Introduction

This chapter reviews how the concepts of boundaries and boundary work are deployed in theorising intimacy, in order to assess how these concepts further our understanding of intimacy and social change. In everyday current usage, intimacy is often presumed to involve practices of close association, familiarity and privileged knowledge, strong positive emotional attachments, such as love, and a very particular form of ‘closeness’ and being ‘special’ to another person, associated with high levels of trust. Recent discussions of intimacy emphasise one particular practice of generating ‘closeness’ above all others, selfdisclosure. Intimacy of the inner self, ‘disclosing intimacy’ or ‘self expressing intimacy’ has become celebrated in popular culture as the key to a ‘good relationship’ although some academic work has suggested that this type of intimacy may be more of an ideological construct than an everyday lived reality. The practices attended to in such a conceptualisation of intimacy suggest an absence or lowering of boundaries among intimates in comparison to the presence or heightening of boundaries between intimates and those outside their intimate relationships. In accounts of personal life, intimates are described as if encapsulated together by a protective boundary that stops distractions that would otherwise interfere with their intimacy or by an exclusionary boundary that keeps non-intimates out.

Although often not explicitly named as such, reference to boundaries and boundary work has been a longstanding aspect of theorising the place of personal life in social change. For social theorists of the emergence of ‘modernity’, the reconfiguration of ‘public’ and ‘private’ as separate spheres and renewed emphasis on individualism, and the conceptualising of individuals as having unique inner selves, were necessary precursors to the association of intimacy with private personal relationships. For some, private intimacy was also the product of another facet of modernity: the development of divisions of labour, specialisation and bureaucracy, resulting in interaction organised around the functions people perform or positions they occupy rather than ‘whole persons’. Hence it is argued that individuals need intimacy to re-establish themselves in “holistic, multifaceted interactions that contrast with the segmental, single-faceted interactions of the relatively many rolerelations” (Davis, 1973, p xxii).