Curious Affinities

by Sophie Chauhan

How much distance and difference can intimacy hold? How much proximity and likeness does it require? What can we learn from its capacities? And what could we salvage from its limits?

Curious Affinities unravels the risks and possibilities brought forth by unconventional styles of intimacy. Across kinship, friendship, romance and community, the threads of social relation are entangled by race, class and queerness in unexpected and generative ways, as we find ourselves rent to shreds and stitched back together in the name of common feelings.

In rousing poetry and incisive prose, Sophie Chauhan reflects on the bonds and boundaries that govern our collective ways of life and wonders how they might be reimagined.

Genres: Poetry, Queer, LGBT, Politics

146 pages, Paperback

First published November 23, 2023

About the author

Sophie is a London-based writer and researcher, born in the UK and raised in Naarm (Melbourne). She is completing a PhD in Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies at University College London. Her academic, creative and organising work converge around her interest in anti-capitalist, queer and decolonial approaches to radical coalition-building.

Reviews

[huda 💋 · Rating 4 out of 5]

first of all - happy feminist fight day habibi

curious affinities is exploring modes of togetherness through a queer understanding of friendships, kinship, romantic and platonic love. i enjoyed reading this book a lot - it’s a mix of theory-based essays but also prose, and excerpts of their life. sometimes it felt a bit scattered i couldn’t really piece the pieces together but I embraced the confusion haha - I was drawn in and could read without getting tired of it. interesting exploration of the impact of capitalism on our social relations.

the part i loved the most was their honest and brutal reading of class and class consciousness within left circles. If you can’t be honest about your own class and the maybe uncomfortable feeling of guilt when admitting you are actually neither working class nor middle class was something they explored in a very honest way i think. and i also think that we don’t speak enough about class in personal relationship but always on a rather abstract level, it think because it still is awkward - but it shouldn’t be, or rather, it is essential to not be.

I felt the book was honest, and i really liked that

[miles z · Rating 2 out of 5]

My issues with the book are that:
1) It's not really about what the blurb or reviews say it's about
2) It tries to cover too many issues and ends up not having enough space to say anything significant

It's a book that's supposed to be about intimacy, but I don't really think I've learned anything about intimacy at all from this book. At the heart, it's really a memoir with some theories sprinkled around. It reads like an 150 page gal-dem article or substack collection, rather than a book. More than anything else, it's about being mixed race. Some of the reviews on the back suggest that it will "rearrange every particle of your being" after reading it, ehich oversells the book and leads to disappointment.

It uses too much pretentious language to be an accessible introduction to political themes for new readers and for experienced readers, it's too superficial and tries to cover too many issues and ends up being spread too thin, especially when there is plenty of literature alreqdy dedicated to these topics individually. She writes about being mixed race, upper class, a lesbian, gay marriage being legalized in Australia, Aboriginal rights in Australia, being in London, chronic pain and the pandemic. For example, she talks about chronic pain and covid for the span 10 pages and never mentions it again. At the same time, she makes a lot of points that have already been made before by activists and academics, but doesn't provide any citations. There's a small bibliography at the back that has less than 10 references. She makes wild and wide ranging claims without backing it up with evidence, For example saying that indigenous / black + white mixed race people are vilified for identifying as l black or indigenous. Or that people of color are frowned upon for dating people of the same ethnicity instead of having mixed race relationships because that goes against post-racial progress? She also makes some big speeches, for example saying that rich people should not hide their wealth and do more. But then she doesn't really do much with this for the rest of the book. There are some interesting parts, like the multiple choice questions on the privilege. But mostly the book is skippable.

It's also uncomfortable for me how she dislikes her mother basically for being white and representing the colonizer whilst romanticizing her dad for being brown. He never really gets a proper personality or description other than being this vaguely Brown aspiring immigrant man because he is her link to her poc culture and therefore untouchable, a culture which she never actually names.

I'll leave you with the line that made me roll my eyes:

"she will fuck me so hard I forget my National Insurance number"

[Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

tasty, but flavours were a lil too scattered