AADS/GSF 382S: Intimacies: Sexuality, Nation, and the State
Rachel Qu + Celine Weian exploration in intimacy
me & you
How can the concept of constraint help us learn about intimacy?
In our current society, certain values are recognizable across multiple pillars of culture. To name a few: the idea that imperfection is inhibitive to beauty; an over-emphasis on growth, speed, and ease (a viral 5 minute dalgona coffee routine, charcuterie boards that come pre-buttered, drive-thru lanes at Starbucks spilling out into the road while the storefront is devoid of people); a cynical over-reliance on marketing; a lack of interest in locality and place; the focus on content over form and process. These values cross-over into the beauty and cosmetics industry, tech, academia, politics, labor disputes.
In this case, our midterm project is a look into the domestic sphere of the kitchen. While countertop salsa won’t bring about our cultural downfall, the virality of certain trends pervades the American-Psycho-ification of our lives. In this, we thought that a viral trend that is more challenge than hack could help us explore what does feel meaningful: texture, substance, imperfection, slowing down, taking the scenic route, trusting your senses, something you can touch, making more considered creative choices, making less.
At the end of the day, our tiramisu cake has character, has a story, became entangled in the web of relations that both of us inhabit every day. Constraints not only improve creative work, inconvenience and unease can help us explore aspects of intimacy that bring us outside of our zones of comfort. When communication breaks down, when we can’t embody the clean-cut efficiency of a kitchen “line,” where can we find common touchstones?
Bake a tiramisu cake, one person without sight and one person without sound, and communicate and follow instructions by working together in order to overcome accessibility challenges
Cooking food can be therapy for the soul. If you have limited motor skills, it might affect how “perfectly” you can cut an onion or roll out sushi, but enjoying the tactile experience, using your senses – that in itself is just as important as the end product.
– Rodelio Aglibot, Board Member of In Chef’s Hands, an organization that pairs chefs with food enthusiasts who have special needs, illness, physical limitations, or disabilities for a day of cooking together
This cooking challenge can easily reinforce ableist notions of helplessness. By trying to be cognizant of those limitations, cooking can present challenges as well as opportunities for creative problem solving and trust, finding a balance between helping and respecting each other’s autonomy.
“The Between embraces an old Butlerian point: our vulnerability is the price we pay for sociality, but, for this reason, it is also what reminds us that, for better or worse, we owe everything to one another.”
Locked into a situation that required reliance on one another, how could work to rely on one another? Given intentional and situational constraints in our (in)capabilities, we looked out for each other and were made to seek help from each other in the process of creation.
Rachel’s inability to see +
Celine’s inability to bake = an optimized struggle
(it could’ve gone really bad, but it didnt!)
Celine’s inability to withstand silence and Rachel’s control issues were both pacified by COMMUNICATION!! <3
“What in other words, is possible in the infinity, if indeed it is an infinity, between one and two?” - The Between
There exists some communication beyond conversation, or the comfort of being with each other as something more than merely existing next to each other. The reciprocity of an inside joke (a witty reference, a knowing look, a shared music taste) elevates the act of togetherness beyond the act of creating (or perhaps, creating something beyond what is tangible)...
“as the joke works by an economy of surprise and withheld explanation, its effects are entirely affective and social, the pleasure of an available rapid mutuality passing over the surface of language to create the incomparable promise of a shared unthreatening awkwardness.”
(p. 35)
As a show of the “beautiful promiscuity of friendship,” we negotiate with the very space itself. The space between us, what exists “in the between of a couple form...like antagonism or friendship, bad habits or good intentions, a shared history of oppression or a long history of infidelity” (perhaps too real considering the number of times we ended up rescheduling on each other).
Inconvenience: the affective sense of the familiar friction of being in relation.
“This is why, during an encounter that vibrates, there is always an accompanying fear that inflames the defenses…Conflict is inevitable, reciprocity is always negotiated, all objects remain enigmas, and ends do not usually provide a sufficient summary judgment of a project’s value.” (p. 76)
And thus, we both actively embraced our non-sovereignty. When people gave us weird looks or came into the common room briefly, we felt as though we had to justify ourselves. We also felt surveilled by the glass walls that surround the common rooms at Duke (Rachel was literally living in the panopticon there for a hot second).
“The commons concept serves as a preserve for an optimistic attachment to recaptioning the potential for collective nonsovereignty and as a register for the gatekeeping and surveillance that organizes still so many collective pleasures” (p. 90)
What does it mean for there to be a “commons” at a private university, and on stolen Catawba and Shakori land?
Neither me or you, but some secret third thing (the skillset of an amateur baker with a temporary impairment and incomplete ingredients)
“By describing neglected genres of coupledom...[these] categories imply duration and memory made manifest in the affective expectations and performatic repetitions that come to characterize this or that couple form.”
-Introduction, “The Between”
RITUAL vs MONUMENT
Rather than rely on some kind of permanent structure or monument to our relationship, we instead chose to make a cake, which is a process, a temporary site of togetherness, followed by a meal time ritual. This friendship is not immediately intelligible through the object of the cake, at least not in the way matching friendship bracelets (or in the past, being in your friend’s MySpace top 8 list). Instead, by using this embodied ritual, we now have a shared memory and touchstone for future activities.
crossing lines
By having a challenge inherent in our cooking process, we refocused on the process rather than efficiency, speed, or expertise, in the way a restaurant line cook would. In a Marxist sense, this assembly line format ends up alienating the worker from their social being, whereas we were able to enjoy the fruits of our labor!!
sneak peek! (after this, the lid was sealed for 4 days (we could not open it))
