ABSTRACT
Why do many inequalities concerning gender and sexuality prevail, even in countries that rank highly in equality measurements and where demands for equality are widely supported? This book stems from the assumptions that intimate relationships are crucial sites for producing and experiencing inequality and that inequalities are shaped in everyday affective encounters. The introduction foregrounds the idea that exploring affect in intimate relationships sheds light on such subtle power dynamics, which may easily go unnoticed. By pinning down the challenges that theoretically advanced affect studies pose to the empirical study of intimate relationships, it advances a relational understanding of affect, one that sees how affecting and becoming affected emerge in and through open-ended encounters between bodies and things. Since affects may sediment power imbalances and asymmetries in intimate relationships, the collection seeks, with the help of the concept of affective inequality, to capture empirically such phenomena in particular. The introduction concludes by outlining the sections and chapters of the book and suggesting some possible reading trajectories for it.
