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Radical Intimacy
An impassioned discussion about the alternative ways to form relationships and resist capitalism.
Capitalist ideology wants us to believe that there is an optimal way to live. 'Making connections' means networking for work. Our emotional needs are to be fulfilled by a single romantic partner, and self-care equates to taking personal responsibility for our suffering. We must be productive and heterosexual, we must have babies and buy a house. But the kicker is most people cannot and do not want to achieve all, or any of these life goals. Instead we are left feeling atomised, exhausted and disempowered.
Radical Intimacy shows that it doesn't need to be this way. A punchy and impassioned account of inspiring ideas about alternative ways to live, Sophie K Rosa demands we use our radical imagination to discover a new form of intimacy and to transform our personal lives and in turn society as a whole.
Including critiques of the 'wellness' industry that ignores rising poverty rates, the mental health crisis and racist and misogynist state violence; transcending love and sex under capitalism to move towards feminist, decolonial and queer thinking; asking whether we should abolish the family; interrogating the framing of ageing and death and much more, Radical Intimacy is the compassionate antidote to a callous society.
Capitalist ideology wants us to believe that there is an optimal way to live. 'Making connections' means networking for work. Our emotional needs are to be fulfilled by a single romantic partner, and self-care equates to taking personal responsibility for our suffering. We must be productive and heterosexual, we must have babies and buy a house. But the kicker is most people cannot and do not want to achieve all, or any of these life goals. Instead we are left feeling atomised, exhausted and disempowered.
Radical Intimacy shows that it doesn't need to be this way. A punchy and impassioned account of inspiring ideas about alternative ways to live, Sophie K Rosa demands we use our radical imagination to discover a new form of intimacy and to transform our personal lives and in turn society as a whole.
Including critiques of the 'wellness' industry that ignores rising poverty rates, the mental health crisis and racist and misogynist state violence; transcending love and sex under capitalism to move towards feminist, decolonial and queer thinking; asking whether we should abolish the family; interrogating the framing of ageing and death and much more, Radical Intimacy is the compassionate antidote to a callous society.
196 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2023
384 people are currently reading
10519 people want to read
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November 20, 2025
This book is NOT about “sex”.
‘Intimacy’ is primal and inscrutable, vital and elusive. Like love, it is difficult to explain for good reason: something so intricately personal – spiritual – might be debased by attempts at objective definition.
Upon learning ‘intimacy’ was its subject, some people assumed this book would be about sex. Indeed, ‘to be intimate’ is often used euphemistically in this way. Intimacy is much more (and much less) than sex – though perhaps sex itself could be a helpful lens through which to understand it. Whilst intimacy in general need not include any semblance of sex, as an experience it might mirror some of the reasons people can find sex meaningful. Like sex, intimacy can allow us to access desire, pleasure, comfort, tending, tenderness, coming together and feelings of ‘being seen’.
But just as not all sex is intimate, not all intimacy is sexual. ‘Intimacy’ encompasses many kinds of relationships. It is a way of being together that might include fleeting or enduring experiences of affinity, vulnerability, nearness and love.
Intimacy can refer to the textures of the personal and the everyday; the essence of our lives, ‘a form of commoning’ that ‘is often arduous’.
Rosa frames intimacy as a critical, yet often overlooked, political site. She argues that the personal is political and that our everyday relationships are deeply affected by broader social and economic structures.
Intimacy is essential as well as the terrain of pleasure and peak experience. Normative modes of intimacy often limit its potential, while our experiences and material conditions can make it hard to imagine, let alone desire, our lives being any other way. Imagining that things could be radically different can be a way to reject the exploitation, oppression and violence in the world, helping us reimagine ourselves as capable of rebellion. This relates to what the writer and activist adrienne maree brown calls ‘pleasure activism’: ‘the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy’.
Despite the state of the world, we are pushed, even coerced, towards wellness. The ‘self-care’ industry markets solutions to suffering based on a pro-capitalist conception of wellness. ‘Good self-care’ might include signing up to yoga and meditation apps, using skincare products and sex toys, ingesting expensive and foul substances like ‘functional mushroom tea’, or watching Netflix. But these activities are only considered healthy if they bolster rather than subtract from the time and/or energy we dedicate to work. This understanding of self-care is attached to productivity, or, as feminist activists and scholars Silvia Federici and Nicole Cox put it, to ‘preparing ourselves for work … restoring our “muscles, nerves, bones and brains” with quick snacks, quick sex, movies…’
Rosa critiques the popular, commercialized notion of self-care, arguing it individualizes systemic problems like mental illness and exhaustion, turning wellness into a personal responsibility and a commodity. She argues the wellness industry aims to make us "happy workers," not empowered ones.
Like the growing popularity of psychedelics in Silicon Valley, self-administered app therapy may in the end amount to a kind of self-development more helpful to profit growth than to emotional growth. No matter how we are feeling, ‘sanity’ under capitalism is about the willingness and ability to work – the harder, the better.
Therapy and self-care might alleviate suffering. They might also be understood as forms of adaptation to, or even collusion with, its underlying causes. ‘The well-balanced person’, wrote the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, ‘would not thereby have achieved an inner resolution of social conflicts’ because ‘His integration would be a false reconciliation with an unreconciled world.’ At worst, he conjectured, this kind of ‘false reconciliation’ could be ‘an “identification with the aggressor”, a mere character-mask of subordination’ to systems of violence, stifling solidarity and dissent.
The softness of care rejects the hard systems that propagate suffering. Beyond vapid understandings of self-care and wellness, as defined by mostly rich white people, or forms of therapy that individualise suffering, we might find liberatory possibilities in looking after. It is most often people whose identities mean they fare relatively well in the world, and those unaccustomed to the feminised labour of caring, especially white cis straight men, who dismiss this idea as not urgent or necessary – not ‘real’ politics. Those subject to more systemic trauma and violence know better. As Lorde – a Black lesbian living with a cancer diagnosis – wrote: ‘Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.’
Fighting systems – capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy – is considered more important political work than changing individual behaviours and lives. This makes sense: changing our lives alone, so far as that is even possible, won’t change the world.
Non-normative relationships are not necessarily ‘more radical’,anyway.
‘The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living’, wrote Karl Marx. ‘And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionising themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before … they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past.’
Rosa explores how capitalism promotes the idea of finding all emotional fulfillment in a single partner, often at the expense of friendships and community ties.
Fighting for a broadening of possible alternatives to the nuclear family is also about fighting alongside those who aren’t permitted into the ideology in the first place. Because, as bergman and Montgomery argue, ‘Challenging the nuclear family is not about puritanical rejection of anything that resembles it; it is about creating alternatives to its hegemony, to the dismembering of social relations.’
Increased freedom to build ‘families’ beyond the nuclear would allow more people to experience enduring group intimacy. It would also allow more people to survive.
Despite popular loyalty to the form, it is widely accepted that ‘family fucks us up’. Whether through abuse, violence, rejection, neglect or good old-fashioned emotional unavailability, most of us know that the scars family leaves mark us for life. But – though relationships inevitably involve harm – surely our closest kinship bonds should, by and large, be a source of healing. The latter may be found in transforming existing families, or by creating new ones.
At the same time, what if we extended the commitment, care and resource sharing that we primarily understand as the domain of ‘family’ to other kinds of kin: to friends, to lovers, to nonhuman species, to the land? And what if we brought to our families the same level of communication and boundaries we might try to practise with our friends or lovers? It’s the questions that matter.
The book explores how the demands of work, economic instability (such as the housing crisis), and the relentless pursuit of productivity interfere with our ability to form deep, meaningful connections. Rosa discusses how material limitations act as barriers to intimacy and highlights how some communities resist the commodification of labor and care, fostering solidarity outside traditional work structures.
The Wages for Housework campaign called for the recognition of domestic labour as work under capitalism, refuting the idea that the nuclear household exists because of women’s ‘love’ alone:
To say that we want wages for housework is to expose the fact that housework is already money for capital, that capital has made and makes money out of our cooking, smiling, fucking. At the same time, it shows that we have cooked, smiled, fucked throughout the years not because it was easier for us than for anybody else, but because we did not have any other choice.
