‘Radical Intimacy’: love, sex and intimacy in a capitalist society

2025-04-27 12:26:59admin

"Most people don’t think about their love lives in terms of capitalism," writes Sophie K Rosa in her book Radical Intimacy. "But how we practise and speak about such relationships is revealing."

The connection between capitalism and intimacy is blatant in some ways and far harder to identify in others. But the ideology of capitalism has long infiltrated what love and relationships look like, as examined in Rosa's debut work. And this has come with a set of consequences.

From the the patriarchal roots of marriage and the nuclear family, to the burgeoning market of data-driven dating apps, capitalism has shaped the means through which intimacy is achieved. It has also defined relationships and connections in transactional ways, assigning value to some partnerships, detracting from others, and oftentimes promoting scarcity and indifference. When it comes to finding love, for instance, Rosa aptly points out the need for "self-commodification" and the rise of "competition" – both of which have arisen through apps and what she describes as "the dating industrial complex."

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Through lenses such as family, self-care, sex, death, home, and friendship, Rosa looks into the limitations of intimacy in a capitalist world, exacerbated by ingrained notions of monogamy and by current political systems and policing of women's bodies. Cited frequently and fundamentally are contemporary writers and thinkers like Luke de Noronha, Katherine Angel, Mia Mingus, and Torrey Peters, alongside the likes of bell hooks, James Baldwin, and Audre Lorde. Rosa also peppers the book with contemporary examinations, ones that will resonate particularly with Britain's politically-conscious, pop-culture-inclined readers. The wildly popular British reality show Love Islandis utilised to illustrate instances of toxic monogamy and infidelity; Britney Spears' curtailed freedom under a conservatorship is cited in a larger conversation surrounding family, ownership, and oppression.

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While Radical Intimacyscrutinises the reality of love and intimacy in such a society, it also paints a moving alternative of what a different reality can offer. At a time when the likes of compassion fatigue and general disillusionment is rife, there seems to be no better moment to question existent frameworks and the way(s) in which we've been told to love.

"Left to its own devices, the world cannot hold us. The colliding global crises of capitalism – in ecological collapse and in the rising tide of fascism – threaten the fabric of communities and the lives that compose them," Rosa writes. "We must hold each other, as we remake a world that can."

With such words, the book is likely to cause some yearning for the new world Rosa envisions. The call to action is strong; she is asking, with compassion and conviction, for collective liberation and for a revolution.

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Below, read an excerpt of Rosa's powerful case for moving beyond the traditional, heteronormative notion of a relationship.

It can be very difficult to build relationships outside of normative frameworks. Even if people experience non-normative desires as an essential aspect of who they are – rather than as a choice – there can be material as well as psychic and social barriers to living them out. "The personal is not political because personal choices are necessarily political choices", Lennard writes, "but because the very terrain of what gets to be a choice and what types of persons get to be choosers – what types of persons get to be – are shaped by political power".

The choice to marry or not, for instance, has not been free, most of all for women, for most of human history. And whilst the pressure to marry is thankfully weaker today for many younger people than it was for older generations, in many cases it remains – at least partially – an unfree "choice". Some people are compelled to marry by tradition, culture, family or religion. Marriage may also be a survival mechanism, for example for those who would be unable to obtain visas, access public services or afford to live without a legal spouse. Even for queer people, who may have only accessed the right to marry in recent years, the social, economic and financial compulsion to marry or cohabitate as a couple is significant.

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In society as it stands, getting married may have irresistible or essential material benefits: for buying a home, for tax relief, for social harmony, for child-rearing, for pooling incomes. In short, in some important ways, being in a marriage or marriage-like relationship might make life easier.

Decolonising love, argues [Kim] TallBear, is not a simply personal decision, but something that requires us to fight battles against the structures that attempt to pre-empt, coerce and fix the shape of relationships:

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Decolonization is not an individual choice. We must collectively oppose a system of compulsory settler sexuality and family that continues building a nation upon Indigenous genocide and that makes Indigenous and other marginalized relations as deviant. This includes opposing norms and policies that reward normative kinship ties (e.g., monogamous legal marriage, nuclear biological family) over other forms of kinship obligation.

Even the act of sex is to a large extent predetermined by our material realities. Whether someone has access to a safe home, what condition their home is in, who they live with, whether they can afford enough to eat, how much and how hard they work, how sick or exhausted they are, whether they have access to contraceptives and abortion; all these factors influence the possibilities of the erotic. Who gets to experience pleasure is a political question. As the radical queer organisers Queer to the Left demanded in 1990s–2000s United States: "Everyone deserves a place to fuck. Affordable Housing NOW."

This extends to the kinds of intimate relationships that feel – or are – possible. A common retort to polyamory, for example, is: "Who has time for that?! I barely have time for one partner!" Indeed: who does? In life and love as we currently know them, sustaining more than one committed partnership might well feel difficult or impossible – whether logistically, materially or emotionally – especially for those with less resources. As the author and educator Kevin A. Patterson writes in his book about race and polyamory, Love’s Not Color Blind: "So, when do you engage in all that valuable relationship-affirming communication? In the limited space between your full-time, minimum-wage shift, and your parttime, minimum-wage shift? Do you find time on the phone, while taking public transportation to pick your children up from school or daycare? Do you find the time after you get home from washing dishes … but before you have to write a paper for one class and study for an exam in the other?"

Most people struggle under capitalism to locate enough time and energy to nurture relationships at all. Being able to tend to our intimate relationships should not be a privilege. It is a devastating reality that so much of our lifeforce is directed towards labour, rather than love. While "Who has time for that?" is often a throwaway dismissal of the idea that people might maintain more than one intimate partnership, it could instead be a question of intimate justice. Rather than giving up on alternative visions for our relationships as inexorably impossible, and rather than cajoling individuals to build ‘radical’ relationships that may not make sense for their lives, let us imagine and fight for a future in which multitudinous love, in multivalent forms, will be conceivable for everyone.

It is a devastating reality that so much of our lifeforce is directed towards labour, rather than love.

Some of this political work must come from within the intimate realm itself, as it always has. The Wages for Housework campaign – launched by the International Feminist Collective in 1972 – demanded that women’s labour in marriage and the nuclear household under capitalism be categorised as work, and therefore its refusal as strike. ‘They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work. They call it frigidity. We call it absenteeism’, proclaimed Federici’s Wages against Housework, explaining: "We want to call work what is work so that eventually we might rediscover what is love and create what will be our sexuality which we have never known." To this day, such resistance is invoked in calls – for example, by the actor Bette Midler in response to the 2021 anti-abortion law in Texas – for women to mount (heterosexual) sex strikes as a form of protest. Structural power overwhelmingly shapes the intimate realm; but the intimate realm must also organise to challenge structural power.

Whatever "radical" romance and sex might be, it is not simply about choices and behaviours. The possibility of meaningful agency in this sphere will not come from the proliferation of polyamorous life coaches advertising their services on Instagram, nor from the representation of ‘queer families’ or ‘chosen families’ in mainstream advertising campaigns. Liberation requires structural change – from secure housing for all, to freedom from exploitation at work, to free childcare. "Radical" sex and relationships won’t topple capitalism, but toppling capitalism might just make them possible. In the meantime, no matter what kinds of relationships we are in, trying earnestly to be loving – and not to treat each other like commodities – would be a good start.

Radical Intimacyis out on March 20 with Pluto Press.