Music & Peacebuilding
Music & Peacebuilding
Together Somehow pt 2: Intimacy, Belonging, and Paradox
Part two of this three-part series on dancefloors and belonging examines how we experience intimacy and a sense of vague belonging. We look at the complex conflicted feelings of our lives that introduce paradox in a queer approach to analysis that draws upon magical realism. We examine the notion of an intimate public and how our constructions and projects of a “we” inform our feelings of belonging. Finally, the episode looks at senses of vague belonging and vague intimacy that are most profoundly experienced on dancefloors. Interwoven are reflections on peacebuilding and how peacebuilders may use the arts to lubricate spaces for vague belonging and multilayered affective experience.
The Music & Peacebuilding Podcast is hosted by Kevin Shorner-Johnson at Elizabethtown College. Join our professional development network at www.musicpeacebuilding.com - thinking deeply we reclaim space for connection and care.
That loosen people up that that kind of that loosening up in a sense, makes it possible then for people to experience a kind of an intimacy based mostly on physical proximity on just sharing.. being bodies in a room, but also going through a particularly intense experience together.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson:You are listening to season four of the music and peacebuilding podcast, a podcast season focused on multifaceted textures of belonging. Our podcast explores intersections of peacebuilding, sacredness, community, creativity and imagination through research and story. Luis Manuel Garcia Mispereta is associate professor in ethno musicology and popular music studies at the University of Birmingham. His research focuses on urban electronic dance music scenes, with a focus on effect, intimacy, Stranger socio ability, embodiment, sexuality, creative industries and musical migration. His book together somehow, music affect and intimacy on the dance floor, is published by Duke University Press. In this three part series, we explore Garcia Mispereta's book together somehow, in the first episode, we looked at the politics of diversity. continuing this dialogue, we examined juxtapositions of metaphors as forms of sensemaking conflicted feelings, the experience of intimacy, and the notion of an intimate public. So, yeah, as I was building the next few questions, I just want to name to that I really struggled about how to build questions that would allow paradox to exist, I think, I think that's one of the beautiful parts of your writing is that you're trying to present each one, but trying to give space to allow paradox to live. But when we talk about ethnography as magical realism, you say, together somehow palpitates the contour of the real world searching for cracks, it can pry open to release the strange and wondrous. And then you talk about how it also uses disjunctive alignment, to juxtapose different items side by side looking for similarities that unlock new unforeseen ways of understanding them. How did you come about this idea of searching for cracks that open the strange and wondrous, as a form of ethnography?
Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta:You know, that's, that is a great question. For you know, in a lot of ways, there's there's a few ways that I got to that. One was some reading that I had been doing, just as part of a class I was teaching for, for students. It's a music festivals class that I teach. And one of the when one week I get them to read some, like very early performance studies, literature, in particular I get them to read Schechner, they're Schechner's performance studies. And I get them to read a section one of the chapters where he's kind of just theorizing, he's doing that sort of, hey, I'm developing a new discipline or a new area of study, let's just like throw in a bunch of ideas and see what sticks right. And somewhere in there, he, he starts, he's moving from talking about performance spaces and urban environments, and so on, he suddenly starts talking about creases, creases in the urban environment and like, folds and creases and talking... his point is that like, you know, up until then, he'd been talking about the structure of theater spaces, performance theaters, particularly comparing like Athenian, you know, and broadly kind of classical Greek approaches to theater, open in the round, etcetera, etcetera, where you can see the whole city as you see these performances, versus the early modern, proscenium stage, camera obscura kind of theater where you're in a dark little box, right? And you're supposed to forget the rest of the world and just see what's on the stage, right? But he goes from there to then talking about alleyways and creases and like how performance can happen there and you know, and so on. So he's, that already sort of did something for me, I found that tickled something for me or I found something really interesting in this idea of folds and creases as a different way of thinking kind of spatially and conceptually. Also, at the same time, around the same time I had been reading I think it was the introduction to Sianne Ngai's ugly feelings.