The campaign was a political standpoint, built on class solidarity; it demanded that ‘women’s work’ be recognised as such, as part of a wider struggle to revolutionise personal, social and economic relations. ‘We are seen as nagging bitches, not workers in struggle’, wrote Federici. In this way, she argued, the fury of the ‘privatised kitchen-bedroom quarrel that all society agrees to ridicule’ must be galvanised into workplace demands; the ‘housewife’ would be an agitator for radical change.
A radical home is not a secluded private property for a select few bound by blood. Rather than being a bunker, it is a network of care; not lifelessly compliant, but the embodiment of demands. As Paul Jackson suggests, this kind of home is not even necessarily a physical space, ‘but a process to make more and more kinship’.
A radical home may be an example of what English professor Susan Fraiman calls ‘extreme domesticity’. In this understanding, the domestic is not the domain of the patriarchal private household, but something that those most marginalised by it create. The ‘extreme’ domestic has multiple meanings:
extreme as a reference to dire circumstances due to such things as economic insecurity, physical vulnerability, and/or stigmatized identity; extreme in the sense of balancing on a knife-edge, as in X-treme sports; extreme in the sense of being seen as immoderate or outlandish; extreme in the sense of gender/sexuality that is shunned as X-rated, offensive to ‘family values’ and off-limits to children; and extreme in the sense of occupying an eccentric position vis-á-vis the center, being on the outskirts of belonging, including the exilic state of being without national, marital, or other social standing.
No household will be free from difficulty and conflict; the violence of the world, and that of all our past homes, lives on inside us as we try to make home anew. In our struggles, let us do our best to make and remake ourselves and each other, at home.
Rosa argues that the fear and isolation surrounding the universal experiences- aging and death- are heightened by a system that devalues non-productive life stages.
As Mary Oliver says, we will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many…
For some people, capitalism might feel like a wily murderer, gradually sapping the life out of bodies and souls through unrelenting stress. For others, its murderousness is more immediate and brutal. The uneven death toll under capitalism plays out at all scales – including within, at and across the deadly borders of the UK. Working-class and racialised people in the UK face disproportionate threats from the climate crisis, for example.
Structural inequalities mean they are more likely to breathe air with unlawful levels of pollution and are more likely to face homelessness because of extreme weather events, due to low-quality housing.
Most people die of ‘natural causes’ – which is to say a coroner has ruled out an ‘external cause’. This verdict is, in many ways, misleading. With the conditions of our lives being so tied up with the structures and mechanisms of capitalism, can our deaths ever be ‘natural’ and free of ‘external causes’? As both the pandemic and the climate crisis demonstrate, ‘natural’ deaths can be directly linked to the global economy. And whilst people are living longer overall, sickness, healthcare, ageing, end-of-life care and death look very different depending on who you are and where you are.
Although the United Kingdom is the world’s fifth largest economy, one fifth of its population (14 million people) live in poverty, and 1.5 million of them experienced destitution in 2017 … Close to 40 per cent of children are predicted to be living in poverty by 2021. Food banks have proliferated; homelessness and rough sleeping have increased greatly; tens of thousands of poor families must live in accommodation far from their schools, jobs and community networks; life expectancy is falling for certain groups; and the legal aid system has been decimated.
Those whose health means they are unable or unwilling to work are subject to a ‘scroungers’ and ‘shirkers’ narrative – rhetoric propelled by successive governments to invoke disdain for those without paid employment among those with jobs.
Grief is not supposed to be expressed in public – except for when it must be. Whilst grieving our loved ones is not supposed to interfere significantly with our productivity, ritualised mourning for the rich and powerful is traditionally an obligation of good citizenship. Some people are mourned publicly, with state-sanctioned fanfare – especially the royal family, benefactor and profiteer of slavery and empire. The death of Queen Elizabeth II’s husband, Prince Philip, well-known to enjoy bigotry, initiated ‘Operation Forth Bridge’, which detailed the protocols for an eight-day period of national mourning. Flags were lowered to half-mast, children’s television was suspended, news presenters wore black and radio stations played sombre music.
When his wife, 96-year-old Queen Elizabeth II, died on 8 September 2022, ‘Operation London Bridge’ similarly set out the minutiae of mourning – all games were banned in Royal Parks, and the day of her state funeral, costing millions, was a national holiday, for which thousands of hospital appointments were cancelled. Public space was saturated with her image and condolences – lest the people forget the royal death – and public petitions to the government were paused. The queue of people waiting to see the monarch lying in state stretched up to ten miles. A BBC news announcement of the Queen’s ill-health declared an important statement by the prime minister regarding the cost-of-living crisis – which is leaving millions struggling to survive – ‘of course insignificant now’ due to the ‘gravity of the situation we seem to be experiencing with Her Majesty’.
The conclusion synthesizes the arguments, emphasizing that radical intimacy is a vital form of resistance in the face of current crises.
Friendship is conceived of as – and therefore often is – a shallower bond than a romantic partnership. As carla bergman and Nick Montgomery put it: ‘Under neoliberalism, friendship is a banal affair of private preferences: we hang out, we share hobbies, we make small talk … Under neoliberal friendship, we don’t have each other’s backs, and our lives aren’t tangled up together … Empire works to usher its subjects into flimsy relationships where nothing is at stake, and to infuse intimacy with violence and domination.’
As bergman and Montgomery suggest, ‘friendship as freedom … names a dangerous closeness that capitalism works to eradicate through violence, division, management, and incitements to see ourselves as isolated individuals or nuclear family units’.
Foucault considers friendship’s potential for counter-power in relation to homophobia, suggesting this hate is less about sex, and more about society’s unease with the modes of ‘affection, tenderness, friendship, fidelity, camaraderie, and companionship’.
Writer and performer Alok Vaid- Menon describes this beautifully in their poem ‘Friendship is Romance’:
“i want a world where friendship is appreciated as a form of romance.”
Caring for each other in indeterminate ways builds power from below, pushing back against oppressive forces. It makes sense that the state would look to undermine such bonds – especially when they straddle borders. ‘It is no surprise’, de Noronha notes, that ‘there is no such thing as a “friendship visa”’.
And finally as Mingus writes:
we’re going to mess up. Of that I am sure. We cannot, on the one hand have sharp analysis about how pervasive systems of oppression and violence are and then on the other hand, expect people to act like that’s not the world we exist in. Of course there are times we are going to do and say oppressive things, of course we are going to hurt each other, of course we are going to be violent, collude in violence or accept violence as normal. We must roll up our sleeves and start doing the hard work of learning how to work through conflict, pain and hurt as if our lives depended on it – because they do.
‘Intimacy’ is primal and inscrutable, vital and elusive. Like love, it is difficult to explain for good reason: something so intricately personal – spiritual – might be debased by attempts at objective definition.
Upon learning ‘intimacy’ was its subject, some people assumed this book would be about sex. Indeed, ‘to be intimate’ is often used euphemistically in this way. Intimacy is much more (and much less) than sex – though perhaps sex itself could be a helpful lens through which to understand it. Whilst intimacy in general need not include any semblance of sex, as an experience it might mirror some of the reasons people can find sex meaningful. Like sex, intimacy can allow us to access desire, pleasure, comfort, tending, tenderness, coming together and feelings of ‘being seen’.
But just as not all sex is intimate, not all intimacy is sexual. ‘Intimacy’ encompasses many kinds of relationships. It is a way of being together that might include fleeting or enduring experiences of affinity, vulnerability, nearness and love.
Intimacy can refer to the textures of the personal and the everyday; the essence of our lives, ‘a form of commoning’ that ‘is often arduous’.
Rosa frames intimacy as a critical, yet often overlooked, political site. She argues that the personal is political and that our everyday relationships are deeply affected by broader social and economic structures.
Intimacy is essential as well as the terrain of pleasure and peak experience. Normative modes of intimacy often limit its potential, while our experiences and material conditions can make it hard to imagine, let alone desire, our lives being any other way. Imagining that things could be radically different can be a way to reject the exploitation, oppression and violence in the world, helping us reimagine ourselves as capable of rebellion. This relates to what the writer and activist adrienne maree brown calls ‘pleasure activism’: ‘the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy’.
