Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
This essay brings together two different rubrics that are animating recent strands of critical analysis: intimacy and infrastructure. Intimacy has emerged in feminist and queer scholarship as a rubric to depict how regimes of power shape relations and identification, particularly through the operations of discursive norms. This essay proposes that infrastructure offers another rubric for excavating material-symbolic assemblages that embed intimate relations in fields of power. Infrastructure refers to systems for transport, energy, water, and communication, but also more generally to networks that enable movement or activity, a definition that includes physical, immaterial, and regulatory elements. The emergence of critical studies of infrastructure makes this domain amenable to feminist and queer analysis. The essay introduces this work on infrastructure, explaining the merits of infrastructure as rubric and object for understanding the intimate operations of power.
Ara Wilson (Wed,) studied this question.