This chapter introduces the main topic of this book, inducing intimacy, and explains that the focus is deceptively induced sex and intimate relationships (i.e., sex and sexual and/or romantic relationships). It then sets out the book’s core aims, that is, to examine how the law has responded to inducing intimacy as a form of wrongdoing and source of harms and what can this tell us about the justifiability and desirability of using law to respond to these practices in the present age. The chapter also outlines the scope of the book and the sources used before introducing the theoretical framework that informs the analysis in the remaining chapters, which is based on the cultural significance of sex and marriage, including their significance for self-construction. The chapter closes by outlining the main arguments of the book, including the potential for its historical analysis to inform contemporary debates about whether and how to respond to inducing intimacy via law today.

This chapter summarises the overarching narrative of this book and argues that as was as being intrinsically valuable it can inform contemporary debates about using law to regulate the practices of inducing intimacy. The discussion is organised around three sets of issues: the public and private dimensions of sex and intimate relationships, including the interests protected by law, the form of response (i.e., state or non-state), and the variety of legal response (i.e., public or private); the structure of legal responses, the meaning of consent and its relation to deception, targeted modes of deception, culpability matters, the requirement for a causal link between deception and ‘outcome’, and the temporalities of the legal wrong; and the substance of deceptions, including the dynamics governing the range of topics about which transparency has been expected. Drawing the discussion together, the chapter concludes by offering a new framework for constructing legal responses to deceptively induced intimacy, which builds on the core insight and these responses have historically been predicated on temporally sensitive associations between self-construction and intimacy.

The word ‘Klavier’ occurs only twice in the texts of Schubert’s lieder, but both times in a prominent position – namely, in the titles of Christian Daniel Friedrich Schubart’s ‘An mein Klavier’ and Friedrich Schiller’s ‘Laura am Klavier’, both set to music in 1816 (respectively D342 and D388). The first poem deals with two figures – the narrative persona and his piano; the second with three – Laura, the piano and the narrative persona. In Schubart, the emphasis falls on the piano’s expressive potential; in Schiller, mainly on the impression it imparts. The two poems thus present the instrument in quite different, even antithetical, guises: introverted versus extroverted. Although Schubert turned to poems that were already a generation old (they were first published in 1785 and 1782, respectively) and had a different sound in mind compared to the two poets (this was an age of rapid evolution in keyboard instrument construction), the instrumental aesthetic displayed in Schubart’s and Schiller’s poems still applied with undiminished force in 1816. The antitheses marked by the poems Schubert chose with respect to the Klavier reveal the breadth of notions associated with the instruments that went by that name around 1800.

• Our relationships with our family members, friends, and romantic partners are important to our body image and can have both negative and positive effects on our sense of self.

• Developing friendships and romantic partnerships can be an important part of your life during your teens and adulthood and can open you up to feelings of vulnerability about your appearance; experiencing some stress surrounding the initiation of relationships is common.

• Maintaining healthy relationships can contribute to your positive body image development.

This chapter works through multiple valences of queerness in relation to blackness. Alongside the presence of non-normative sexual practices, intimacies, and identifications within black literatures this chapter looks at ways that blackness is often posited as already queer, part of the residue of having been hailed as property. In this reading, blackness destabilizes or “queers” the category of the person. This happens through the blurring of the categories of person and object as well as the possibility of making a distinction between an individual and a collective social identity. We might consider this person-object blurriness to be one of the effects of the processes of commodification that enslavement entailed. This estrangement from personhood though enfleshment, objectification, and loss of the mother also introduces literary possibilities of resistance in a queer register, including movements to mourn and re-find the mother, sonic resistance, and other uses of the flesh to produce forms of embodiment that evade traditional forms of capture. Here, queerness is related to finding different ways to describe orientations toward the world and pleasure.

This chapter explores race and sexuality in three parts. After a preamble that explores uses and definitions of race both historically and by historians, the first part examines representations of race and sexuality in relation to the politics of race and sexuality, via such historical figures as Sarah Baartman, Josephine Baker, and Jane Nardal. The second part considers administrative and legal policies as well as forms of social control that were used to control sexuality along the colour line, with references to Cleopatra, legal codes such as the Code Noir, the Scottsboro affair, sex work, and sex talk in the Americas, West Africa, Europe, and Southeast Asia. The third part considers a newer trend towards exploring the influences of love, family, community, and kinship networks upon discussions and experiences of sexuality and race, via examples such as the Signares of Senegal or the ballroom houses of Harlem. One of the points of this chapter is to show how histories of empires, and those of encounters between the Global North and the Global South, were also histories of sex and race.