Despite the state of the world, we are pushed, even coerced, towards wellness. The ‘self-care’ industry markets solutions to suffering based on a pro-capitalist conception of wellness. ‘Good self-care’ might include signing up to yoga and meditation apps, using skincare products and sex toys, ingesting expensive and foul substances like ‘functional mushroom tea’, or watching Netflix. But these activities are only considered healthy if they bolster rather than subtract from the time and/or energy we dedicate to work. This understanding of self-care is attached to productivity, or, as feminist activists and scholars Silvia Federici and Nicole Cox put it, to ‘preparing ourselves for work … restoring our “muscles, nerves, bones and brains” with quick snacks, quick sex, movies…’
Rosa critiques the popular, commercialized notion of self-care, arguing it individualizes systemic problems like mental illness and exhaustion, turning wellness into a personal responsibility and a commodity. She argues the wellness industry aims to make us "happy workers," not empowered ones.
Like the growing popularity of psychedelics in Silicon Valley, self-administered app therapy may in the end amount to a kind of self-development more helpful to profit growth than to emotional growth. No matter how we are feeling, ‘sanity’ under capitalism is about the willingness and ability to work – the harder, the better.
Therapy and self-care might alleviate suffering. They might also be understood as forms of adaptation to, or even collusion with, its underlying causes. ‘The well-balanced person’, wrote the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, ‘would not thereby have achieved an inner resolution of social conflicts’ because ‘His integration would be a false reconciliation with an unreconciled world.’ At worst, he conjectured, this kind of ‘false reconciliation’ could be ‘an “identification with the aggressor”, a mere character-mask of subordination’ to systems of violence, stifling solidarity and dissent.
The softness of care rejects the hard systems that propagate suffering. Beyond vapid understandings of self-care and wellness, as defined by mostly rich white people, or forms of therapy that individualise suffering, we might find liberatory possibilities in looking after. It is most often people whose identities mean they fare relatively well in the world, and those unaccustomed to the feminised labour of caring, especially white cis straight men, who dismiss this idea as not urgent or necessary – not ‘real’ politics. Those subject to more systemic trauma and violence know better. As Lorde – a Black lesbian living with a cancer diagnosis – wrote: ‘Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.’
Fighting systems – capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy – is considered more important political work than changing individual behaviours and lives. This makes sense: changing our lives alone, so far as that is even possible, won’t change the world.
Non-normative relationships are not necessarily ‘more radical’,anyway.
‘The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living’, wrote Karl Marx. ‘And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionising themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before … they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past.’
Rosa explores how capitalism promotes the idea of finding all emotional fulfillment in a single partner, often at the expense of friendships and community ties.
Fighting for a broadening of possible alternatives to the nuclear family is also about fighting alongside those who aren’t permitted into the ideology in the first place. Because, as bergman and Montgomery argue, ‘Challenging the nuclear family is not about puritanical rejection of anything that resembles it; it is about creating alternatives to its hegemony, to the dismembering of social relations.’
Increased freedom to build ‘families’ beyond the nuclear would allow more people to experience enduring group intimacy. It would also allow more people to survive.
Despite popular loyalty to the form, it is widely accepted that ‘family fucks us up’. Whether through abuse, violence, rejection, neglect or good old-fashioned emotional unavailability, most of us know that the scars family leaves mark us for life. But – though relationships inevitably involve harm – surely our closest kinship bonds should, by and large, be a source of healing. The latter may be found in transforming existing families, or by creating new ones.
At the same time, what if we extended the commitment, care and resource sharing that we primarily understand as the domain of ‘family’ to other kinds of kin: to friends, to lovers, to nonhuman species, to the land? And what if we brought to our families the same level of communication and boundaries we might try to practise with our friends or lovers? It’s the questions that matter.
The book explores how the demands of work, economic instability (such as the housing crisis), and the relentless pursuit of productivity interfere with our ability to form deep, meaningful connections. Rosa discusses how material limitations act as barriers to intimacy and highlights how some communities resist the commodification of labor and care, fostering solidarity outside traditional work structures.
The Wages for Housework campaign called for the recognition of domestic labour as work under capitalism, refuting the idea that the nuclear household exists because of women’s ‘love’ alone:
To say that we want wages for housework is to expose the fact that housework is already money for capital, that capital has made and makes money out of our cooking, smiling, fucking. At the same time, it shows that we have cooked, smiled, fucked throughout the years not because it was easier for us than for anybody else, but because we did not have any other choice.
The campaign was a political standpoint, built on class solidarity; it demanded that ‘women’s work’ be recognised as such, as part of a wider struggle to revolutionise personal, social and economic relations. ‘We are seen as nagging bitches, not workers in struggle’, wrote Federici. In this way, she argued, the fury of the ‘privatised kitchen-bedroom quarrel that all society agrees to ridicule’ must be galvanised into workplace demands; the ‘housewife’ would be an agitator for radical change.
A radical home is not a secluded private property for a select few bound by blood. Rather than being a bunker, it is a network of care; not lifelessly compliant, but the embodiment of demands. As Paul Jackson suggests, this kind of home is not even necessarily a physical space, ‘but a process to make more and more kinship’.
A radical home may be an example of what English professor Susan Fraiman calls ‘extreme domesticity’. In this understanding, the domestic is not the domain of the patriarchal private household, but something that those most marginalised by it create. The ‘extreme’ domestic has multiple meanings:
extreme as a reference to dire circumstances due to such things as economic insecurity, physical vulnerability, and/or stigmatized identity; extreme in the sense of balancing on a knife-edge, as in X-treme sports; extreme in the sense of being seen as immoderate or outlandish; extreme in the sense of gender/sexuality that is shunned as X-rated, offensive to ‘family values’ and off-limits to children; and extreme in the sense of occupying an eccentric position vis-á-vis the center, being on the outskirts of belonging, including the exilic state of being without national, marital, or other social standing.
No household will be free from difficulty and conflict; the violence of the world, and that of all our past homes, lives on inside us as we try to make home anew. In our struggles, let us do our best to make and remake ourselves and each other, at home.
Rosa argues that the fear and isolation surrounding the universal experiences- aging and death- are heightened by a system that devalues non-productive life stages.
As Mary Oliver says, we will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many…
For some people, capitalism might feel like a wily murderer, gradually sapping the life out of bodies and souls through unrelenting stress. For others, its murderousness is more immediate and brutal. The uneven death toll under capitalism plays out at all scales – including within, at and across the deadly borders of the UK. Working-class and racialised people in the UK face disproportionate threats from the climate crisis, for example.
Structural inequalities mean they are more likely to breathe air with unlawful levels of pollution and are more likely to face homelessness because of extreme weather events, due to low-quality housing.
Most people die of ‘natural causes’ – which is to say a coroner has ruled out an ‘external cause’. This verdict is, in many ways, misleading. With the conditions of our lives being so tied up with the structures and mechanisms of capitalism, can our deaths ever be ‘natural’ and free of ‘external causes’? As both the pandemic and the climate crisis demonstrate, ‘natural’ deaths can be directly linked to the global economy. And whilst people are living longer overall, sickness, healthcare, ageing, end-of-life care and death look very different depending on who you are and where you are.
Although the United Kingdom is the world’s fifth largest economy, one fifth of its population (14 million people) live in poverty, and 1.5 million of them experienced destitution in 2017 … Close to 40 per cent of children are predicted to be living in poverty by 2021. Food banks have proliferated; homelessness and rough sleeping have increased greatly; tens of thousands of poor families must live in accommodation far from their schools, jobs and community networks; life expectancy is falling for certain groups; and the legal aid system has been decimated.
Those whose health means they are unable or unwilling to work are subject to a ‘scroungers’ and ‘shirkers’ narrative – rhetoric propelled by successive governments to invoke disdain for those without paid employment among those with jobs.
Grief is not supposed to be expressed in public – except for when it must be. Whilst grieving our loved ones is not supposed to interfere significantly with our productivity, ritualised mourning for the rich and powerful is traditionally an obligation of good citizenship. Some people are mourned publicly, with state-sanctioned fanfare – especially the royal family, benefactor and profiteer of slavery and empire. The death of Queen Elizabeth II’s husband, Prince Philip, well-known to enjoy bigotry, initiated ‘Operation Forth Bridge’, which detailed the protocols for an eight-day period of national mourning. Flags were lowered to half-mast, children’s television was suspended, news presenters wore black and radio stations played sombre music.