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson:Ngai's text ugly feelings, explores subtle states of complex feelings. complex feelings, like envy, anxiety, paranoia and irritation extend beyond the boundaries of a moment, as subtle tones or moods. Complex feelings also produce a kind of confusion about whether the feeling is produced inside the person or by the environment. When I feel anxiety, it is hard to know where that feeling is coming from and why I feel that way. And feelings are juxtaposed in the layered messiness of our lives. We may feel the paradox of feeling happy and sad at the same time, or feeling anxious and bored. In our lives, we are often feel juxtapositions of different feelings. And in this layered experience lives paradox. The creases and paradoxical folds of our lives are beautifully explored through the arts, including the literature genre of magical realism. In a 1973 interview, the writer Garcia Marquez spoke about improbable juxtapositions of the real and surreal. Magical realism opens quote, improbable juxtaposition and marvelous mixtures. These improbable juxtapositions draw out the textures of conflicted experience. As a peacebuilder I reflect on juxtapositions of... serene landscapes amidst violence, the past amidst the present as within trauma, or imaginings of a future amidst a desolate present. Juxtapositions are painful and hopeful, oppressive and creative. Garcia Mispereta talks about the influence of magical realism and juxtapositions within his approach to ethnomusicology.
Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta:Even if these things weren't meant to be next to each other, that nonetheless, there is analytic value right there, there's there's conceptual value and enforcing that kind of analysis, you know, but it is a different kind of analysis, right? You're not doing you're, you're, you're being sort of deliberately if not provocative than at least, let's say creative right, you know, you're trying to sort of, in a sense, trying to productively break the way that we've been taught to do cultural analysis and social analysis, right, by again, applying tools where that, you know, applying tools to situations for which they were not designed, putting together things that were not meant to go together. And in that way, maybe also breaking some of the rules, not quite rules, but the kind of cultural boundaries we have around for example, high culture and low culture, around women's culture and men's culture around you know, what is straight and what is queer, etc, etc. Right. So yeah, and that's, that gets me eventually to this idea of ethnography as a form of magical realism, you know, and there, again, full transparency, if you like, I have to give some transparency here that like I am of partially Colombian ancestry, you know, and my father is who's who's the Colombian side of the family, he is from the same region where Garcia Marquez is from they're distantly related. So magical realism. And specifically, the kind of magical realism that comes out of the coastal region of Colombia and from Latin American literature, Hispanic literature is deeply important to me, right? Like, and that has always been important to me. So that's where I landed with that section in the in the intro of the book where I am talking about ethnography as a form of magical realism. That was my way of sort of legitimizing and valorizing, the kind of approach I'm taking where, yes, this is an ethnography, you know, this is ethnographic writing about kind of a real world space and scene and so on. But I'm also interested in the the weird and the wonderful, and the the, the unusual and the bizarre. I mean, I think maybe that's where I land with all of this, in a way is that my approach also as somebody who is queer, and who's really deeply who is really deeply imbibed in queer theory, I am from the beginning, skeptical or weary of shaping my my ethnographic work and my kind of anthropological work along lines of what's normal and what is meant to be, you know, what is expected? What is normative, what is, you know, what is supposed to be according to a kind of hegemonic cultural or social framework, right. So, you know, much in the same way that there can be, you know, like much of the same way that a lot of queer culture and a lot of queer creativity gets its energy and its ability and also its critical capacities, its critical edge from pushing things together that aren't that don't belong, by forms of drag of forms of parody, forms of caricature, all these sorts of things, these are all kinds of queer arts of provocative juxtaposition.