2026/01/01 by J. D. Schnepf, Tess Takahashi, Laliv Melamed · 1 voice
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Gender, Feminism, and Media #LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy #Posthumanist Ethics and Activism
paper · pdf · doi:10.1525/fmh.2026.12.1.1
openalex publication_date 2026/01/01 · openalex created_date 2026/01/23 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/11
We came to edit this special issue on “Intimacies of Scale” for Feminist Media Histories through networks of friendship. In the process, we began to understand friendship not as a space of intimacy, but as a medium that should be considered a significant, if often unacknowledged, structure underlying academic scholarship. We believe that academic friendship and collaboration operate as media of communication, across which ideas, affect, and proximity produce their own tenuous alchemy. In this sense, academic friendship is a fragile, crisscrossing medium through which intimacy is produced across scales of experience. The articles in this special issue examine how different media—like friendship—generate intimacy across scales in historical context through feminist lenses of analysis. These media are socially structured and complexly intertwined. For example, these articles investigate the mediating social structures of a feminist consciousness-raising group in New York City in the 1970s, a neighborhood community center in occupied Bethlehem in the 2010s, heterosexual marriage in Colorado in the 1960s, Indo-Caribbean diasporic music scenes in two decades, present-day incarceration centers in the United States, and a twenty-first-century Italian beach where queer cruising meets migrant death. These socially structured media interweave with multiple technologies in ways that generate unexpected forms of intimacy in their scalar traversals. We have two interrelated theses: first, that a consideration of intimacy challenges our thinking about scale, and second, that contemplation of scale challenges our understanding of intimacy. But first, we look at what questions of scale and intimacy bring to each other through an examination of academic friendship and collaboration.Unsanctioned by outside forces, the informal and occasional structure of friendship within the academy has particular affordances, many of which have been taken up by feminist and queer scholars. While relationships like marriage are legally authorized and thus subject to damages in the face of broken contracts, friendship offers no guarantees. Rather, friendship is a precarious tie that depends on the inchoate labor of continued association and investment. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner have asserted that the heterosexual marriage contract is “publicly mediated,” regulated, and sanctioned by the state in ways that generate enabling fictions about intimacy as occurring in the protected space of the private.1 Namely, marriage appears to operate on the minute scale in a private space held separate from the national scale of politics, public, and labor. Yet unlike marriage, friendship is neither enclosed nor safeguarded. Rather, friendship in the academy functions as an informal and promiscuous set of ties among individuals, an indeterminacy that recalls Laliv Melamed’s writing on the indeterminate status of the “girlfriend” of the dead soldier.2 Like the girlfriend, friendship possesses no official status for the state, and none within the porous milieu of the academy. Contemporary neoliberal culture understands friendship as occupying a casual space of semiprivate relationships where informal agreements are made and boundaries drawn between sovereign individuals in an ad hoc way. In this sense, we see friendship as aligned with what Berlant and Warner have called the “non-standard intimacies” of queer association that work to unsettle the norms of official institutions of intimacy like heterosexual marriage.3 Friendship requires no vows, contracts, or witnesses, a condition that fosters its continued precarity. In other words, friendship in the academy has no formal status in the sense that it occupies the elsewhere of a system built on individual achievement. At the same time, friendship is essential to the larger institution of academia.While academic friendship and collaboration often overlap, there are essential differences between the ways that the intimacy of these two forms operate in relation to larger forces. If friendship is informal, academic collaboration is the form that formalizes the bond for at least the duration of a defined project, whether the making of a film, the cowriting of an essay, or the joint editing of a special issue. Unlike friendship, academic collaboration is marked by the constraint of the deadline and the need to produce a product, both of which can place pressure on the relationship, forcing friends to confront their conflicting obligations and differences in working styles. As we have seen during the process of working on this issue of “Intimacies of Scale,” our relationships are subject not only to the external demands of academic deadlines but also to the overarching strictures and aporias of state institutions of belonging and