Jasmine Gunkel (University of Southern California) “What is Intimacy?”
Forthcoming, The Journal of Philosophy
Imagine that you’re throwing a dinner party. You are running a little late, as you do.
You somewhat nervously peer through the oven window, observing that the cashew cheese atop your dish is nowhere near the golden brown it should be. You hear a knock at the door, and glance at the oven clock. It’s 6:45pm. The dinner invitation you sent out listed 7pm as the start time.
You hurriedly head to the door, oven mitt remaining on your left hand. You open the door (remembering to wipe the look of anxiety from your face as you do so) to reveal your friend, who is running a bit early, as they do. Behind your friend stands someone else, a plus-one you haven’t met before. And this friend-of-a-friend is nosy.
After the greetings, you scramble back to the kitchen to make sure the food isn’t burning. Your friend follows you, offering to set the table. The uninvited guest, rather than trail along, begins to wander your house unattended. They open up the door to your bedroom, which you have deliberately left closed to politely signal to partygoers that ought to avoid entering. As if this wasn’t party-foul enough, their intrusion escalates. They begin to open up your bedroom drawers. They riffle through their contents.
They pick up a notebook on your bedside table, a notebook filled with your handwriting. They open it, flip to the most recent entry, and begin to read.
“May 19th, trip with dad.
8:05pm: A great horned owl, maybe 2 feet tall, sits in a cypress tree, partially obscured by its branches.
8:10pm: The owl turns its head, maybe in response to a sound or sight we cannot hear or see. It then leaps from the tree, and swoops down towards the ground. Its talons surround a small creature (what appears to be a mouse) and scoops it from the ground. The owl soars back to the branch from which it departed, and devours the mouse.”
Now imagine a second version of this case, a version in which the uninvited guest picks up a slightly different notebook from your bedside table. Instead of your bird watching field notes, they pick up your dream journal. They flip to the most recent entry, and begin to read.
“May 19th
2am??: Unnerving dream. I was an owl, but with my own head. I was sitting in a dark tree whose branches kept twisting so as to obscure whatever moonlight there was. I could feel hunger clawing my insides. The wind carried a sound, a faint rustling. My wings dragged me towards it, commanded by some owlish instinct. I snatched up a mouse and as my talons dug into its sides, I heard it cry out in my own father’s voice. I swallowed the mouse (my father) whole.”
The uninvited guest’s actions are invasive and creepy in either version of the case. But there is intuitively something substantially worse about the latter case. It feels more intrusive, more violating. And importantly, what’s going on in this case is not a bizarre and philosophically uninteresting sort of wrong.
Rather, I believe there is a common thread shared by the reading of the dream journal and many grave violations with which we are more familiar, including sexual assault, the stealing of medical information, and gestation mandates. These are all intimate violations, and it is their intimate nature that makes them so significant and affecting. In my new paper, “What is Intimacy?”, forthcoming in The Journal of Philosophy, I give an account of intimacy that reveals what all these cases share in common and shows why our intimate rights are so stringent.
I argue that, despite the intuitive appeal of beginning our investigation from relationships, we cannot build a cohesive and explanatory conception of intimacy from there. I show that such attempts lack the ability to accommodate the intimacy that seems to occur outside of close relationships, and lack the ability to explain why not all acts that occur primarily in intimate relationships are themselves intimate. They have trouble explaining, for instance, why making a drunken disclosure to a stranger in a bar can be intimate, and why sharing a garbage disposal with one’s partner is not.
Instead, I argue for what I call the “Intimate Zones Account,” a view in which intimate zones of persons are primary. These zones (or features) of persons are exposed via intimate acts, and exposure over time can build into intimate relationships. There are two conditions a feature must meet to be intimate, what I call “Hiddenness” (what we are disposed to hide from general view, and would feel psychological discomfort about its exposure) and what I call “Importance” (what we believe, fear, or worry reveals who we are as a person). A feature’s meeting these two conditions makes it a locus of special vulnerability. It makes us especially prone to shame about the feature, shame which can warp our autonomous decisions about who we want to be, and disempower us by undermining our sense of ourselves as equals. It is this special vulnerability that grounds our intimate rights, and our intimate duties to others.
This paper lays the theoretical groundwork for a larger project I am developing. I believe the insight offered by the Intimate Zones Account can be of use to us in crafting policies that serve to buttress the vulnerability intimacy engenders. I am currently refining a set of policies that I believe are apt to regulate what I call “intimate labor,” a broad category which includes not only sexual and reproductive labor, but also therapy, nursing, surgery, home repair, teaching, and art. It is my hope that the framework I develop in “What is Intimacy?” can be useful to other philosophers, and can better position us to protect intimate rights.