By being an “inward genre with outwardly skins”, as Omar describes, intimacy enables an interface between very private worlds and very public worlds. Thinking through intimacy opens up ways of understanding ourselves. More than a feeling, intimacy is a gradual form of consciousness, it is a form of knowing. Even when that knowing is still indistinct and imprecise. In the process of its unfolding, intimacy orientates us towards possible becomings, beings, temporalities.

This idea is seen in the queer practice of offering oneself as an archive. It allows to access objects that are either removed from ordinary historical view or they might be remote in terms of time and place. In this episode, Omar shares with us his academic work related to intimacy. We talk about forms of knowing, queer personal archives, autotheory and temporality.

How to think intimacy with and beyond its connection to sex?

What kinds of histories and inheritances are revealed through rituals of intimacy?

What concerns of our futurities can we access in our unfinished present?

How to birth plural possibilities from relating to other social objects or bodies?

How to use the disclosure of the self to get somewhere where we wouldn’t have arrived otherwise?

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Omar Kasmani (he/him) is a Social and Cultural Anthropologist working at the Collaborative Research Center Affective Societies at Freie Universität Berlin. He usually describes himself as Berliner by love, although he grew up in Pakistan.

read Omar’s beautiful work of autothery: thin attachments (2019)

follow him on instagram @the_scene_maker

follow him on academia

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authors mentioned by Omar in this episode:

Lauren Berlant (intimacy build worlds)

Ruth Behar (autotheory)

Christina Sharpe (in the wake)

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follow us on instagram @intersectionalislands

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podcast by Rodrigo Zorzanelli Cavalcanti

music by Shanti Suki Osman