This issue provides an area-studies perspective on intimacy and explores the analytic, theoretical, and political work that intimacy promises as a concept. The contributors explore how multiple domains and forms of intimacies are defined and transformed across the cultural and social worlds of the Middle East, looking in particular at Egypt, Turkey, and Israel. Focusing on everyday constructions of intimacies, the contributors engage with questions about how we should calibrate the evolving nature of intimacy in times of rapid transition, what intimacy means for individual and social lives, and what social, political, and economic possibilities it creates. Topics include physical exercise, Turkish beauty salons, transnational surrogacy arrangements, gender reassignment, and coffee shops as intimate spaces for men outside the family.

Article Contributors: Aymon Kreil, Claudia Liebelt, Sibylle Lustenberger, Sertaç Sehlikoğlu, Aslı Zengin

Review and Third Space Contributors: Dena Al-Adeeb, Adam George Dunn, Rima Dunn, Meral Düzgün, Iklim Goksel, Didem Havlioğlu, Sarah Ihmoud, Sarah Irving, Adi Kuntsman, Shahrzad Mojab, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Rachel Rothendler, Afiya Zia

Aslı Zengin is Allen-Berenson Fellow in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University.

Sertaç Sehlikoğlu is Affiliated Researcher at the University of Cambridge.