Queer Feeling: Affective Bonds, Intimate Possibilities

Taking a broad and shifting definition of intimacy, this dissertation looks to queer and/or unexpected forms of intimacy that have taken hold of the public imaginary through contemporary popular cultureprofessional cuddling, feminist pornography, interspecies friendships, and object-oriented sexualities. By analyzing representations of these intimate connections that are found in online public cultures and in responsive forms of queer and feminist art, this project offers a way to rethink our approach to intimate knowledge formation, including challenging dominant structures of relation, kinship, and affection.

Through grounded sites of intimate encounter, this project suggests that critically valuing unexpected or dissenting moments of affective connection is fundamental in resisting oppressive and restrictive social orders, including intensified neoliberalisms, ongoing colonial and imperial state projects, and renewed heteronormativities and homonormativities. Methodologically, this work blends scholarly writing with personal narrative and practice-based research methods in a proposal of practice-based affective research: a hybrid methodology which accounts for the ongoingness of affect-based research and values the personal sparks that guide ones objects of study. Located at the crossroads of cultural studies, digital humanities, queer theory, and affect theory, this research aims to diversify the scope of what we understand to be intimate knowledge by augmenting marginalized knowledges, re-imagining intimate futures, and broadening possibilities for living lives in resistance to the status quo.