When his wife, 96-year-old Queen Elizabeth II, died on 8 September 2022, ‘Operation London Bridge’ similarly set out the minutiae of mourning – all games were banned in Royal Parks, and the day of her state funeral, costing millions, was a national holiday, for which thousands of hospital appointments were cancelled. Public space was saturated with her image and condolences – lest the people forget the royal death – and public petitions to the government were paused. The queue of people waiting to see the monarch lying in state stretched up to ten miles. A BBC news announcement of the Queen’s ill-health declared an important statement by the prime minister regarding the cost-of-living crisis – which is leaving millions struggling to survive – ‘of course insignificant now’ due to the ‘gravity of the situation we seem to be experiencing with Her Majesty’.
The conclusion synthesizes the arguments, emphasizing that radical intimacy is a vital form of resistance in the face of current crises.
Friendship is conceived of as – and therefore often is – a shallower bond than a romantic partnership. As carla bergman and Nick Montgomery put it: ‘Under neoliberalism, friendship is a banal affair of private preferences: we hang out, we share hobbies, we make small talk … Under neoliberal friendship, we don’t have each other’s backs, and our lives aren’t tangled up together … Empire works to usher its subjects into flimsy relationships where nothing is at stake, and to infuse intimacy with violence and domination.’
As bergman and Montgomery suggest, ‘friendship as freedom … names a dangerous closeness that capitalism works to eradicate through violence, division, management, and incitements to see ourselves as isolated individuals or nuclear family units’.
Foucault considers friendship’s potential for counter-power in relation to homophobia, suggesting this hate is less about sex, and more about society’s unease with the modes of ‘affection, tenderness, friendship, fidelity, camaraderie, and companionship’.
Writer and performer Alok Vaid- Menon describes this beautifully in their poem ‘Friendship is Romance’:
“i want a world where friendship is appreciated as a form of romance.”
Caring for each other in indeterminate ways builds power from below, pushing back against oppressive forces. It makes sense that the state would look to undermine such bonds – especially when they straddle borders. ‘It is no surprise’, de Noronha notes, that ‘there is no such thing as a “friendship visa”’.
And finally as Mingus writes:
we’re going to mess up. Of that I am sure. We cannot, on the one hand have sharp analysis about how pervasive systems of oppression and violence are and then on the other hand, expect people to act like that’s not the world we exist in. Of course there are times we are going to do and say oppressive things, of course we are going to hurt each other, of course we are going to be violent, collude in violence or accept violence as normal. We must roll up our sleeves and start doing the hard work of learning how to work through conflict, pain and hurt as if our lives depended on it – because they do.
May 21, 2023
One of the most interesting, well-researched and well-written books I have read in a while. Rosa offers an extensive and thought-provoking analysis of how capitalism interferes with and damages our lives in ways that are not always necessarily obvious. Strong emphasis is placed on the value of community building and care outside of just romantic relationships and the nuclear family, which can work as a radical counter-movement against oppressive, violent regimes aiming to control us and turn relationships into capital.
A truly eye-opening work that will be enjoyed by feminists of all 'knowledge levels', drawing on foundational work of (socialist) feminists such as Federici or hooks. I would recommend this book to everyone! Get it girls!
A truly eye-opening work that will be enjoyed by feminists of all 'knowledge levels', drawing on foundational work of (socialist) feminists such as Federici or hooks. I would recommend this book to everyone! Get it girls!
April 8, 2024
4.5- like Friedrich Engels if he slayed
June 29, 2024
Early in the book, the author quotes another source: "Saying that capitalism (or colonialism or racism) is the problem does not help me get up in the morning"(pg 22).
I was excited when I read this, as I went into this book hoping for some sort of roadmap for how create radical intimacy in difficult systems - ways to get up in the morning. Instead, I got more of a capitalism-is-bad 101. There's a place for these books, but I think we also need books that push boundaries of imagination of what intimacy and love can look like. This book didn't quite reach that goal for me.
For a book on intimacy, this book lacks any sort of authorial voice and feels detached from its subject. Most of the things that resonated with me were just descriptions of other sources, not new points the author brought forward. It felt like a collection of sources that described the work of others rather than meaningfully adding to it. The book reads like a literature review, but the first rule of a good literature reviews is that there needs to be a substantive critique of the subject.
There was plenty of critique about systems, but not so much critique of the ideas being presented themselves - without this, any analysis that was presented felt very shallow.
I think the conclusion helped to pull some ideas together but I wish I didn't have to wait until the last few pages for that.
I was excited when I read this, as I went into this book hoping for some sort of roadmap for how create radical intimacy in difficult systems - ways to get up in the morning. Instead, I got more of a capitalism-is-bad 101. There's a place for these books, but I think we also need books that push boundaries of imagination of what intimacy and love can look like. This book didn't quite reach that goal for me.
For a book on intimacy, this book lacks any sort of authorial voice and feels detached from its subject. Most of the things that resonated with me were just descriptions of other sources, not new points the author brought forward. It felt like a collection of sources that described the work of others rather than meaningfully adding to it. The book reads like a literature review, but the first rule of a good literature reviews is that there needs to be a substantive critique of the subject.
There was plenty of critique about systems, but not so much critique of the ideas being presented themselves - without this, any analysis that was presented felt very shallow.
I think the conclusion helped to pull some ideas together but I wish I didn't have to wait until the last few pages for that.
April 2, 2023
the realm of intimacies as a liberation site against the political and economic global world has always fascinated me. in this book, sophie k rosa explores how to create an equal and just world for all through the creation of radical forms of relationships. this book is about holding each other close to our hearts and holding each other accountable. it’s about romantic and sexual relationships, family bonds, friendships and self love. a must read for all my radical besties our there <3
September 5, 2025
Dla mnie nic specjalnie odkrywczego 🤷♀️ to może byc spoko wstępniak dla osób, które w ogóle nie rozkminiały tego jak kapitalizm i patriarchat stworzyły jeden (na wielu poziomach opresyjny) model miłości/związku/rodziny, ale ja te rozkminy mam w dużej mierze za sobą. Myślałam, że książka te rozkminy jakoś pogłębi, ale to raczej przegląd różnych kwestii i tego, jak się o nich pisało i pisze niż faktycznie revolutionary deep dive, który wywraca myślenie o świecie do góry nogami. Może wielu osobom wywróci, ale no niestety nie mi
Read
January 8, 2025De overheid wil dat je gaat trouwen en veertig uur werken zodat je geen tijd hebt om een revolutie te beginnen met je friends en lovers 😈
(Dit was goed, maar ik miste tussen alle (voor mij grotendeels wel bekende) systeemkritiek een beetje de verbeelding van wat radicale intimiteit kan zijn. Mijn favoriete stukje was een passage uit de ‘The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions’ dus I guess dat ik die nu ga lezen!!!)
(Dit was goed, maar ik miste tussen alle (voor mij grotendeels wel bekende) systeemkritiek een beetje de verbeelding van wat radicale intimiteit kan zijn. Mijn favoriete stukje was een passage uit de ‘The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions’ dus I guess dat ik die nu ga lezen!!!)
June 26, 2023
agree with the premise but the analysis is shallow
May 29, 2025
4,5 ⭐️
a nice read to remind myself of how my socialisation towards/within/about the nuclear family/romance/partnership is intertwined and shaped by capitalist logics. as i agree with the premise that the state is violent and extends itself through the institution of the family i think i would have appreciated more nuance on why the family CAN also provide shelter and care and community. Especially when people need the safety of the family because of unequal legal treatment/policing/etc etc etc - at times it felt quite eurocentric as the idea of the nuclear family feels a bit white and western ?
nothing too new, but i think a nice summary of different schools of thought about how we understand intimacy, love, care and partnership. it speaks about race and class, the idea of house and home, sickness and health, death and grief - a societal critique of it all.
last chapter low-key made me tear up because I feel so intimate and close with my friends and it made me feel so cared for and loved whilst knowing how much labor goes into especially living in a system that makes care and love a commodity
mwahhh kisses
a nice read to remind myself of how my socialisation towards/within/about the nuclear family/romance/partnership is intertwined and shaped by capitalist logics. as i agree with the premise that the state is violent and extends itself through the institution of the family i think i would have appreciated more nuance on why the family CAN also provide shelter and care and community. Especially when people need the safety of the family because of unequal legal treatment/policing/etc etc etc - at times it felt quite eurocentric as the idea of the nuclear family feels a bit white and western ?
nothing too new, but i think a nice summary of different schools of thought about how we understand intimacy, love, care and partnership. it speaks about race and class, the idea of house and home, sickness and health, death and grief - a societal critique of it all.
last chapter low-key made me tear up because I feel so intimate and close with my friends and it made me feel so cared for and loved whilst knowing how much labor goes into especially living in a system that makes care and love a commodity
mwahhh kisses
February 6, 2024
4.5! Very interesting book about the ways capitalism has influenced our relationships/marriage, friendships, ideas of family, housing, and death. This book connected a lot of social issues together in ways I hadn’t thought of. I highlighted a lot of good quotes, and enjoyed the overall message
May 23, 2024
Read the Left Book Club edition. Interesting piece which seems to be written in the emerging 'salvage' current (works which salvage lessons and experiences of second-half 20th century progressive social struggle). In this case what is being revisited is the interest in moving beyond the confinement of human intimacy to the bourgeois nuclear family and liberating it to a position where if can be experienced in wider communal contexts.
