Joanna Huh

Damaging Intimacy: Reimagining Community in Early Modern Drama

Damaging Intimacy rewrites the history of selfhood in early modernity to privilege community over the individual. This book disrupts the traditional narrative of modern selfhood: that as the subject becomes more modern, the subject becomes more bounded, and then that this bounded subject chooses to join a community in order to protect those bounds. Instead, Damaging Intimacy shows that communities are actually dependent on selves willing to open themselves up to real danger and sometimes even to death. This book explores key moments in early modern drama that stage the risks and costs of community, illustrating that it is rarely a positive, salutary experience predicated on security and protection. Rather, the very social bonds necessary to constitute community are often dangerous, damaging, and violent.

This analysis shatters the fantasy of an integral, coherent subject, so common in master narratives of Renaissance humanism, liberalism, and republicanism. Instead, this book's understanding of community shares deep affinities with queer understandings of interrelationality-where queer intimacy yields experiences of extreme vulnerability but also of intense connectedness. Damaging Intimacy shows how these possibilities for unguarded existence belong to the Renaissance world and also how these possibilities, in altered form, are still very much with us today.