Naked Intimacy: Connection in Collective Sexual Spaces

• In Event: 578 - Section on Social Psychology Paper Session. Social Psychology of Sex, Sexualities, and Romantic Relationships

Abstract

Naked intimacy is a feeling of connection that people experience when they are in collective sexual or erotic situations. Using data from a three year ethnographic project of Chicago’s Boystown gay neighborhood and other queer spaces, this paper describes naked intimacy and the theoretical foundations behind it. Naked intimacy is a case of collective emotion, a psychological state produced by social interaction, embodied in totems of sexual experience, and thereby induced by erotic spaces and objects. Collective sexual situations produce moments of collective effervescence, in which people feel ‘more than themselves,’ and bound to other people within the space. Naked intimacy connects people across other kinds of boundaries, like race, by ‘uncrowning’ participants and rooting them in their bodies.

Author

• Jason Ronald Orne, University of Wisconsin-Madison