Material culture profoundly influences the ways we understand, experience and represent sexuality. This chapter examines cross-cultural material cultures of heterosexuality, homosexuality, domestic life, communal rituals, sex work and intimate relationships, among other examples. The history of sexuality and material culture is a long one, and to consider Roman brothels, Palauan men’s houses and Peruvian pottery is to recognise their significance in changing sexual mores. Objects, including buildings and artworks, can tell us about fundamentally diverse ways of understanding sexuality as an everyday practice and the subject of academic inquiry. The chapter also offers a discussion of the ephemera of movements for sexual rights in more recent times. These objects may be everyday items repurposed for queer life and politics, for example, or custom-made props for protest and organising. Museums have often paid little attention to the material culture of sexuality, hiding away incriminating exhibits, but new museological approaches to objects reveal the intricacies of intimate life, tell the story of previously marginalized forms of sexuality, and even resist established modes of power. Material culture, and the ways we address it, speak forcefully to the politics of sexuality.

The archives of modern European colonialism are preoccupied with sex. Desire, with its contexts and consequences, presented colonial authorities with opportunities and motive for the exercise of power. Yet the gamut of sexual practices they sought to regulate bore a tenuous relationship to the messy intimacies of lived experience. Those worlds of desire, repugnance, accommodation, and resistance remain beyond our reach. Historians have employed various methodologies to tackle the complexities and silences of the colonial archive. Some have striven to find dissenting, variant or “hidden” voices within bureaucratic records. Some have sought traces of fantasy, desire, and subjective experience in personal writings or works of creative imagination. Some have shown how the fashioning of the archive itself is implicated in the production of both desire and desiring subjects. Arguing that we learn most about colonial sexuality when we allow for multiple possibilities, this chapter presents and describes some of the more influential lenses historians have brought to bear upon their elusive subject: those of erotics, regulation, intimacy, mobility, and violence. While these do not exhaust the possibilities of understanding colonial sexuality, when taken together they reveal how entwined was the emergence of modern sexual mores with colonialism”s history.

Transition to socialism meant that the relationships between domestic workers and their employers had to be reimagined. Rather than framing the relationship between domestic workers and their employers as a contractual one, the state now celebrated employers and domestics who treated each other “like family.” The economic nature of the relationship between Soviet families and their domestics puts into sharp relief the meaning of Stalinist socialism for domestic workers and their employers. Similar to capitalist countries, class inequality lay at the heart of domestic service in the Soviet Union. Yet, this inequality was less stark and more fragile. As a result, domestic workers were able to negotiate special bonuses, such as extended vacation time to visit families. However, in return domestic workers had to give up labor rights guaranteed by Soviet laws, such as days off or regular pay. The chapter demonstrates the limits of legal regulations within the household and the role of informal arrangements in domestic service.

This chapter deals with another group of modernistas, mostly from the Catholic cities of Western Mexico, who are quite different from those examined in Chapter 6. Although they often met with the other group in Mexico City or shared the pages of the Revista Moderna, their approach to modernity is so different that it deserves a separate analysis. Modernismo can be defined by its able incorporation of Romanticism, Symbolism, and Parnassianism, but in the case of this group, there is a scepticism towards several aspects of these aesthetic movements, which always acts as a path that leads back to provincial life, landscape, and a national (and again Catholic) decorum. The authors studied in this chapter include Luis G. Urbina, Enrique González Martínez, Francisco González León, Manuel José Othón, and, in pride of place, Ramón López Velarde.

This chapter focuses on mystical experience. It considers especially the late medieval mystical accounts of and about women, which are particularly rich in their experiential and affective dimensions. The chapter shows that mystical experience lives within the tension of uniqueness and exemplarity, setting the individual apart from the community while also often arising out of its shared life and perceived to serve and inspire it. Mystical experience is also characterized by the paradox between extensive practices of preparation and recognizable patterns of experience on the one hand and the sense of the givenness of the experience on the other. Mystical experience is frequently abundant and overwhelming, marked by intense affect and emotion, displayed in bodily fashion, full of rich sensory impressions, and combining suffering and ecstasy, sometimes in the same experience. In all these respects, mystical experience displays a phenomenality of excess and saturation.

Chapter 6 explores a different path: building privacy law on liability. Liability for material and immaterial privacy would improve the protection system. To achieve meaningful liability, though, laws must compensate privacy harm, not just the material consequences that stem from it. Compensation for financial and physical harms produced by the collection, processing, or sharing of data is important but insufficient. The proposed liability framework would address informational exploitation by making companies internalize risk. It would deter and remedy socially detrimental data practices, rather than chasing elusive individual control aims. Courts can distinguish harmful losses from benign ones by examining them on the basis of contextual and normative social values. By focusing on harm, privacy liability would overcome its current problems of causation quagmires and frivolous lawsuits.

