Manon Mathias analyses new attitudes towards disease and hygiene in the nineteenth century in the context of the unprecedented growth of cities in this period, which provoked a parallel rise in diseases from human excrement (such as typhus, typhoid fever, and cholera). This analysis is placed in the context of new scientific understandings of bacteria that began to develop in the late nineteenth century, as the realisation that germs spread through human contact led to an acute fear of dirt and an increased obsession with cleanliness. As human excrement came to dominate discussions of public health and disease, fictions of the period provoked and explored imaginative extensions of these concerns. Jules Verne’s Cinq cents millions de la Bégum (1880), Camille Flammarion’s Uranie (1889), and William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) each created compelling fantasies of alternative, faeces-free societies in which bodily waste and dirt have been eradicated. These somewhat anodyne and sterile hygienic utopias, however, also reveal the potential unintended consequences of extreme cleanliness. Implicated in the rational rejection of disease and infection, Mathias argues, is a rejection of human physicality, intimacy, and passion.
immigration acts (see Home Office 2002, 2014b; HM Government 2006), the Home Office (quoted in Chambre 2016) reminded the press that ‘citizenship is a privilege not a right. The Home Secretary can deprive an individual of their citizenship where it is believed it is conducive to the public good to do so.’ 136 Bordering intimacy From 2002 to 2016, eighty-one subjects were deprived of their citizenship. In 2017 it was reported that in that year alone a further 104 were stripped of their rights. These figures also reflect the expanding number of people who have their
have found that, despite the poem's brief mention of them, it is not carelessness but deep ambivalence, emotional complexity, and resilience that underwrites Beowulf 's relationship to children. In thinking about such ambivalent concern, I attend to critics such as Lauren Berlant, making room for the ambivalently ‘charged’ interruptions of family life in the poem and in my criticism by recalibrating these intimacies to include babies in Beowulf . Abandonment, childcare, and the early medieval North The place of infants
chapter 4, ‘the child’ is bound to heteronormative futurity, and with this hope, and thus is made into the ultimate vulnerable subject. But this relies equally on who can be a child and, subsequently, who can be innocent, vulnerable and a subject of empathy and protection (Crawley 2011). It makes us ask which bodies are maintained by the dominant value of childhood, and how this might structure questions of mobility, borders and belonging more broadly. 182 Bordering intimacy Childhood Global regimes of humanitarianism rely upon the codification of childhood as
'Hara 137 amount of energy he invested in our art and our lives made me feel like a miser. (H, 99) One expression of that energy was, as Rivers indicated, O’Hara’s capacity for intimacy, where intimacy meant not just friendship but a detailed understanding of the artist friend’s work. Philip Guston recalls a conversation with O’Hara: Frank was in his most non-stop way of talking; saying that the pictures put him in mind of Tiepolo ... Suddenly I was working in an ancient building now a warehouse facing the Giudecca. The loft over the Firehouse was transformed. It was
162 Bordering intimacy 2017; Fargues 2017; Gibney 2017), I argue that de facto deprivation of rights and personhood was arguably foundational to modern citizenship. Rather than an aberration of citizenship, the racialised control we see today is better understood as an intensification of this past function. This I argue reveals a particular type of imperial family drama which rages through British citizenship. I conclude the chapter by considering how contemporary rights and citizenship are shaped by the historical figurations of the ‘indentured labourer’ and the
showing the world.2 His enthusiasm consists in that attempted showing, and in the perpetual reacquaintance with the environment it entailed. But it consisted also in pleasure, Schuyler taking an exquisite pleasure both in the sound of words – his own and other people’s – and in the intensified relationship with the world that words can effect. His poems are acts of disclosure, where the disclosure is founded on an intimacy with both language and the world: an intimacy thwarted by the abstractions of administration. ‘Freely Espousing’ Schuyler was 43 when, in 1969, he
demise. Even on his deathbed, Toland appeared more interested in books than his own health, after all it was books and ideas that had dominated his life. Crammed into his back room, books were his most precious belongings. Stacked on chairs, teetering in piles on chests, or packed into boxes, these works, and his intimacy with their contents, were the foundation of Toland’s reputation. A mixture of recondite theology, classical learning and political tracts, the eclecticism of his library underscores the range of his interests and erudition. Even the last letters he
view of a work in a clandestine moment. As we will see, for Toland, and the individuals he cultivated, books were as much instruments of sociability as carriers of intellectual meaning. The pursuit of certain books caused intimacies amongst 26 MUP/Champion_02_Ch1 26 27/2/03, 10:15 am Libraries, friends and conversation booksellers, authors, buyers: the composition of works similarly required, and produced, patrons, printers, booksellers and reviewers. The books Toland wrote, and used, were given cultural value by a combination of the sociabilities necessary to
affective intimacies of spatially entangled intra-actions that take shape in the collective, participatory social practices of lesboratories. In this chapter I focus on lesboratories to analyse the collective bonds of affective intimacy through which the affected bodies became-with the materiality of the spaces of lesbian and gay dance parties. I first contextualise the 1980s lesbian