Rosa opens up the argument with a lament about the worsening state of mental health in contemporary life and the growing role of a dubious 'happiness' industry in providing sticking plaster care. And that is only the soft focus end of the business. For those who can't afford an app that links them to an online therapist there is the Mental Health Act, which empowers the police to enter homes and restrain, arrest and detain anyone going through an episode of distress. The Anti-psychiatry movement that flourished in the 60s and 70s had seen the way the wind was blowing and offered an alternative explanation for poor mental health, which was seen as having its roots in the emotional repression of the nuclear family. 'Wellness' - meaning the right to be well (?) - was seen as a common good which had to be struggled for collectively.
From this point the book moves on to look at the ideology of romantic love between, ideally, a man and a women, which establishes the structure in which babies can be born and children raised. More might have been said about the his history of romantic love and how seldom it has appeared across the generations as a practical form of living life. Its heyday in countries like the UK, from where Rosa draws most of her examples, was in the 1950s and probably didn't last much longer than this brief period of years. Itself the product of a generation of men whose normal lives had been interrupted by having to go off and fight in wars and women who had lived through the years of deprivation and terror bombing, when the hope that all might be redeemed by collapsing into the arms of the pre-destined 'right one'. By the 1960s many of these marriages were coasting towards acrimonious separation or sustained with the aid of alcohol or Valium.
Rosa surveys how things stand with the marriage market as it currently exists, replete with commercial dating apps and a dream of finding Mr/Ms Right fuelled by Love Island-type reality shows. When the relationships established by these means goes to bust the wreckage is picked over in the law courts to establish whether blame can be attributed to either party, using the ancient concepts of betrayal and adultery to mete out the appropriate forms of punishment. Meanwhile society moves further and further away from any concept of a mutually sustaining relationship with facilitates rather than impedes the capacity to live out the hope of freedom.
Then onto the children who are raised within the constraints of the nuclear family, or whatever remains after it has broken down. The evidence that children are more likely to flourish in communal households with adults other than the biological parents on hand to provide attention and care is abundant but this presumes types of housing, with multiple rooms and large shared spaces for dining and recreation that few of us can afford. The advantage of these extended relationships is acknowledged in the cliche about it 'taking a village' to raise a child but less is said about the work of the past century to whittle down communal intimacy and reduce everything to the binary ideal of a man and woman as care providers. The practices of aboriginal people as the providers of these enriching experiences is simultaneously exoticised and marginalised in industrialised societies, with the communities that withhold these traditions deprived of their lands and resources that enable them to be lived out.
A final chapter precedes the books conclusion which delves in the way overdeveloped countries deal with advanced age and the inevitability of dying. Society has used religion to soften the hard facts of our personal extinction but to many these seems like evasion - hiding behind the claim for a life after death - rather than truth-telling. The book argues that even the finality of life can be faced up to by facing it as collective experience, in which the dying person is accompanied through the final stages by others with whom they have shared parts of the whole of their lives, with all the appropriate forms of care, including ritual, which might bring the subject to the final end.
In keeping with do many books which urge radical rethinks of social practices, the book calls for 'abolition' of the oppressive feature being considered - in this case, the family itself. It acknowledges the likely reaction to this as a slogan, with resistance from those for whom family life in its present form is experienced as sustaining, and in any event a better option than the alternative, which is likely to be loneliness and isolation and loss of opportunities for sexual relations and the affections gleaned from have a partner and raising children. Insisting on abolition in the face of these moods seems overly purist and the argument can be advanced equally well by calling for the transformation of the family by embedding it within a communal setting. But the book's central points, that intimacy is critical for human happiness and would be more rewarding if experienced in more extensive networks of care and affection, remains solid and convincing.
Rosa opens up the argument with a lament about the worsening state of mental health in contemporary life and the growing role of a dubious 'happiness' industry in providing sticking plaster care. And that is only the soft focus end of the business. For those who can't afford an app that links them to an online therapist there is the Mental Health Act, which empowers the police to enter homes and restrain, arrest and detain anyone going through an episode of distress. The Anti-psychiatry movement that flourished in the 60s and 70s had seen the way the wind was blowing and offered an alternative explanation for poor mental health, which was seen as having its roots in the emotional repression of the nuclear family. 'Wellness' - meaning the right to be well (?) - was seen as a common good which had to be struggled for collectively.
From this point the book moves on to look at the ideology of romantic love between, ideally, a man and a women, which establishes the structure in which babies can be born and children raised. More might have been said about the his history of romantic love and how seldom it has appeared across the generations as a practical form of living life. Its heyday in countries like the UK, from where Rosa draws most of her examples, was in the 1950s and probably didn't last much longer than this brief period of years. Itself the product of a generation of men whose normal lives had been interrupted by having to go off and fight in wars and women who had lived through the years of deprivation and terror bombing, when the hope that all might be redeemed by collapsing into the arms of the pre-destined 'right one'. By the 1960s many of these marriages were coasting towards acrimonious separation or sustained with the aid of alcohol or Valium.
Rosa surveys how things stand with the marriage market as it currently exists, replete with commercial dating apps and a dream of finding Mr/Ms Right fuelled by Love Island-type reality shows. When the relationships established by these means goes to bust the wreckage is picked over in the law courts to establish whether blame can be attributed to either party, using the ancient concepts of betrayal and adultery to mete out the appropriate forms of punishment. Meanwhile society moves further and further away from any concept of a mutually sustaining relationship with facilitates rather than impedes the capacity to live out the hope of freedom.
Then onto the children who are raised within the constraints of the nuclear family, or whatever remains after it has broken down. The evidence that children are more likely to flourish in communal households with adults other than the biological parents on hand to provide attention and care is abundant but this presumes types of housing, with multiple rooms and large shared spaces for dining and recreation that few of us can afford. The advantage of these extended relationships is acknowledged in the cliche about it 'taking a village' to raise a child but less is said about the work of the past century to whittle down communal intimacy and reduce everything to the binary ideal of a man and woman as care providers. The practices of aboriginal people as the providers of these enriching experiences is simultaneously exoticised and marginalised in industrialised societies, with the communities that withhold these traditions deprived of their lands and resources that enable them to be lived out.
A final chapter precedes the books conclusion which delves in the way overdeveloped countries deal with advanced age and the inevitability of dying. Society has used religion to soften the hard facts of our personal extinction but to many these seems like evasion - hiding behind the claim for a life after death - rather than truth-telling. The book argues that even the finality of life can be faced up to by facing it as collective experience, in which the dying person is accompanied through the final stages by others with whom they have shared parts of the whole of their lives, with all the appropriate forms of care, including ritual, which might bring the subject to the final end.
In keeping with do many books which urge radical rethinks of social practices, the book calls for 'abolition' of the oppressive feature being considered - in this case, the family itself. It acknowledges the likely reaction to this as a slogan, with resistance from those for whom family life in its present form is experienced as sustaining, and in any event a better option than the alternative, which is likely to be loneliness and isolation and loss of opportunities for sexual relations and the affections gleaned from have a partner and raising children. Insisting on abolition in the face of these moods seems overly purist and the argument can be advanced equally well by calling for the transformation of the family by embedding it within a communal setting. But the book's central points, that intimacy is critical for human happiness and would be more rewarding if experienced in more extensive networks of care and affection, remains solid and convincing.
