"Low Fences": Reflections on Intimacy across Scales. (3rd May 2020) - Bahng, Aimee
ABSTRACT: This short reflection on "intimacy" considers the cross-ethnic labor coalitions at the CPC plantation camp in Wahiawa O'ahu to thread conversations about solidarity together with theorizations of intimacy. Whereas Euro-American notions of modernity as demonstrating dominion over nature and alienation from labor rely on conquest and environmental degradation, relational epistemology belies the framework of possession by understanding nature and the human as fundamentally interconnected rather than in contention with one another. Intimacy as relation upends intimacy as (self-)possession, and in so doing, it facilitates affinity and solidarity across differences rather than producing the coercive intimacy of appropriation and domination.