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson:Interspersed through this episode, our tracks designed and performed by Bilal studio, these tracks were designed for this podcast. In their profound text, Berlant describes cruel optimism. Berlant notes that we make conflicted bargains as we form optimistic attachments to things about how an object will make our life better. However, our projections sometimes become cruel, creating a mirage that never quite delivers. We experienced questions like, Does money buy happiness? If I make a certain salary will I finally be happy? If I prove myself with this next accomplishment, will I finally belong? Will I be enough? Berlant notes that we form attachments because we want something to endure to survive and this is what quote magnetizes an attachment to it. The questions of our lives are ripe with the vagueness of the ambivalent bargains of our desires and hopes. Garcia Mispereta explores the vagueness and ambivalent bargains on the dance floor. A dance floor often contains a roomful of strangers, who in synchrony and movement, propelled by music feel a sense of vague togetherness, a sense of belonging, somehow. Darkened dance floors may smooth over the edges of complicated identities, allowing us to belong for a while, in an intertwined sense of time. So I want to ask about vague belonging, and let them lead into to the next question on intimacy. To do that, I want to use this this tactic of juxtaposition. So if I layer some of your quotes side by side, and I want to hear what you hear, as we... so, you write that vague belonging enables surprisingly intimate encounters. You also write it as expressed an action a kind of, quote, social cohesion, in which constituents avoided talk about what made them cohere. Right. That's fascinating about avoidance of talk, you right vagueness is not a loss of coherence, but quote, a condition of cohesion, cohesion, imaginative possibility. I love your language, all the way through the book about possibility. Thank you. You write that queer nightlife worlds, quote, offer an ambivalent bargain between belonging and identity, solace and struggle. So what did you learn about vague belonging, or this idea of liquidarity as action possibility, burgeoning intimacy, or an ambivalent bargain?
Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta:What fascinates me about Stranger intimacy at electronic music events and rave culture, club culture, and so on from the beginning, was, you know, how folks manage to get along, quote, unquote, you know, be intimate, you know, in this way, that is meaningful.. Yes, sometimes maybe superficial, but also sometimes deeply profound. But across stranger hood, right, like, without requiring deep intimate knowledge of the person that you're that you're engaging with, or the persons that you're engaging with, right, and in ways that would normally be socially really awkward or unexpected, or, or would really violate boundaries if you were doing this in like everyday, kind of daytime life. Right. So that, you know, really, the question of the whole book is like, how does that happen? What's what's the role of music in that? What's the role of emotions, bodies, sexuality, etc. And, you know, and so then vagueness for me was a really key idea, you know, or at least the, if not an idea that at least kind of an argument of sorts, right? Or an explanation, right, that, like, part of how this works, is by relying on and actually cultivating and to some degree that vagueness, right that like, you know, and in some ways, you could think of this kind of metaphorically like the, you know, a bit of of, you know, the kind of smoke that you get from a smoke machine, you know, on a dance floor, something that makes things kind of hazy in a way that shortens your field, your your, your field of vision, or you're not the field division, but yeah, the field of vision that, you know, sort of shortens the distance, right. But you can see, softens edges, blurs some things out that might be distracting and overwhelming, but also allows you to then kind of imagine and project what's behind what's behind that smoke, right? Like it sort of allows for maybe a more kind of expansive imagination of what's going on. And so similarly, what I kind of landed with or landed at, with with chapter three, and really, the whole book is how, how, like kind of powerful and productive and socially productive it is, in a way for folks to be able to sort of act on an imagined belonging and imagine sociability and imagined connection with others. And that it because of that, actually, it sometimes is, for the best in a sense, or at least it serves those desires best to not prod too much into exactly who are the people that you're engaging with? What do they believe in? Do they have the same? Are they aligned in the same way politically as I am? You know, do they even have the same connection to the music that I have? You know, like, do we really share the same taste in music is everybody here on the dance floor really, as committed to the genre as I am or some of these people just sort of randomly hear because their friend brought them? right. And again, rather than trying to you know, rather rather than trying to engage in what you might describe as a paranoid reading of the situation, right of the kind of like, I must know, I must ascertain who in this space I can trust and who in this space is probably is my people. And part of my community what