April 3, 2025
I have a long review but only BC this book super resonated with me and I think it is An essential read! This book really encourages you to challenge literally all the social scripts we've been taught from birth in a way that is non judgemental of how you feel at the end (at least imo!). I feel like as I've gotten older I've really begun to feel uncomfortable with the idea of nuclear families/ prioritisation of relationships etc so in a way I found it really reassuring (although infuriating) to discover how influential the government has been in the way we have come to understand and build relationships and I think it is super important to have this social context of the relationships we are taught to expect from our lives- even though such expectations are hard to let go of! and it's cool to have the language to now explain that!
Although the book really confronts the reality in which the western/ capatilistic world lives, it makes alternative ways of living feel genuine and aspirational rather than idealistic which made me feel super hopeful!!
Whilst reading this, I kept thinking how lucky I am to live where I live and have the relationships that I do. This really stuck out to me in the final chapter, most notably when she says 'to transform the world, we're going to need strong links between us' like hell yeah babes!! Guys can U read this so we can continue to build on our radical friendships with a focus on communal care and kinship so we can forever create beautiful lives together
Although the book really confronts the reality in which the western/ capatilistic world lives, it makes alternative ways of living feel genuine and aspirational rather than idealistic which made me feel super hopeful!!
Whilst reading this, I kept thinking how lucky I am to live where I live and have the relationships that I do. This really stuck out to me in the final chapter, most notably when she says 'to transform the world, we're going to need strong links between us' like hell yeah babes!! Guys can U read this so we can continue to build on our radical friendships with a focus on communal care and kinship so we can forever create beautiful lives together
November 6, 2023
this one was a long time coming. i read it in chunks because it’s definitely got a lot of theory and big concepts to digest but i was constantly impressed and inspired by the authors ability to weave the sound bites of pop culture into describing those theories. made it a ton more accessible. some of my favorite sections were around communal grief, collective parenting, and romantic friendships 🫶🏻
January 27, 2025
This was amazing wow
September 2, 2023
Most of the book's contents I was familar with, having done a relevant masters programme. On this point, I think it does well to provide concise summaries of several feminist, queer, Black, and indigenous theoretical works or practical grassroot movements/projects. Where it strikes well is intertwining the historical practical applications of intimacy to the present food for thought(s), that is, "how can we build friendships that hold and sustain us as we colaborate for better futures?"
In this, Rosa discusses a few (non-exhaustive) areas such as death, healthcare, family, and work. I found myself drawn more towards the discussions of death (and caring), as it (unsurprisingly) isn't something I've considered in a collective sense. Personally what would've elevated this discussion more is bringing in Freud's Death Drive theory, particularly Edelman's use of it in relation to the child, as I noticed children, The Child, adult centrism sentiments, etc weren't really brought in, bar when considering the concept of 'youth'.
My overall impression is, if I consider what this book sets out to do, I think it's a fantastic primer for those who haven't read much on intimacy within the parameters of capitalism, feminist and queer theory, or those who maybe have read bits, but wanting to give consideration to the praxis. Which, the book finishes with a recommended reading list, as well as several podcasts to listen to.
In this, Rosa discusses a few (non-exhaustive) areas such as death, healthcare, family, and work. I found myself drawn more towards the discussions of death (and caring), as it (unsurprisingly) isn't something I've considered in a collective sense. Personally what would've elevated this discussion more is bringing in Freud's Death Drive theory, particularly Edelman's use of it in relation to the child, as I noticed children, The Child, adult centrism sentiments, etc weren't really brought in, bar when considering the concept of 'youth'.
My overall impression is, if I consider what this book sets out to do, I think it's a fantastic primer for those who haven't read much on intimacy within the parameters of capitalism, feminist and queer theory, or those who maybe have read bits, but wanting to give consideration to the praxis. Which, the book finishes with a recommended reading list, as well as several podcasts to listen to.
October 15, 2023
Important premise, thoroughly researched and backed up. Challenges paradigms, practices and social norms that aren't questioned nearly enough, and presents examples of how things could be different.
It was a little disjointed for me, and more on the theoretical/academic side of writing - which is valid of course, but I'd love to see a bit more development of persuasive writing in there too. 3 stars because though it didn't flow for me, it's worth the read.
It was a little disjointed for me, and more on the theoretical/academic side of writing - which is valid of course, but I'd love to see a bit more development of persuasive writing in there too. 3 stars because though it didn't flow for me, it's worth the read.
January 23, 2024
an essential read!! one that certainly has the power to give you a whole new/deeper outlook towards a myriad of different topics!! ‘Radical Intimacy’ is an extremely powerful text and an amazing source to rely upon when it comes to navigating your thoughts & emotions in this difficult world!!
not only does the book put out a completely compelling narrative, it backs up every single point made with an incredible amount of research that completely validates the text! i never found myself confused or questioning the text, everything was very accessible and well-written!! also just on a personal note, i found it so much easier to fully engage with certain topics due to the modern examples & contexts it uses!
although this book is a damning look on how capitalism has continually & profusely made everything worse, the hope this book instills in the reader is incredibly important! a call to action & a call to love and care remarkably intwined together!
not only does the book put out a completely compelling narrative, it backs up every single point made with an incredible amount of research that completely validates the text! i never found myself confused or questioning the text, everything was very accessible and well-written!! also just on a personal note, i found it so much easier to fully engage with certain topics due to the modern examples & contexts it uses!
although this book is a damning look on how capitalism has continually & profusely made everything worse, the hope this book instills in the reader is incredibly important! a call to action & a call to love and care remarkably intwined together!
September 18, 2023
Loved it
September 14, 2025
Gillade starkt! Boken är uppdelad i self-care, romantiska relationer och sex, familjen, hemmet, döden och vänskap. Till detta kommer en väldigt tydligt förklarande inledning och en bra sammanfattande och hoppingivande avslutning, allt på ca 180 sidor. Det är typ helt sjuk att så mycket ryms i denna lilla bok, Rosa plockar från flera olika håll och får in olika perspektiv och vinklar på de olika ämnena. För mig var mycket upprepning från andra böcker, saker jag tagit del av online, konversationer jag själv haft med folk osv men det var ändå en väldigt bra sammanfattning och typ en syntes till de feministiska idéer vi verkligen behöver lära oss för att bygga ett bättre samhälle. Har inte läst så mycket familje-abolitionism innan så det var intressant och jag vill verkligen läsa mer!! Har ibland svårt att relatera till vissa linjer i feminism (pga ickebinär, lesbisk och uppvuxen i ett mer jämställt land än UK) men tycker att Rosa har tagit hur sexistiska strukturer i samhället också påverkar och ger uttryck i queera relationer i större beaktning än typ bell hooks (vilket också kanske är rimligt eftersom queer-teori typ uppstått sen 80-talet lol) så det va ju nice. Jag vet att folk inte brukar gilla referenser till covid-19 i böcker men här tycker jag verkligen att det tillförde! Att läsa om hur samhället i UK ändrades pga pandemin och de hårda reglerna där och vad de betydde för relationer och för samhällets och regimens syn på relationer och vardagliga problem i samhället (ex. hemlöshet, trångboddhet, ekonomi) gjorde att det blev väldigt tydliga exempel på hur vi kulturellt skapar och kommer fram till vilka normer som är rätt, vad som är tillåtet och "gott", men också att det går att förhandla, tänka om och agera annorlunda. Ofta gjordes det inte så bra, men det gjordes och det hade kunnat göras annorlunda. Hur vi tänker kring sociala relationer och hur vardagen ska se ut är ofta val och vi kan välja att tänka och organisera oss annorlunda. Härligt att läsa feministisk litteratur. Står fast vid att det är i feminismen mer än i någon annan rörelse som vi kan hitta visioner om hur världen borde se ut.
Mitt enda minus är typ att jag önskar att boken hade gått djupare in i många av de spår som läggs fram, men då hade den heller inte varit lika enkel att plocka upp och ta sig igenom. Tack och lov fanns bok- och podd-tips i slutet. Och att författaren hade haft lite fler egna takes i stället för att referera mkt till andra tänkare.
Mitt enda minus är typ att jag önskar att boken hade gått djupare in i många av de spår som läggs fram, men då hade den heller inte varit lika enkel att plocka upp och ta sig igenom. Tack och lov fanns bok- och podd-tips i slutet. Och att författaren hade haft lite fler egna takes i stället för att referera mkt till andra tänkare.
