A Queer/Feminist Perspective
on Practices of Relating

The project aims to renew how intimacy and sexuality are approached. Our contribution to the study of intimacies is to challenge old notions of sexual identities as predetermined, productive of, or involving particular types of relations. We challenge normative forms of intimacy by looking beyond binaries and finding new, more nuanced ways of, and concepts for, exploring the ever-developing state of intimate relating. We explore intimacies on the level of practices, bodies, spaces and affects that participate in creating and shaping our forms of relating to others.

In the last few years, we have witnessed an increasing media exposure and interest in intimate relationships questioning coupledom and its normativities such as polyamory, open relationships, communal households and family-making among LGBTQ+ population. Friendship, too, has been claimed to have become increasingly important to people in Euro-American societies. Although Western societies can be characterized as considerably permissive towards sex, many critics have noted that only certain forms of sexual expressions are legitimized and encouraged, the most visible of them being dyadic heterosexuality. However, even heterosexuality is more complicated than that, and there are multiple forms of heterosexuality, not all of which are equally legitimated. Yet, as sexual expression is normalized, it is also presupposed that one must be sexual, disregarding other forms of intimate relating. In our contemporary times, new forms of intimacies are explored not only in new forms of relationship types, but also in queer body art in embodied, stereotype-challenging and imaginative ways. The organization of domestic and relational intimacies is therefore changing, and the selection of intimate others may not be driven by romantic and sexual expectations, nor by a fixed identity categories defining sexuality or gender.