The Coda returns to the example with which the book begins: the story about the gentleman caller and the naked lady in the bathroom told by the character Fabienne in Truffaut’s film Stolen Kisses (1968). The aim of the Coda is to revisit key aspects of the theory and history of tact developed in the course of the book, and to draw its findings to a close.

Existing theories of human interaction tend to focus on tact as a marker of social distinction (Sartre, Bourdieu), and a tool for the cementation of bourgeois power (Foucault). The introduction sets the arena for a new account of tact that not only considers tact’s discriminating effects but also, and primarily, gives room to its equalizing dynamic and democratic potential. Using a story from Truffaut’s film Stolen Kisses (1968) about a gentleman and a naked lady in a bathroom as an example to unpack some of the key aspects of tact, I engage in critical dialogue with a wide range of scholars from different disciplines (including Wollheim, Kohut, Coplan, Luhmann, Derrida, Goffman, Žižek, Sartre, and Sennett). The aim is to address the following questions: What is tact? What is the relation between empathy, widely associated with proximity, and tact as a generator of distance? How can we distinguish tact from politeness and what are the implications of this distinction? How does social tact, as the spontaneous and individual art of mitigating social encounter, relate to hermeneutical tact as a particular mode of reading faces, images, texts?

Central issues of family business are treated in Chapter 4. It is widely assumed that in establishing a new business family members are preferred employees as they are trusted. As it expands a business increasingly employs non-family members. In these circumstances kinship forms of address, irrespective of kin status, create familiarity and closeness. A significant literature reports that by these means pseudo-kinship or quasi-familial relations are formed in order to cultivate trust with non-kin individuals. Chapter 4 challenges these assumptions. It is shown, firstly, that among family members, rather than trust a number of other factors, including compliance with role obligations as well as monitored forms of reliability, xinyong and face considerations, govern relationships and authority structures. Secondly, as non-kin employees are recruited to a family business neither pseudo-kinship nor quasi-familial relationships are assumed nor market exchange relations engaged; rather, non-kin members of family firms are subject to an intentionally cultivated emotionalized guanxi relationship with the company. This arrangement means that intra-firm relations operate in conjunction with market relations in order to elicit obligatory feelings and maintain them, generating firm-specific social bonds between management and employees as well as between employees.

This chapter examines how early relationships become established relationships. It reviews varying relationship trajectories (e.g., ascent, peak, and descent) and then describes the three key components of the relationship that develop over time: love, intimacy, and commitment. First, the chapter defines and differentiates the various forms of love (e.g., passionate love, companionate love, compassionate love) and reviews how love develops and changes over time. Second, this chapter explores how interpersonal intimacy develops through repeated instances of self-disclosure and perceived partner responsiveness and how developing intimate relationships change the self. Third, this chapter reviews how people make and communicate their commitment decisions, as well as how social network members shape commitment. Finally, it provides an overview of common major transitions (cohabitation, marriage, parenthood) and some key challenges therein.

Agnes Smedley was an American writer, journalist, activist, and spy who traveled North America, Europe, and Asia in pursuit of her anti-imperialist and communist agendas. She came to anticolonial transnationalism through her personal and often intimate ties to India’s diasporic revolutionaries in the US (1912–1919) and Germany (1920–1929), as well as Chinese communists and Soviet spies in Shanghai (1929–1937). The chapter traces Smedley’s global crossings as a prism for exploring the power of intimacy in the making (and unmaking) of transnational solidarities, while also considering the gendered experiences of revolutionary women like her who were critical to shaping transnational anticolonialism. The chapter argues that Smedley’s most revolutionary acts were often intimate and private ones, including interracial marriage and romantic ties to leading luminaries of transnational anticolonialism during the interwar period.

Intimacy, sex, and desire are important elements to personal and relational well-being and are some of the top reasons couples seek therapy. For Black couples, there is a unique challenge that can hamper the development of these elements given the historical backdrop of oppression that contributes to significant stressors on these couples. Helping Black couples to understand how they make meaning of sex, intimacy, and interactions with their partner, while maintaining a clear sense of self in the context of their physical and emotional closeness, has been positively associated with sexual desire, intimacy, and couple satisfaction. This chapter looks at the role of differentiation, the impact it has on a Black couple’s intimate life, and how clinicians can help facilitate the process of increasing the couple’s levels of differentiation, thus breathing life into the relationship.