Reconfigurations of Intimacy

Abstract

In contrast to the era of mass media (radio and TV), since the popularization of the Internet in the early twenty-first century, digital media allow their audience to take an active role not only in communication, but in creating content. Based on a research on social networking sites and applications directed to the search for affective / loving / sexual partners, favoring heterosexual women between 30 and 50 years old, living in São Paulo, I propose a reflection on the exposure of intimacy. In this sense, I ask to what extent the exposure allowed by technological mediation (re)sets intimacy notions - what happens when the subjects themselves produce the content? Or “produce” it for the love market? What identifications are at stake in abundant, and accelerated, partner offer? What speeches / images are triggered? Or, how does this production activate different moralities? My argument is that the codification of subjects on the basis of the articulation of marked differences in the body, but also of objects, occurs through an imaginative construction of the social class of potential partners, one of the key factors in the election, being “class” associated to a specific kind of masculinity.