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Book cover for Postdigital Intimacies open access

Publication date: 16 March 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781806550531

Number of illustrations: 9

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Postdigital Intimacies

Relational lives in the networked public-private

Adrienne Evans (Editor),  Jamie Hakim (Editor),  Jessica Ringrose (Editor),  Amy Shields Dobson (Editor),  Shaka McGlotten (Editor)

Postdigital Intimacies presents a unique and timely collection of research into the complex interplay and entanglement between digital and analogue relationships. Set within the normalisation of digital technology, cultures, AI and algorithms, the book explores social, political and cultural implications of intimacy in a blurry public–private. Chapters are informed by intersectional feminist, queer, anti-racist and postcolonial theories, and show how research can be part of creating affirmative, collective worlds that are more equitable and socially just. Through these lenses, contributors uncover vibrant digitally mediated lives and sociality. They investigate the vibey, emotional and affective sensibilities evolving online – excitement, boredom, mental health, survival – and reveal new activisms formed through digital belonging and a networked identity that responds to and resists marginality.

Consideration is given to the capacity for digital affordances to enable new forms of connection, community and solidarity as well as harm. Authors explore vulnerability and risk through image-based abuse and gendered and sexual violence. They also analyse the forms of digital surveillance, labour and platformed capitalism that shape intimate relations created in kinship and domesticity. By addressing these relationalities as postdigital intimacies, the chapters offer fascinating insights and timely analyses of the intimate relations that emerge from our current cultural and postdigital condition.

List of figures
List of contributors

1 Postdigital intimacies: an introduction
Adrienne Evans, Shaka McGlotten, Jamie Hakim, Amy Shields Dobson and Jessica Ringrose

Part I: Postdigital feelings

2 The vibe factory: intimacy, affective capitalism and digital media
Maria Gemma Brown, Nicholas Carah and Amy Shields Dobson

3 Boring intimacies: #BoredVibes and the affective public-private
Tina Kendall

4 Intimate matters: privacy and security and networked mental health support
Marjo Kolehmainen

5 Sinéad O’Connor, ‘bipolar’ celebrity and mediated intimacies: towards a mad feminist temporal politics
Debra Ferreday

Part II: Postdigital connections and collectivities

6 Postdigital intimacies and digital feminist activism
Estefanía Reyes and Kaitlynn Mendes

7 Affect, Black diaspora, and postdigital: moving towards a theory of Black digital relational intimacies
tèmítópé lasade-anderson

8 Queer social media imaginaries and relational becoming amongst sapphic youth
Niamh White

9 (Dis)embodied feminist rage and the affective economies of postdigital visibility
Xumeng Xie

Part III: Postdigital violences and vulnerabilities

10 Bypassing consent? A postdigital platform affordance methodology for exploring youth experiences of Snapchat
Jessica Ringrose

11 Sexual harm and image sharing: rethinking and reimagining gender, power and intimacy with and for adolescent boys
Emily Setty

12 Sexting risk and negotiations of consent in masculinity identity construction
Rikke Amundsen

13 The deepfake, the screenshot and the leak: vulnerable visibilities of the body in postdigital intimacies
Emily van der Nagel

14 Nude image sharing and image-based sexual abuse on Netflix’s Sex Education and HBO’s Euphoria
Tanya Horeck

Part IV: Postdigital kindship, domesticity and hospitality

15 Postdigital queer kinship: intimacy, choice and the market
Rikke Andreassen and Ulrika Dahl

16 ‘Home is where the data is’: what is at stake in the trade in data-households?
Alison Winch

17 Migrant domestic women workers’ cartographies of care: a postdigital feminist scoping review
Zoe Hurley

18 If you liked it, then you should have put a ring on it: self-tracking and intimacy in wearable tech
Lindsay Balfour

Index

DOI: 10.14324/111.9781806550531

Number of illustrations: 9

Publication date: 16 March 2026

PDF ISBN: 9781806550531

EPUB ISBN: 9781806550548

Hardback ISBN: 9781806550517

Paperback ISBN: 9781806550524

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