care. The stipulations and blank spaces of immigration, health care, and policing put pressure on our families, psyches, and partnerships—including those of academic collaboration. But we join other feminist scholars in asserting that what might be seen as stresses on friendship are also its currency. The intimacy of collaborative friendship is built not on the hardening of the individual but on becoming permeable through an uneven “accumulation of vulnerability” across bodies, as Paige Sarlin describes it, in which we accumulate favors, debts, frictions, and gifts over time.4 Like the neoliberal state, the culture of the academy expects us to remain individuals within the realm of intellectual collaboration. Indeed, the academy rewards the idea of individualism, the sovereign intellect, and the singular author (or editor), as if ideas are not generated within a larger community of discourse and dependence. We see the liberal humanist idea of the sovereign individual as a fantasy of “the individual’s possession of his own person, his own interiority”—an independence that depends on the exclusion of not only our peers but of global networks of intimate labor and support, as Lisa Lowe reminds us.5Academic friendship functions not so much as an enclosure, but as a medium—or form—of exchange where intimacy is generated across a range of media, technologies, and social structures at every scale, from the face-to-face to the global. While at times the temporality of academic friendship can be a daily negotiation (as when facing a deadline or period of personal crisis), more often contact between friends in the academy is occasional, infrequent, and conducted over physical distance with short periods of intensity separated by weeks, months, and years. Today academic collaboration depends on our access to the technological media that join us over vast geographical distances like the telephone, email, WhatsApp, GoogleDrive, FaceTime, and Zoom, where our children and pets often appear at the borders of the screen. While we might see each other in the halls of the university, our physical dispersal means that academic friendship also relies on institutional forms of mediation that bring us together in person in the form of talks, symposia, workshops, and conferences. These in-person gatherings are supported by extended global infrastructures of institutional and governmental funding and international transport, as well as the embodied labor of organizers, volunteers, hotel workers, mechanics, and babysitters. These gatherings also come up against the blockages of visa requirements and financial resources. Academic friendship and collaboration depend on these mediating technologies and structures for not only the exchange of ideas but also the exchange of emotional support, as we reveal our differing needs, vulnerabilities, and stresses to one another. Academic friendship and collaboration produce intimacy in ways that are sometimes messy and disappointing and at other times inspiring and revelatory. Further, academic friendship is never contained but rather inevitably reaches out into the larger field, mediated through chance encounters, email introductions, dinner parties, and retreats based on disciplinary affinities and political kinship.There are two contradictory, nevertheless mutually defined fantasies about friendship in the realm of academic collaboration. The first is that friendship compromises aspects of individual academic merit, in that it comes to bear on processes of legitimating excellency and prestige. This is a fantasy because friendship in the form of support, readership, advice, and brainstorming are an essential motor for our thinking, as well as necessary to our progress in academia. The second fantasy is that friendship can sublimate all the toxic aspects we currently associate with the milieu of academia. In this sense, friendship, as well as other forms of academic kinship, must also be understood as another form of exclusionary gatekeeping through which numbers are kept at a manageable scale.This special issue on scale, intimacy, and media interrupts standard ideas about scale. In his 2014 essay “Anti-zoom,” written to accompany the Olafur Eliasson exhibition at the Fondation Vuitton in Paris, Bruno Latour takes on zoom’s scalar logic.6 Latour articulates this problem as the human relation to “phenomena, which are at once immensely vaster than we are, and yet subject to our affect.”7 For Latour, the “common sense” approach to these scalar phenomena assumes distinct “levels of reality” that are nonetheless understood as continuous.8 To approach the scalar in such terms is to subscribe to a metaphor shaped by the material properties of cinematic media: specifically, the power of the camera’s telescopic lens to bring detail into focus as it moves toward our object of interest or to blur detail as it moves away as if from a singular perspective.Charles and Ray Eames’s iconic 1977 pedagogical short documentary Powers of Ten illustrates this fantasy of seamlessly transitioning between levels of reality that lie neatly nested together while taking the heterosexual couple as its primary object of measure.9 The film secures the sense that intimacies are