ABSTRACT
Neoliberalism colonizes the private sphere with competitive, commodifying logics and also elicits from this domain a spectrum of aptitudes and dispositions that add dimension to the ‘entrepreneur of the self’. Confirming the general diagnosis, this chapter will also probe intimate life for critical needs. How might intimate life represent itself as a site of idealized interactions whose realization demands a rethinking of key social practices and institutions? Contemporary feminism has always been interested in this task. The first part of the chapter explores two competing paradigms favoured by it for diagnosing the emancipatory, critical pulse of modern intimacy. Neither alone proves to be satisfactory, and the second part of the chapter takes up a mirroring debate in the sociology intimacy over the capacity of ‘love’ or ‘friendship’ to model the freedoms of an intimate sphere. The final part finds that the one-sidedness of both accounts can be redressed by a third approach that closes down neither the claims of love nor friendship and finds an ongoing dialectical interchange to be the best option.
