Scales of Intimacy: Across/Aside/In Between
This introduction proposes that intimacy and scale are mutually constitutive rather than separate analytical categories. Drawing on feminist media theory, it argues that intimacy is not confined to private or interpersonal relations but is produced through media, technologies, and social structures operating across multiple scales. Beginning with academic friendship and collaboration as a form of mediated intimacy, the article challenges the ideal of the autonomous scholar and highlights the relational conditions of knowledge production. Engaging with feminist theories of situated knowledge and the social construction of scale, it reframes scale as a mediated, relational process rather than a fixed hierarchy. The introduction positions the contributions to the special issue as explorations of how intimacy traverses bodies, homes, institutions, infrastructures, and global systems, revealing the entanglements of media, power, and everyday life across historical contexts.