formed and tended to on some of the smallest of scales: think here of the body or the domestic partnership. Perhaps prioritizing such cozy proportions offers up the fantasy that nourishing our attachments could be a private, self-determined affair. But as the title “Anti-zoom” anticipates, Latour proposes we eschew the easy metaphor. Contrary to the “common sense” approach, these levels “do not nestle one within the other like Russian dolls”: such a relation is always a “zoom effect,” which is to say always a construction and an arrangement, a deliberate bringing together of multiple media technologies—and often discrete data sets—located in different times and spaces.10Donna Haraway’s concept of situated knowledge allows us to draw out the feminist implications of approaching scale through Latour’s concept of the anti-zoom, since it doesn’t align with the ideology of “disembodied scientific objectivity” that pretends to universality.11 Rather, Haraway speaks in the idiom of the constructed view, which derives not just “from a body,” but from “a complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity.”12 If the contrast Haraway sets up here calls to mind the rational machine-like continuity promised by Powers of Ten, then it also prepares us for a feminist scalar media that relies on collaboration. “Situated knowledges are about communities, not about isolated individuals,” Haraway writes: “The science question in feminism is about objectivity as positioned rationality. Its images are not the products of escape and transcendence of limits (the view from above) but the joining of partial views and halting voices into a collective subject position that promises a vision of the means of ongoing finite embodiment, of living within limits and contradictions—of views from somewhere.”13 Following Haraway, we understand the mediating work of scalar arrangement as necessarily intimate and collaborative.The articles in our issue explore what arrangements might be possible when considering scalar movement and the production of intimate knowledge. Rather than moving continuously from inside to out or near to far, these essays show the scales that unexpectedly emerge from proximal, horizontal, or, as Sergio Rigoletto puts it in his contribution to this issue, sideways reading.14 In such arrangements, personal subjective experiences reside next to abstract systems. This way of thinking through the scalar as juxtapositions rather than continuous zooms aligns with the scalar thought forwarded in the field of human geography where scale is understood as a social construction. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Marxist scholars pointed out that the political economy is a significant driver of the production of space in the material world.15 Through shifts in capitalist production, for instance, the abstraction of the global as a recognizable scale comes into view. For feminist Marxists like Sallie A. Marston, this focus on the immense scales constituted through “systems of domination” requires complication, specifically by acknowledging the roles of social reproduction and consumerism.16 In her influential essay, “The Social Construction of Scale,” Marston argues that scale’s social—and thus intimate—construction is thoroughly gendered, working on and through the levels of the household, and also the body.17 This feminist reframing of scale’s gendered production crucially links the scalar to the contradictions of capitalism that come into view when social reproduction is centered.18 While some social-reproductive activities have become internalized by the gig economy and take visible form through their outsourcing to migrant labor, for example, the essays in this issue attend most carefully to the social-reproductive sites of the household and the body as they emerge in tandem with the large-scale systems they support.Finally, scale’s enabling fiction, that its levels are continuous, has led to confusion when it comes to scale’s relation to intimacy—what it is and where it is possible. If scales are continuous like the camera’s zoom, this would presume a relation between the space of the household, the intermediate space of semipublic life, and the large-scale abstract scales conditioned by systems such as capitalism or the nation-state. The authors in our issue advocate for scalar intimacy that cannot be tracked through size or level. Specifically, they suggest that we do not enter into intimacy that might alleviate the violence visited by the dominant forces of impersonal global systems by escaping those systems and retreating into smaller worlds. Rather, intimacy exists within the context furnished by the very systems from which we seek to turn away.What does “thinking across scale” enable us to understand about intimacy? As we determined in putting together this intimacy is mediated across Indeed, mediated intimacy with it a form of a that of scale. Rather than a that forms of and always or intimacy first and Lisa of is to our of of of and and between Lowe the elsewhere of liberal of individual and in proximity to whether in or embodied the for and like with for intimacy forms of liberal its contradictions and or is to but often that are not