December 30, 2024
nothing new if you are a little familiar with the topic (and every attempt to describe human psychology is solely based on quoting psychoanalysts and criticizing the concept of "evidence-based"). very diverse topics and interesting takes on parenting and raising children, though.
“i want a world where friendship is appreciated as a form of romance. i want a world where when people ask if we are seeing anyone we can list the names of all of our best friends and no one will bat an eyelid. i want monuments and holidays and certificates and ceremonies to commemorate friendship.”
“i want a world where friendship is appreciated as a form of romance. i want a world where when people ask if we are seeing anyone we can list the names of all of our best friends and no one will bat an eyelid. i want monuments and holidays and certificates and ceremonies to commemorate friendship.”
February 17, 2025
What a beautiful book on the place of disruptive intimacy and how imaging new kinds of love and kinship bonds can be a potent way of fighting back against neoliberal systems. Direct descendent of “All about Love” by bell hooks. UK focused; great anecdotes; I teared up. Book has been a companion for the past year. Treasure your friends and recongize love’s power!!!
January 25, 2024
Incredibly well-researched, woven with contemporary references, eloquently argued - definitely an essential read
March 3, 2025
listened to this on audiobook really quickly, so probably missed some details :( but overall i enjoyed rosa’s analyses of the ways in which patriarchy, capital, and heteronormativity shape our personal / intimate relationships.
favorite discussions were around romantic vs. platonic relationships under neoliberal capitalism (i.e. how and WHY friendships are demoted in favor of romantic relationships to serve patriarchy and capital, friendship as a threat to the state’s goals of nation-building and capital, etc. etc. etc.) and how we can expand and reimagine the spectrums / possibilities of both friendship and romance.
favorite discussions were around romantic vs. platonic relationships under neoliberal capitalism (i.e. how and WHY friendships are demoted in favor of romantic relationships to serve patriarchy and capital, friendship as a threat to the state’s goals of nation-building and capital, etc. etc. etc.) and how we can expand and reimagine the spectrums / possibilities of both friendship and romance.
September 20, 2023
I decided to read this after scanning the blurb and thinking "Huh, this reminds me of 'all about love' by bell hooks. I love that book!" 'all about love' is referenced a lot in Radical Intimacy, so I'm not surprised I came to that conclusion at first glance, but reading Radical Intimacy didn't inspire me with hope or make me question the fundamental concept of love, let alone to the extent that 'all about love' did. It was mostly a bummer.
I didn't find the writing style particularly easy to engage with. Some of the anecdotes were nice and really grounded the ideas in what is otherwise an incredibly theory-heavy read. I especially enjoyed the passage where Sophie and her friend dressed up as rich people to spy on Ballymore housing developers, but mostly I felt myself pushing towards the end of the book because it was fairly short and I couldn't justify giving up when I was already halfway done.
The standout stuff for me was the criticism of psychiatry, the pathologization of trauma, and the way that mental illness is so racialised in the UK. I'd probably recommend these sections to others even though I didn't vibe with most of the rest of the book because it was really cohesive and the conclusions that were drawn were presented so well.
One weird thing that came back to me repeatedly was how the "Wages for Housework" campaign kept being mentioned, but without the criticism that inviting capitalism into yet another area of our domestic lives only opens us up to further exploitation. In a book which pretty much constantly discusses how capitalism infiltrates our lives and degrades it, not mentioning this incredibly relevant criticism felt like a bizarre omission - especially since bell hooks herself made this point.
Anyway, if you finish reading Radical Intimacy and think you'd like something else on the subject, read 'all about love' by bell hooks.
If you read the first few pages of Radical Intimacy and think "This isn't for me", I'd also recommend that you read "all about love" by bell hooks.
I didn't find the writing style particularly easy to engage with. Some of the anecdotes were nice and really grounded the ideas in what is otherwise an incredibly theory-heavy read. I especially enjoyed the passage where Sophie and her friend dressed up as rich people to spy on Ballymore housing developers, but mostly I felt myself pushing towards the end of the book because it was fairly short and I couldn't justify giving up when I was already halfway done.
The standout stuff for me was the criticism of psychiatry, the pathologization of trauma, and the way that mental illness is so racialised in the UK. I'd probably recommend these sections to others even though I didn't vibe with most of the rest of the book because it was really cohesive and the conclusions that were drawn were presented so well.
One weird thing that came back to me repeatedly was how the "Wages for Housework" campaign kept being mentioned, but without the criticism that inviting capitalism into yet another area of our domestic lives only opens us up to further exploitation. In a book which pretty much constantly discusses how capitalism infiltrates our lives and degrades it, not mentioning this incredibly relevant criticism felt like a bizarre omission - especially since bell hooks herself made this point.
Anyway, if you finish reading Radical Intimacy and think you'd like something else on the subject, read 'all about love' by bell hooks.
If you read the first few pages of Radical Intimacy and think "This isn't for me", I'd also recommend that you read "all about love" by bell hooks.
April 10, 2024
a superficial journey of citations of other authors and thinkers that never engages seriously with any text it excerpts to complicate or develop its own ideas, frustratingly shallow and very impersonally written for a book with "intimacy" in the title - an idea not particularly central to most of what the book actually discusses, or if there is a case for this it does not make it. any moment where the book becomes at all specific or personal in its prose is a breath of fresh air despite most of these tangents don't particularly enrich the contention of the book. maybe if i weren't already familiar with most of the texts and thinkers it cites and on board with all of the ideas it would have hit differently
December 19, 2024
really enjoyed this but it is definitely more of an overview/starting place in terms of the research and analysis. some parts were repetitive but i think the scope and structure was very easy to digest and understand.
May 28, 2024
Veryy ambitious in scope. Loved the parts about radical models of parenting / health care.
September 27, 2024
all of my favorite books from 2024 have been pleasant and unexpected surprises. also, i have to confess that i chose this book because it had a nice cover, proving that you should always judge by appearances. (i didnt even read the abstract lol.) another thing this book indirectly taught me is that youre probably going to vibe with a book right away. after reading two somewhat politically challenging and personally frustrating books in a row, it was nice to start listening to an audiobook that i completely agreed within its entirety. life is too short to read shit you hate.
my only very minor criticism isnt really a criticism at all but perhaps an observation with regards to who might find this most useful. ive read many of the authors sophie k. rosa cited and she did an absolutely masterful job in bringing together multiple works in presenting her thesis. it read more as an advanced beginner's introduction to various marxist feminist topics such as wages for housework, family abolition, death care, etc. however, there is a dearth of compelling, succinct, and theoretically sound texts out there that also approach such a wide array of issues. i think radical intimacy could easily become part of feminist canon. highly recommend.
my only very minor criticism isnt really a criticism at all but perhaps an observation with regards to who might find this most useful. ive read many of the authors sophie k. rosa cited and she did an absolutely masterful job in bringing together multiple works in presenting her thesis. it read more as an advanced beginner's introduction to various marxist feminist topics such as wages for housework, family abolition, death care, etc. however, there is a dearth of compelling, succinct, and theoretically sound texts out there that also approach such a wide array of issues. i think radical intimacy could easily become part of feminist canon. highly recommend.
August 18, 2024
This just wasn’t very organized or memorable, which is unfortunate. I had high hopes for this book, which I see as one attempt to continue my reading era about a topic (care networks/etc.) that is one of the central themes impacting my life (more on that in my review of Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro.) I did enjoy Sophie K. Rosa’s framework for radical intimacy—in this context, the phrase is about getting to the root of why we struggle with intimacy under our current society. By deconstructing the state's restrictions on how we practice intimacy, and getting intimate in ways that aren't just useful the state/production, there is the ability to care for each other in ways that truly meet our needs. Rosa’s book attempts to showcase how radical intimacy can be practiced as a form of activism that impacts several arenas of life, here organized into a few brief chapters: self-care, romantic love and sex, family, home, death, and friendship.
The self-care section is one of the stronger chapters
I think it was smart to start the book here, because it’s where Rosa’s points about “getting to the root” of our societal intimacy problems makes the most sense. She focuses on how in our current societal relations, happiness is often used to justify oppression, which means that the wellness industrial complex and its promotion of self-care is often about trying to make us happy workers, but not empowered ones. I really enjoyed Rosa’s reflections about how the self-care industry is “coercing us towards wellness” so we can get back to work. Inherent in her critique is an acknowledgment that work and the world are what are making us mentally ill in the first place!! One of the most useful points in this chapter (and the book overall TBH) is when Rosa illustrates how people who are institutionalized are often being punished because they are not coerced into this structure of wellness and self-care. Rosa briefly references some of the care models and alternative safety plans created by these “psych survivors”, and I really want to learn more about this in the future!