have you, and instead melting into this space and and, you know, allowing yourself to feel a connection to this larger crowd. All of that for, you know, to my analysis, all of that is is is profoundly enabled, it's deeply enabled by this vagueness it by, you know, like not knowing nothing but knowing just a little bit, you know, or knowing enough, or having enough of a sense of, of what is shared, to allow you to project a whole lot more about what can be shared or what is likely to be shared. So, for me, in that chapter, I'm talking a lot about shared musical tastes, on the one hand, you know, as like a way in which a lot of people that I interviewed would imagine and kind of project a larger community, a larger set of a larger scene of belonging in... at these parties is like, Well, look, if everybody turned up for this music, and they're all we're sharing the dance floor, we're sharing this music, and we're enjoying it, and I can see other people responding to this music in ways that are similar to me, I can see other people getting off on it the way that I am, then clearly, you must have more in common, clearly, we must also have compatible, you know, a similar or compatible personality, similar vibe, you know, whatever that might mean, and maybe even deeper things, right? And as long as it remains that that horizon of possible, maybe, you know, maybe yes, kind of thing, rather than going to try to confirm it, and then maybe sometimes being spectacular, does spectacularly disappointed by that, right? You know, that seems to be where it operates the best. So this kind of liquidarity, this sort of fluid solidarity that I'm trying to describe, seems to operate optimally. In these environments where you don't know people much beyond maybe a familiar face. Or maybe you might know somebody by first name. You might have seen them at parties for months now, but you don't know their last name. You don't know what they do for a living. Like it's that it's at that kind of level of vagueness of interpersonal vagueness, that this sort of thing seems to work to operate optimally.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson:In most of my circles, I belong without being fully known. I may attend a family holiday gathering, without bringing the fullness of my political beliefs and identity. I may curate a presence at a dinner party, introducing just enough of myself to mingle. Vagueness may cross relational boundaries that we may not have willingly crossed., tilling the soil for experiences of belonging that extend beyond the fleeting moment. And also PERPETUAL vagueness may hide unwanted parts of ourselves, making relations feel fragile conditional and temporary. As we improvised simpler versions of ourselves in vague contexts, how might this till soil for relational reciprocity? How do the arts like a dance floor lubricate space for this dance among strangers who may soon feel like a relation?
Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta:A thing I really got from from Lauren's previous books before cruel optimism, there was the female complaint, the unfinished business of sentimentality in, gosh, now I'm forgetting the rest of the title. But nonetheless, as a book in the intro there, Lauren sets up this idea of the intimate public. And that, for me was like, deeply important to the it was not just important, it was formative to this project right there, you know, I get this idea. Even before the book, per se, I got this idea from taking a PhD seminar called the intimate public sphere, where we were talking about intimacy in public spheres and that kind of thing. So from early on, right? This is really, really shaped how it was coming at this whole project. But within that book, they theorize this idea of the intimate public, like in the sense of here, a reading audience so the public here, meaning something like an an audience who receives a set of films or a set of texts, a magazine, that kind of a thing, right? And they make the argument within that intro chapter that intimate publics thrive on incoherence about what makes them cohere. Right. So like that, a part of that point comes quite directly from Lauren and comes from from conversations I was having with Lauren, right around, like, Isn't it fascinating how an intimate public and here you know, their definition of an intimate public is a kind of a space of belonging, for their cases, this is always a space of belonging, marked by or shaped through consumerism, consumption, capitalism, etc. Like the you know, they were very much reading through that lens, right, or their attention was there. But you know, the example that they gave in that entire chapter was the whole concept of women's culture, right? They'd like you know, magazines from the 19th century, forms of literature, forms of kind of entertainment, consumer culture, dedicated and devoted to an imagined audience of woman. But then what, you know, how do you define what that identity is in a way that can really capture the huge breadth of experience that falls under the category of woman right? and Yeah, so you know, their