necessarily by or in the sense that it is a form that the or the As a way to bring to a set of intimacy a of authors in this are thinking and in between and and body and and and Lauren Berlant to with the of and If the can be thought of as the of scale, what would be the that calls for the of and would be its medium—or is not by that two of the articles in this special issue with in this a medium of intimacy is not the of its to the domestic In the essays in this issue the idea that intimacy in domestic intimacy from its to the and its of or as well as its to scales in ways that private and public, state and the individual and the always porous and mutually constructed of the the of intimacy we here is not conditioned by media, or The essays in this special issue intimacy across media, and in of or Media of intimacy (or intimacy as is the of and a to us by in this of technologies, and that operate within and across scales of These a range of media forms and In other words, what are to be enclosed spaces of intimacy like the human body or the are always with other forces, and and Ray Eames’s mediated of scale, Powers of Ten, the body appears to the most of scale. zooms out continuously to a of intimacy between a couple in the The the of the body, its and extended only by kinship, and The up from the of a singular body to the couple form that are produced through the of large-scale and The authors in this understand as and often subject to from the inside out and If the body a medium of intimacy then it also to Berlant how intimacy is constituted through the of in and is through this a that aspects of are and other social come in and through the In a and the of body and as a media that power through labor are through incarceration in and are of all of and In “The of Media and the specifically by of and gendered The body of labor, and and the of the intimacy that in the and of such or We the of domestic by to the of her among and Through this argues that her body, making it a medium through which her a place in the As these essays show are never the private of the individual but rather are always to labor, and As much as are for power through their or their this special issue how technological media, and processes of production such the body, the is the place most with the idea of intimacy as just as the essays in this issue the of the body, they reveal the as both and across scales of through forms of in scale and by intimate and families, the to as a private space that those within from the of Yet as the larger culture the as from sovereign external and these essays show how the subject to technologies of state For example, to a that are subject to This us to the way in which larger state to the of the and the intimacy At the same time, a community functions as a space of and within her neighborhood and larger In these essays the also through its as through the of and migrant Sergio on the the of migrant and queer cruising through an or Through the very production of from to and Rigoletto the and intimacies constituted between and across and in of and the Feminist in the where the medium of to into a community through intimate of their in the as the of and are to and media and This which made among for blockages when to from the private realm to the community As in all of the a of technologies and social structures both and intimacies across from body to to intermediate spaces to the larger structures of and special issue of Feminist Media Histories work in and media that intimacy as a scale, a a a and a particular media To understand intimacy as a mediated requires us to the and that have been to the scale of the or to the scale of private spaces for and In other words, we think about how intimacy has been mediated across scales of and understanding in ways that and political These essays the of and private, the and the the and the on how these have and in so the and spaces through which we understand what intimacy can Histories of intimacy, often to the the and the with with immense scale, such as and global In thinking about and scale” historical questions and challenges for feminist media a consideration of of intimacy as a of mediating scale into view different possible a way of we to our of academic friendship and collaboration. Like other complexly mediated spaces of intimate like the body, the the the the community the and the milieu of the academy is neither nor like the social relationships considered in the essays friendship in the academy is both a medium of intimacy the of scale, friendship occupies the the the that between the institution and the of the individual author the of academic the of intimacy, friendship is the enabling nevertheless has norms of production and as its are two enabling fictions of intimacy and scale that we seek to explore in this first, the enabling of scale is that it is the enabling of intimacy is that it is the other it could also be the other way The enabling of scale is that The enabling of intimacy is that to our for this special issue of Feminist Media the of academic collaboration and friendship with every issue We the and to her always and of every essay in this issue. We also to the of often in our from the of the