Journal of Gender Studies

Intimate Cities: Body, Gender, and the Politics of Intimacy in Urban Spaces

Cities are often imagined as spaces of anonymity, freedom, and mobility. Yet for gendered, queer, migrant, and marginalised bodies, urban spaces are also sites of intense regulation, surveillance, negotiation, and vulnerability. The fabric of everyday urban existence is woven through the perpetual negotiation of corporeal proximity, manifesting across a diverse topography of social frames, ranging from the hyper-visibility of public transit and the workplace to the regulated domesticity of the home and the mediated intimacies of digital platforms.

This call for papers proposes to explore body intimacy and gender in urban contexts, asking how everyday urban spaces shape intimate bodily experiences and how, in turn, gendered intimacies redefine the meaning of the city. Here, intimacy is understood broadly and inclusively, not confined to sexuality, but encompassing emotional closeness, bodily vulnerability, care, fear, pleasure, self-regulation, and the everyday work of surviving in urban spaces. Streets, public transport, workplaces, homes, clinics, parks, hostels, nightlife zones, and digital-urban interfaces all become arenas where bodies encounter others, negotiate proximity, and manage risk, desire, and selfhood.

While urban studies have extensively focused on infrastructure, labour, housing, and migration, intimacy as a dimension of urban life has received far less attention, especially through gendered and intersectional lenses. Feminist scholars such as Doreen Massey, Elizabeth Wilson, and Lauren Berlant, among others, have consistently demonstrated that the public/private divide is deeply gendered, with women and gender-nonconforming people often encountering the city’s public spaces as sites of intrusion rather than freedom. Moreover, scholars of masculinity studies, like Sanjay Srivastava (2022), explore how the fragmented spaces of the city influence the construction of urban masculinities; Romit Chowdhury’s (2025) City of Men, an ethnographic analysis of public transport infrastructures in Kolkata, reveals how urban mobility, heterosexual masculinity, and spatial politics intersect in everyday urban life. These intersections of human experiences across all genders and sexualities raise questions about how these inhabit gendered urban environments.

Therefore, this special issue aims to draw attention to such interdisciplinary, gendered interventions that explore how intimacy, desire, and pleasure are shaped, experienced, constrained, and reformulated within urban spaces.

The call for papers conceptualises intimacy as both relational and spatial, shaped by power relations embedded in urban design, governance, social norms, and economic structures. Moving beyond understandings of intimacy as confined to private spaces or romantic relationships, the panel foregrounds its manifestation in everyday urban encounters such as negotiating bodily proximity, navigating unwanted touch, seeking care, and carving out moments of solitude or pleasure within densely populated environments.

Gender is approached as an embodied and intersectional category, shaped by caste, class, race, sexuality, disability, age, migration status, and religion. The call is particularly attentive to how processes of urbanisation simultaneously expand possibilities for autonomy while intensifying conditions of vulnerability and precarity, especially for women, men, queer, and trans bodies.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Negotiating bodily proximity and boundaries in urban public spaces such as transport, parks, workplaces, and clinics

• Gender and surveillance in the city

• Public/private intimacy divide in the city

• Unwanted touch and everyday negotiations of safety

• Queer and trans intimacies

• Dating apps, social media, and digital-urban intimacies

• Migrant bodies and displacement in the city

• Domesticity and intimacy within private spaces

• Pleasure, desire, and the body in urban spaces

• Intersectional experiences of caste, class, race, and sexuality in the city