point is, well, yeah, it has to be deliberately very vague. It has to instead, rather than relying on very specific definitions, you know, or, for example, in our current moment, right now we're in the middle of a moral panic about trans identity and so on trans, you know, transgender identities and so on. So, you know, rather than trying to go down highly biological routes to define what a woman is, or racialized ones, or whatever, instead, it would be well look, if you've lived through the experience of being a woman, and we won't say exactly what that means. But if you've, if you've had the affective experience, the lived experience of living in that category, then you must be part of this community. Part of what allows a, this kind of imagined community of partygoers and dance, you know, dance music lovers, to instantiate themselves once in a while in physical space as this kind of larger community and successfully pull that off night after night is by remaining at this level of vagueness and incoherence, incoherence about why they're there and what it means to be there, right and like leaving it at this very general, not empty, but just very generally defined or very vaguely defined, kind of level, rather than trying to be really specific and prescriptive about like we're here because of this. We you know, we are specifically into these things, we specifically believe these things and everybody who's who is here belongs to these specific identity categories.[music]
Kevin Shorner-Johnson:Reading Garcia Mispereta and then Berlant's introduction to the female complaint. I am fascinated by how we construct a language about our imagined we. Berlant names that we have a desire to mean something moving from our singular story to become part of a larger story. In our desire for a larger story, we project a we to which we might belong, named in this writing as an intimate public. An intimate public is a construction of intimacy where individuals imagine a we based on shared characteristics like identification with a musical genre or some other projected identity. In the context of womanhood Berlant names how market forces create imaginaries of a universality of womanhood, that can increase the normative pressure of what a woman is, and can be. Berlant notes that an illusion of shared experience is often manufactured to create an audience of consumers. They write, quote, an intimate public operates when a market opens up to a block of consumers . . . claiming to circulate texts and things that expressed those people's particular core interests and desires." Listen here to clips from Hoda and Jenna, and the Today show, as they imagine the normative of motherhood.
Hoda Jenna and Today Show:I just wonder how How did moms do it all? How do they give every one Yeah, the attention they need? Yes. And we do like we fall short because I was even thinking this too, when you know, Hope's, has been, you know, hasn't been feeling great. And all the attentions is on on Hope and Haley wonders to like, I'm here. Yeah, here I am. See me. I need something to carry me do what you're doing for Hope. You know, I feel like that there is a lot of that. How do we do it? And me being a mom and me sitting at this table with you guys, quite frankly, just this because I'm having a few out of bodies. Like am I supposed to be at this table? Yeah, it feels a little weird, but I have to
Kevin Shorner-Johnson:Our imaginary constructions of intimacy are often based upon normative beliefs about what it means to be a mother, a teacher, a Taylor Swift Fan or some other projection, we build belonging from an archetype of the normal. Oftentimes that normal is a barrier to more diverse ways of living. Pennebaker's research on pronouns has taught me about the imaginative power, and the oppressiveness of pronouns, like the word "we," in projecting a we, I imagine a web of reciprocity, but without steps of concrete relation, a we remains an anxious vision of belonging. Pennebaker's research also illuminates that humans use the language of we to build conformity as a preparation for violence. A 2013 study found that as terrorist organizations prepared for violence, their communications increased a projection of "we" that hardened adherence to the boundaries of Us and Them. Or, as Berlant suggests, in the female complaint, the projections of we can also be a tool of mass market commodification, using an intimate public to market a desire for more, that simultaneously pacifies political voice. Berlant names that these ambivalent bargains are felt and experienced within normative power structures of what it means to be a woman. I turned to ask about Berlant's exploration of feeling and effect. And the ways in which Garcia Mispereta has explored how we feel a sense of belonging? Well, one of the things that struck me early on was the challenge to the name Think Tank and instead turning into feel tank, right, which would seems to like continue that idea about, there are some things in which we don't name but we feel, and I'm fascinated that we, we so often ignore that part of our existence.
Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta:Absolutely. And that is, for sure. An important part of the analysis for me as well through through the whole book, but especially in those sort of chapters, three, four, you know, run liquidarity, and then around sort of affects, kind of the thickening of affect on the dance floor into into something that feels like a community, right, or feels like a something, that through that whole through those chapters, in particular, I'm thinking a lot about how people are making decisions. Well, I don't know if decision is quite the right word, but people are acting on a sense, a felt belonging, even when there's not that much kind of empirical evidence of it, right? You know, that, you know, in the absence of kind of empirical or kind of systematic confirmation of belonging, right, or of, of, you know, of parity with the people on the dance floor, in the absence of that kind of evidence, under certain conditions, people can nonetheless act as if they are already intimate, act as if they already belong, even though they've just arrived to the dance floor, that sort of thing, right. And that is enabled by, by effect by feeling right or rather, it's enabled by folks going with a feeling before or without necessarily thinking it through, in a in a more kind of explicit way. Right? And I don't necessarily want to come out here as somebody who, you know, like, I didn't want to be like the sort of hand wavy, vitalist person who's like, it's all about feeling and nothing else. And you know, like, Forget collaboration. Right? Right. You know, because that can also send us in some, like, alarming directions philosophically, but, but more just that, you know, I think we don't pay enough attention to the ways that we, as social animals, make decisions about how we socialize and how we behave, and how we interact with each other, on things that are affective, rather than directly cognitive, although, again, I don't want to separate those two things. There are neuroscientists out there, including one of my colleagues back at back at the university Birmingham, who would who would strenuously disagree with that, with that separation of spheres. But nonetheless, yeah, there's there's there is, you know, there's something going on there, there's something there, at least, you know, we've paid a lot of attention. Or we have tended to assume that humans are these, like rational decision makers, who make, you know, who make these kind of very kind of calculated decisions about how they, how we move through the world. And part of what I want to pay attention to is how that's not how we operate. And in fact, because we don't operate that way, all the time, because we can operate on a feeling, on a vibe, on a hunch, and so on, we are sometimes able to do this kind of socializing in a way that really shouldn't be possible. Or at least it should be really hard to do this kind of a thing on a dance floor. That should be it shouldn't be so easy. I mean, easy is not the right word, either. I think it is sometimes a minor feat of minor miracle that these things happen at all. But these sorts of events can come together and happen at all, but nonetheless, you know, I yeah, there's there's something I want to attest to their as far as how unlikely this sort of thing would be, were it not for vagueness, were it not for affect, were it not for the way that we could work, that that humans can connect and interact just through emotion or primarily through an emotion or a feeling or an affect?
Kevin Shorner-Johnson:How do we feel our way into bonds of relation? How does music lubricate spaces for the feeling of belonging? Gillian Howell, a scholar in the field of music and peacebuilding published a 2024 article with Bartlett and Davidson, on how music opens small changes in conflict. Their article on building social connection and inclusion through rock music in the Western Balkans, followed teenagers who transgressed ethnic boundaries to participate in Rock Band rehearsals. This Music Connects program created, quote,"rehearsal space for the navigation of differences" were new kinds of relations, cohesion and identity might be felt and experienced. Drawing on the study's language, this project seemed to create a "bubble" or"incubator" where participants expanded what was normal. Rock band participants expanded the normal as they played their way into new social norms, groupings and identities. In the liminal space of musical rehearsal, participants rewrote the lived experience of their ethnic identities, and social worlds in subtle ways of small, intimate changes. These changes may build lasting, small step architectures for repair and reconciliation. So if we talk about intimacy, which we've been talking about, but I want to go a little deeper. So it's really important that in your book, you set up that traditionally, we've defined intimacy as relationships that are lasting, stable, vulnerable, warm and mutual, right. And yet, this study is going to turn that on its head just a little bit. You write that a dance floor undoes some of these assumptions and raises the importance of touch in all its form, and that also sound might be a form of touch with the granular touch of sound, which is so important. So here's a few quotes. You write touch both threatens and promises to rearrange our bodily boundaries. In other words, touch connects bodies, while also revealing and reshaping their boundaries. Another quote, intimacy is a perpetually emergent quality of bodily proximity and contact, quote that sustains a sense of entanglement beyond the encounter. I love that part. Intimacy is something that quote unfolds between bodies through proximity, contact and impact, which can be registered as a sense of both closeness and expansiveness. So talk to me about intimacy, physical and sonic touch, and how it reshapes bodies and sustains that entanglement beyond the encounter. Just I would love to hear your take on that.
Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta:Sure, of course. And first of all, I should say I should, before I even go into that I should, I should, thank you for like, now, this is the second or third time that you've done this, where you've pulled together quotes from a few different places in the book, and kind of presented them side by side, it's a real pleasure to kind of hear that, hear that. And I love the juxtaposition, too. Thank you. I like it. And also, for me, it's a pleasure, just in the sense of like, Ah, I wrote that, you know, and also being somewhat relieved that like, oh, that's I'm more or less coherent across a few different places in the book, you kind of lose sight of that, when you're when you're, you know, finishing the when you're trying to wrap up the book and so on. But getting back to things. Intimacy, yeah, the, well for, for me, I guess, part of what was my initial intervention around intimacy, like when I was first kind of prepping this project, in a way, even just pitching it to my supervisors. That like, that was the the opening, like value statement, or whatever the word would be for this project was like, Look, there is this really different approach to intimacy that's in this sub cultural space, and probably in a lot of other cultural, sub cultural spaces? And we're not, we haven't, you know, nobody seems to theorized this yet, or talked about this yet, like, or at least tried to explain why it's like this, like, why is there this very different approach to intimacy? And I guess another way of framing that and that this is certainly how I was first approaching it. When I was prepping like my literature review. As a grad student for this around intimacy specifically, it was like, there's a lot of normative discourse around intimacy, right? Like, if you actually look at academic writing around intimacy, and certainly like pop, pop, psychological writing about intimacy, so much of it is normative so much, is about like how to have good intimacy, what is good intimacy? And more importantly, I guess or more urgently, what if the intimacy you feel is not really intimate? Like, uh, you know, there's a real kind of paranoia concern thing that is cultivated, of course, like, you know, that, that sells products, right, that sells, you know, like it sells, right, it always sells to kind of take advantage of anxieties that we have as humans, right. And so one of those is like, what if your, your intimacy is not as deep as it could be? What if the intimacy that you think you're experiencing is actually false or cynical, or what have you, right? So in this kind of a field of writing, where it's really normative, and it's usually connected to very kind of, like heteronormative ideas of like, what, you know, what intimacy is supposed to entail and also how it develops, how it unfolds, right. So like, most of the readings that I was, I was coming across around intimacy would be talking about romantic partners and like in the couple form. Right, dyadic, one on one couple form, almost always, you know, hetero pairing, at least presumably, right like or at least presumed, if not explicitly outlined that way, sometimes familial intimacies, perhaps, and then beyond that maybe larger things like belonging to a particular ethnic group and so on, right, but like, the, across all of these, the definition of intimacy was based on or founded on the presumption that the person you were being intimate with, or having intimacy with was somebody you knew for a long time, had a stable relationship with, had a kind of a clear social kind of link to like, in like, there's some kind of a clear hierarchy, or some sense of parody, that there was this presumption from the beginning that what makes intimacy intimate what makes you feel intimacy is proximity, yes, but also kind of transparency, a kind of interpersonal transparency where like, you know, each other's deepest, darkest secrets, you know, everything about each other, you know, each other inside and out, like a book, that's kind of like interpersonal knowledge, right? And so this is also this is what gets me to vagueness, right, a couple chapters later in this in this book is, as a way to explain the intimacy that seems to be happening, paradoxically, and counter intuitively in spaces where those factors are missing, right? These these factors that are supposed to be like prerequisites for intimacy, right, you know, that like, long, you know, long stable relationship, deep interpersonal knowledge, you know, proximity, et cetera, et cetera, right. A lot of those factors are missing on a dance floor. And, and yet people behave intimately and not just behave intimately. But, you know, express, having experienced that, right. And I don't want to, like I always want to take people at their word when they say that, right? Like, I don't, I definitely did not want to also end up being going into one of these sort of false consciousness analyses, you know, the like, well, people think they're having intimacy, but they don't know, you know, like, that's not real intimacy. Like, yeah, folks are feeling it folks are experiencing and acting on it, you know, in the spaces as a form of intimacy. So let's figure out how that's possible. How that works. And I guess more importantly, what are the factors that make that intimacy possible if it's a different kind, a different flavor of intimacy, so to speak, than the kind where that the conditions of possibility are based on stable relationships, family forms, you know, romantic love, etc.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson:A queer approach to analysis names and questions, the normative, that which is performed again and again in daily lives. Drawing upon this tradition, Garcia Mispereta questions normative understandings of intimacy, that have little room for variation. How do dance Floor experiences of intimacy challenged normative understandings of intimacy as a stable, transparent and enduring relationship? How do we explain moments on a dance floor in a singular glance, or in an experience with strangers that feels intimate? Manuel Garcia went on to speak of how states like proximity, warmth, intensity, and alterations from the normative, propel a loosening an experience and vague feeling of togetherness.
Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta:What I note here is that some of those some of those same factors attributed to normative intimacy are still present, proximity and warmth are still there, right. But it's more like physical proximity rather than social proximity, right. But that physical proximity, kind of lubricated by a non anonymity, the fact that it's usually a nighttime context, where people are maybe, you know, intoxicated, or at least their sleep cycles are flipped, you know, like, there's all these ways in which people are in altered states, right? lubricated by the music lubricated, you know, by all these other sort of factors that loosen people up, but that kind of that loosening up in a sense, makes it possible then for people to experience a kind of an intimacy based mostly on physical proximity on just sharing, you know, being bodies in a room, but also going through a particularly intense experience together. And that's where I think I kind of landed with not so much the special sauce of this kind of intimacy, but like, what makes this intimacy possible and what makes it work in these spaces, you know, despite this lack of, of, of interpersonal knowledge and stable relationships, and some of that is warmth in general. Some of that is physical proximity. And also an important part of that is intensity, it's kind of intense experiences, you know, that are that are experienced together in a social way, right, you know, so the intensity of partying the intensity of maybe being high the intensity of really pushing your bodily limits maybe if you go for like a marathon, night out right, you know, the the adventure of it all so to speak. And even sometimes illicitness and the the transgression like these are all things that also lay groundwork for a certain kind of intimacy that you might find comparable to the kind of like, esprit de corps Brother in Arms sort of intimacy that folks sometimes might cultivate it, you know, when like, getting up to mischief together, you know, when, you know, getting into scrapes together, having adventures together, you know, maybe also doing illicit or illegal activities together like those all also cultivate the sense of kind of intimacy, you know, through shared risk, shared, shared, intense experience, shared ordeal right now, these are all kind of ways that intimacy can also.. can also grow beyond just the family form and the romantic couple form
Kevin Shorner-Johnson:This podcast has explored complex paradoxes of lived experience, and notions of vague belonging, intimate publics, intimacy, and the lived and felt experience of belonging. Belonging is a felt experience, propelled by our imaginations of we, and in the company of strangers this may be felt as vague belonging, where we reveal just enough of ourselves on dance floors, workplaces and in classrooms for a feeling of togetherness. For peacebuilders these lessons have implications on the messiness of lived reality, where complex feelings and identities are juxtaposed within complex spaces. What are the conditions that lubricates space, where we might experience the feeling of together, somehow? When do these momentary encounters become the small steps of peace? The next episode explores utopias, a thickening of the we, and an unfolding of the self in this continuing exploration of the complexity of belonging. This is the music and peacebuilding podcast hosted by Kevin Shorner-Johnson. At Elizabethtown college we host a Master of Music Education, with an emphasis in peacebuilding. Thinking deeply. We reclaim space for connection and care. Join us at music peacebuilding.com