Intimacy on the Move: Historicising Mobilities and Sexual Encounters

Abstract

The introduction discusses the special issue’s focus on historical actors who physically crossed national borders and participated in multi-directional cross-cultural or cross-racial intimacies between 1920 and 1990. It brings research on mobilities and intimacy into dialogue and shows how scholarship on intimacy is beginning to address the spaces and routes that enable intimate encounters. To enrich such scholarship, the special issue revolves around the ways in which intimacies and mobilities were connected in the experiences and practices of people on the move who often differed in terms of class, gender and ‘race’. The introduction highlights the advantages of such an actor-centred, praxeological approach: It avoids the oversimplified juxtaposition of liberal and repressive regimes or periods; instead, it traces bodies in motion and shifts the focus from politics and infrastructures to subjects’ responses to categorisations and regulations. While demonstrating that mobility and intimacy are deeply intertwined, the introduction argues that paying attention to these connections allows us to understand them better. More specifically, the focus on practices and experiences draws attention not only to the agency of historical subjects who have navigated changing political and social conditions, but also to the fundamental malleability and fluidity of sexual regimes and identities.