a lot about intimacy, friendship and belonging. Intimacy and friendship are two central concepts that I engage with in my conceptual framework. In an earlier draft I sent to my supervisors, I wrote, “Lauren Berlant’s (1998) introduction to Critical Inquiry is a necessary starting point.” My supervisor commented that he agreed, but because Berlant builds on even earlier sociological work from Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, I’d also need to provide a short gloss on their work. I obliged.
I found Giddens’ work uninspiring. I find work on late modernity from white men uninspiring (perhaps I’ll write a short positionality statement to absolve myself from explaining why 🙃). Giddens (1), whose work covers late modernity and its impact on identity, intimacy, and relationships with the State, also wrote about how people with different identity categories will have varying experiences with all of the above (so an intersectional consideration). However, he also finds it befitting to speak with such violent authority on Black womanhood, perpetuating stereotypes and flattening Black women’s lives in an essentialist doctrine.
Giddens, 1991 p. 86
After I had recovered from the whiplash of reading a white man’s take on Black women, I realised, in my desire to go “back to the beginning” of critical intimacy studies in this section of my conceptual framework, I had minimised my research’s epistemological underpinning of Black feminism. As a Black feminist research study, I not only centre the lived experiences of Black women but also build and engage with other Black women’s work on intimacy. I re-read sections of All About Love by bell hooks, and looked through my notes on Saidya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments.
Intimacy is central to theorising Black being and belonging.
They both touch on intimacy but not in the ways I was looking for, so I turned to Keguro Machiara’s Frottage. I have only read the introduction, so a book review is inappropriate here, but Frottage has provided me with a language to expand my thinking on Black diasporic intimacies. Their writing on Black diaspora theory —which goes above and beyond ideas of the Nation-State— produces evidence of a deep Black-people-specific kind of intimacy (2019, p.14). Frottage is an art “technique or process of taking a rubbing from an uneven surface to form the basis of a work of art” (2). Keguro conceptualises frottage by placing the term in the context of Black bodies in the hold, rubbing up and against each other. The forced intimacy of slavery against (s)kinfolk. Frottage makes sense of several different rubbings occurring,
“bodies against each other; bodies against the ship; writing implements against ledgers; and the rubbing in the slave holds against the writing in the ledgers. I use the term frottage to figure these violent rubbings and to foreground the bodily histories and sensations that subtend the arguments I pursue” (2019, p. 12-13).
Intimacy is central to theorising Black being and belonging. Keguro’s Frottage is a metaphor for the intimacy bound up in Blackness. It is inextricably linked because of the/our history and the legacy modernity left: a visual language for anti-Blackness, that continues to bind us together in the present.
I am unsure how to put it eloquently into words (or the exact literature I will use to strengthen my argument). Still, intimacy between and from Black people to our chosen kin is a sacred, affective element. There is a subjective, interior understanding of being seen in the context of Black women’s digital intimacies, friendship, kinship, or sisterhood. It is psychological safety; sometimes, this can translate to physical security when whiteness is concerned.
My PhD thesis, like my Master's dissertation, is autoethnograpy. I'm a dual citizen; 'home' is a complicated notion. I am English, but I do not feel or sound English. My many years living abroad in Canada, Germany, Thailand, and Australia, caused me to become a diaspora in liminal apposition, suspended in a state of ambivalence due to multiple migrations from home to foreign land and back. I contest that London is my 'home' while benefiting from an immigration status that affords me 'home' status in the Academy. Yet, as a Black British woman, I (am made to?) feel out of place. In line with Black feminist praxis, I use autoethnography to validate my knowledge and experiences as theory (3) and to "be vulnerable enough to write myself into this story” (4). Doing the work, and engaging with research and literature on Black intimacies and belonging, is crucial to my conceptual framework and autoethnographic method.
If you got this far, thanks for reading! I don’t plan what to say in these —the spirit moves me, and I be writing. If watching is more your style, I’ve been vlogging my journey to my Upgrade Viva (Proposal Defense) on YouTube, too.
1 Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (1st ed.). Polity.
2 Oxford Dictionary of English. Frottage.
3 Collins, P. H. (1991). Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Reprint). Routledge.
4 Dr. Amanda Bennett. (2021). PhD Prospectus. Duke University.