Some of this, you can skip!!
The chapter on romantic love and sex includes all the talking points you’d find in any modern book about ENM or feminism, along with several of the core arguments from Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion. My main annoyance with the chapters about romantic love and sex, family, home, and even friendship was that I didn’t feel like Rosa leaned into the most interesting parts of the content—the experiments in radical intimacy that she’d clearly researched. Rosa clearly identifies how these experiments—including squats, communes, and encampments—are important sites of radical intimacy and caring for fellow oppressed people. She posits that they are examples of “doing home differently” by creating radical households that take consent and decommodification seriously. At the same time, I wanted more than just a preview into these models!! Maybe that’s a different book that I need to read, but still, it felt like it was the most interesting part of this book, but something that was mostly glossed over.
The end is all over the place
The chapters on death and friendship just felt super hasty and disorganized. I truly got where the author was going at the start (“Death is certain for us all, but who dies, when and how, in what conditions and with what care, is a question of politics”), but I just felt like we didn’t fully get the exploration of alternate models for intimacy with dying people and our friends that I was looking for. Since the passing of both of my grandparents earlier this year, I’ve realized that I no longer regularly have any older adults who I see frequently. Recently, I’ve become curious how people connect with older and/or disabled adults outside of familial systems, and potentially help to meet their needs for care and even companionship. Unfortunately, Rosa’s work really doesn’t focus on any “experiments in radical intimacy” that show possibilities for that—it moreso talks about the failure of European culture to embrace death and the dying.
I found a similar lack of rigor in her examples about how capitalism drives our societal lack of access to friendship. She begins by talking about how the prison industrial complex seeks to penalize gang members and other forms of friendship/kinship that challenge the state. Unfortunately, the argument is so hastily discussed that her points barely cohered in my mind before I felt like she was onto another example. I didn’t disagree with many of her points throughout the book, but I just wished she maybe drilled down into a few examples with more attention, instead of trying to “cast a wide net” about all the potential topics that related to a chapter. I felt like the lasting impact of this “wide net” approach is that very few items she discussed were given enough space and exploration to truly be memorable a few weeks out from reading.
Final thoughts
Care networks are an important topic, and Radical Intimacy by Sophie K. Rosa is yet another book that will keep me thinking about this issue—I appreciate that, if nothing else. Many of the experiments of radical intimacy that Rosa briefly profiles could be worth exploring more closely, and I was really sad she didn’t take the chance to study them in more depth through this book. This is, potentially, one argument for reading a physical copy of this book. It would probably be easier to mark down various subjects for later research, something that I found to be difficult in the audiobook format (especially while driving or experiencing motion sickness on the plane.)
Let’s hope that in a few months, I will be able to update this review with a more memorable and well-structured book on this same topic. Until then, I’d give like a half-recommendation for this one!
The self-care section is one of the stronger chapters
I think it was smart to start the book here, because it’s where Rosa’s points about “getting to the root” of our societal intimacy problems makes the most sense. She focuses on how in our current societal relations, happiness is often used to justify oppression, which means that the wellness industrial complex and its promotion of self-care is often about trying to make us happy workers, but not empowered ones. I really enjoyed Rosa’s reflections about how the self-care industry is “coercing us towards wellness” so we can get back to work. Inherent in her critique is an acknowledgment that work and the world are what are making us mentally ill in the first place!! One of the most useful points in this chapter (and the book overall TBH) is when Rosa illustrates how people who are institutionalized are often being punished because they are not coerced into this structure of wellness and self-care. Rosa briefly references some of the care models and alternative safety plans created by these “psych survivors”, and I really want to learn more about this in the future!
Some of this, you can skip!!
The chapter on romantic love and sex includes all the talking points you’d find in any modern book about ENM or feminism, along with several of the core arguments from Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion. My main annoyance with the chapters about romantic love and sex, family, home, and even friendship was that I didn’t feel like Rosa leaned into the most interesting parts of the content—the experiments in radical intimacy that she’d clearly researched. Rosa clearly identifies how these experiments—including squats, communes, and encampments—are important sites of radical intimacy and caring for fellow oppressed people. She posits that they are examples of “doing home differently” by creating radical households that take consent and decommodification seriously. At the same time, I wanted more than just a preview into these models!! Maybe that’s a different book that I need to read, but still, it felt like it was the most interesting part of this book, but something that was mostly glossed over.
The end is all over the place
The chapters on death and friendship just felt super hasty and disorganized. I truly got where the author was going at the start (“Death is certain for us all, but who dies, when and how, in what conditions and with what care, is a question of politics”), but I just felt like we didn’t fully get the exploration of alternate models for intimacy with dying people and our friends that I was looking for. Since the passing of both of my grandparents earlier this year, I’ve realized that I no longer regularly have any older adults who I see frequently. Recently, I’ve become curious how people connect with older and/or disabled adults outside of familial systems, and potentially help to meet their needs for care and even companionship. Unfortunately, Rosa’s work really doesn’t focus on any “experiments in radical intimacy” that show possibilities for that—it moreso talks about the failure of European culture to embrace death and the dying.
I found a similar lack of rigor in her examples about how capitalism drives our societal lack of access to friendship. She begins by talking about how the prison industrial complex seeks to penalize gang members and other forms of friendship/kinship that challenge the state. Unfortunately, the argument is so hastily discussed that her points barely cohered in my mind before I felt like she was onto another example. I didn’t disagree with many of her points throughout the book, but I just wished she maybe drilled down into a few examples with more attention, instead of trying to “cast a wide net” about all the potential topics that related to a chapter. I felt like the lasting impact of this “wide net” approach is that very few items she discussed were given enough space and exploration to truly be memorable a few weeks out from reading.
Final thoughts
Care networks are an important topic, and Radical Intimacy by Sophie K. Rosa is yet another book that will keep me thinking about this issue—I appreciate that, if nothing else. Many of the experiments of radical intimacy that Rosa briefly profiles could be worth exploring more closely, and I was really sad she didn’t take the chance to study them in more depth through this book. This is, potentially, one argument for reading a physical copy of this book. It would probably be easier to mark down various subjects for later research, something that I found to be difficult in the audiobook format (especially while driving or experiencing motion sickness on the plane.)
Let’s hope that in a few months, I will be able to update this review with a more memorable and well-structured book on this same topic. Until then, I’d give like a half-recommendation for this one!
July 19, 2024
One of the best nonfictions I've read this year. (And I've read some BANGERS!!) It made me want to kiss, hug, and cry into the arms of all of my friends. I kept thinking about them throughout each chapter. It's a book that will probably change the way I approach life and relationships for the rest of my life :0
Pros:
- Assumes you're already on board with hating capitalism and all the other -isms. Just gets right into the meat of the book's thesis.
- Is very compassionate and clearly was written from a place of passion and love (and anger!!! at society!!! which we all have!!!)
- Explains a lot about why traditional relationships are the way they are and how they support the state. Super enlightening (and also frustrating, but in a relieving "oh, that makes sense" kind of way)
- really well researched. has podcast recommendations at the end!!
Crits:
- I wish there were more examples of non-traditional/non-hegemonic relationships. I'm so curious about how different relationships can be, especially bc I grew up in a typical nuclear family dynamic. But this was a great entry point to look into it more.
- Erring on the side on inaccessible language.
Pros:
- Assumes you're already on board with hating capitalism and all the other -isms. Just gets right into the meat of the book's thesis.
- Is very compassionate and clearly was written from a place of passion and love (and anger!!! at society!!! which we all have!!!)
- Explains a lot about why traditional relationships are the way they are and how they support the state. Super enlightening (and also frustrating, but in a relieving "oh, that makes sense" kind of way)
- really well researched. has podcast recommendations at the end!!
Crits:
- I wish there were more examples of non-traditional/non-hegemonic relationships. I'm so curious about how different relationships can be, especially bc I grew up in a typical nuclear family dynamic. But this was a great entry point to look into it more.
- Erring on the side on inaccessible language.
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