Think of intimacy and, pretty soon, you’ll probably think about sex. But, as sociologist Katherine Twamley explains, intimacy means much more than that: it’s woven through so many of our relationships – including with people whose names we might not even know. She tells Rosie and Alexis how an accidental trip to India got her thinking about the varied meanings of “love” across cultures and contexts, and reflects on whether, to quote the famous song, love and marriage really do “go together like a horse and carriage”.

Plus: what could it mean to decolonise love? Why should we be wary of acts performed in the name of love? Will we ever live in a truly “contactless” world, and who wants that? And we get intimate with the artist Sophie Calle.

Guest: Katherine Twamley
Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong
Executive Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Joe Gardner
Artwork: Erin Aniker

Find more about Uncommon Sense at The Sociological Review.

Episode Resources

Katherine, Rosie, Alexis and our producer Alice recommended

• Ian McEwan’s novel “Machines Like Me”
• Haruhiko Kawaguchi’s photography
• Sophie Calle’s conceptual art
• Alex Thompson’s film “Saint Frances”

From The Sociological Review

• “The Sociology of Love” – Julia Carter
• On asexual people and intimacy – Matt Dawson, Liz McDonnell and Susie Scott 
• On the phenomenon of self-marriage – Kinneret Lahad and Michal Karvel-Tovi

Further readings

• “Love, Marriage and Intimacy Among Gujarati Indians” – Katherine Twamley
• “Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship” – Kath Weston
• “Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care” – Eileen Boris and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas (editors)
• On Emotional Labour – Arlie Hochschild
• “Decolonising Families and Relationships” – British Sociological Association webinars
• “Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds” – Zygmunt Bauman
• “Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences” – Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim and Ulrich Beck
• Nandita Dutta’s research on South Asian beauty salons in London as diasporic sites of intimacy
• Nick Crossley’s sociological work
• Jessica Ringrose’s sociological work
• Greta Thunberg’s Twitter page (mentioned by Katherine as an intimacy example)
• James Baldwin’s novel “Giovanni’s Room”
• Sally Rooney’s novel “Normal People”

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