Sophie K. Rosa



Capitalist ideology wants us to believe that there is an optimal way to live. 'Making connections' means networking for work. Our emotional needs are to be fulfilled by a single romantic partner, and self-care equates to taking personal responsibility for our suffering. We must be productive and heterosexual, we must have babies and buy a house. But the kicker is most people cannot and do not want to achieve all, or any of these life goals. Instead we are left feeling atomised, exhausted and disempowered.

Radical Intimacy shows that it doesn't need to be this way. A punchy and impassioned account of inspiring ideas about alternative ways to live, Sophie K Rosa demands we use our radical imagination to discover a new form of intimacy and to transform our personal lives and in turn society as a whole.

Including critiques of the 'wellness' industry that ignores rising poverty rates, the mental health crisis and racist and misogynist state violence; transcending love and sex under capitalism to move towards feminist, decolonial and queer thinking; asking whether we should abolish the family; interrogating the framing of ageing and death and much more, Radical Intimacy is the compassionate antidote to a callous society.


Radical Intimacy

Karolina

But just as not all sex is intimate, not all intimacy is sexual. 'Intimacy' encompasses many kinds of relationships. It is a way of being together that might include fleeting or enduring experiences of affinity, vulnerability, nearness and love.

People often find reasons to negate increasing freedoms in the intimate sphere - intentionally or unintentionally shoring up the status quo - because, on some level, we are scared that a widening of acceptable ways of being might challenge the validity or stability of the identities and relational forms in which we seek meaning and security.

Liberation means remaking a world in which everyone is deserving, in which everyone's existence matters: in which everyone is grieveable. 

Fighting for better deaths is fighting for everyone's becoming.

The established hierarchy for relationships - in favour of the romantic dyad and the nuclear family form – shrinks and demotes more various and comradely intimacies.

Radical Intimacy quotes

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