For many Americans, marriage remains a compelling personal choice, one that continues to find broad cultural support. Yet, scholars have underscored the "disestablishment" of marriage, that is, its weakening enforcement by the state and other institutions. The other side to this trend has been the rise of an alternative "relationship-centered" culture whose core is the quest for intimacy. Among its chief features is the absence of authoritative rules governing intimate choice. Whether it's decisions about partner selection (class, race, gender, nationality, religion), living separately or together, having children, cohabiting or marrying, or being single or partnered, intimate life is becoming a field of choice and pluralization. Intimacies brings together leading thinkers and scholars in critical social studies (social sciences, feminism, queer studies) and psychoanalysis in order to explore diverse forms of intimacies in contemporary America.

Introduction Part I: Changing Cultures of Intimacy 1. State and Class Politics in the Making of a Culture of Intimacy 2. "Let Me Tell You Who I Am": Intimacy, Privacy and Self-Disclosure Part II: Between Fluid and Solid Intimacies: Hook Ups, Sex, Love 3. Unexpected Intimacies: Moments of Connection, Moments of Shame 4. "Hey God, is that You in My Underpants?": Sex, Love and Religiosity Among American College Students 5. Queer Girls on Campus: New Intimacies and Sexual Identities 6. Intimacy and Ambivalence Part III: Lateral Intimacies: Siblings, Surrogates, Families 7. Intimacy, Disclosure and Marital Normativity 8. Lost And Found: Sibling Loss, Disconnection, Mourning, and Intimacy 9. The Belly Mommy and the Fetus Sitter: The Reproductive Marketplace and Family Intimacies Part IV: Unsettling Intimacies: Anxieties, Violence, Misrecognition 10. Intimacy, Lateral Relationships and Biopolitical Governance 11. Intimacy Undone: The Psychoanalytic Dyad, Sexuality and Narratives of Defense 12. Whös Your Daddy? Intimacy, Recognition and the Queer Family Story Part V: Phenomenology of Intimacy 13. The Search for Intimacy: Nearness and Distance in Psychoanalytic Work 14. Finding the Addressee: Notes on the Termination of an Analysis 15. The Intimacy of Objects: Living and Perishing in the Company of Things