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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN COMMUNICATION FOR SOCIAL CHANGE

Digital
Intimate
Publics
and Social
Media

Edited by
Amy Shields Dobson
Brady Robards
Nicholas Carah
Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social
Change

Series Editors
Pradip Thomas
University of Queensland
Australia

Elske van de Fliert

University of Queensland
Australia
Communication for Social Change (CSC) is a defined field of academic
enquiry that is explicitly transdisciplinary and that has been shaped by
a variety of theoretical inputs from a variety of traditions, from sociol-
ogy and development to social movement studies. The leveraging of
communication, information and the media in social change is the
basis for a global industry that is supported by governments, develop-
ment aid agencies, foundations, and international and local NGOs. It
is also the basis for multiple interventions at grassroots levels, with par-
ticipatory communication processes and community media making a
difference through raising awareness, mobilising communities, strength-
ening empowerment and contributing to local change. This series on
Communication for Social Change intentionally provides the space for
critical writings in CSC theory, practice, policy, strategy and methods. It
fills a gap in the field by exploring new thinking, institutional critiques
and innovative methods. It offers the opportunity for scholars and prac-
titioners to engage with CSC as both an industry and as a local prac-
tice, shaped by political economy as much as by local cultural needs.
The series explicitly intends to highlight, critique and explore the gaps
between ideological promise, institutional performance and realities of
practice.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14642
Amy Shields Dobson · Brady Robards
Nicholas Carah
Editors

Digital Intimate
Publics and Social
Media
Editors
Amy Shields Dobson Nicholas Carah
Curtin University School of Communication and Arts
Bentley, WA, Australia University of Queensland
Brisbane, QLD, Australia
Brady Robards
Monash University
Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change

ISBN 978-3-319-97606-8 ISBN 978-3-319-97607-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97607-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018950723

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 Acknowledgements

A book like this takes a crowd of people to make a reality, and we wish to
acknowledge that crowd. As we map out in more detail in the introduc-
tion, this book emerged out of a now-annual symposium (in its fourth
year at the time of writing), and for supporting the first two of these
symposia we are indebted to the Institute for Advanced Studies in
the Humanities and the School of Communication and Arts at the
University of Queensland.
Thank you to everyone who has participated in these ‘Digital
Intimacies’ symposia over the years—many of you are contributors to the
book, and many others can be felt in the way ideas have been shaped or
thinking has been prodded.
We also wish to acknowledge and thank Graeme Turner for his ongo-
ing intellectual guidance and encouragement. Graeme has been a key
figure in cultural studies for decades, but more than this he has been a
mentor and enabler for many junior scholars. We three have been espe-
cially grateful for his support over the years, in particular around this
project.
We acknowledge the patience, generosity, and of course the words of
all the contributors to this book. It is a collection of work that we are
truly proud of, and it has been a pleasure for us to work with all of you
to bring it together.

v
vi    Acknowledgements

We thank our publishers at Palgrave Macmillan, especially Heloise

Harding and Lucy Batrouney, for their keen interest in the project at the
outset, and also their flexibility with our schedules and timelines towards
the end of the project.
Finally, we wish to thank our own friends and families for their support
and love.

Amy Shields Dobson

Brady Robards
Nicholas Carah
 Contents

Part I Shaping Intimacy

1 Digital Intimate Publics and Social Media: Towards

Theorising Public Lives on Private Platforms 3
Amy Shields Dobson, Nicholas Carah and Brady Robards

2 Publicising Privacy, Weaponising Publicity:

The Dialectic of Online Abuse on Social Media 29
Michael Salter

3 Software Intimacies (Social Media

and the Unbearability of Death) 45
Grant Bollmer

4 Snapshots of Afterlife: The Cultural Intimacies

of Posthumous Camera Phone Practices 59
Larissa Hjorth

5 Remembering Through Facebook: Mediated

Memory and Intimate Digital Traces 75
Brady Robards, Sian Lincoln, Benjamin C. Pinkard
and Jane Harris

vii
viii    Contents

6 Sexting, Intimate and Sexual Media Practices,

and Social Justice 93
Amy Shields Dobson

Part II Public Bodies

7 Digital Masculine Disruptions: Intimate Webcam

Forums and the Challenge to Heterosexual
Normativities 113
Rob Cover

8 ‘This Dapper Hotty Is Working That Tweed Look’:

Extending Workplace Affects on TubeCrush 129
Adrienne Evans and Sarah Riley

9 Effervescence, Resonance and Emotive Practice on

Social Media: Public Expressions of Heartbreak
Among Young Filipino Twitter Users 145
Jozon A. Lorenzana

10 ‘We’re All Gonna Make It Brah’: Homosocial

Relations, Vulnerability and Intimacy in an Online
Bodybuilding Community 161
Mair Underwood

11 ‘It’s Nice to See You’re Not the Only One with

Kinks’: Presenting Intimate Privates in Intimate
Publics on Tumblr 177
Matthew Hart

12 Between Firefighting and Flaming: Collective and

Personal Trans* and Gender-Diverse Social Media 193
Son Vivienne
 Contents    ix

Part III Negotiating Intimacy

13 ‘There Are Literally No Rules When It Comes to

These Things’: Ethical Practice and the Use of Dating/
Hook-Up Apps 213
Paul Byron and Kath Albury

14 Speaking to the Other: Digital Intimate Publics

and Gamergate 231
Amanda Elliot

15 Ambivalent Intimacies: Entangled Pains and Gains

Through Facebook Use in Transnational Family Life 247
Earvin Charles Cabalquinto

16 Oversharing Is the Norm 265

Jenny Kennedy

17 Archives of Sadness: Sharing Bereavement

and Generating Emotional Exchange Between
Strangers on YouTube 281
Margaret Gibson and Golie Talaie

Index 299
 Notes on Contributors

Kath Albury is a Professor of Media and Communication at Swinburne

University of Technology, Australia. Her current research focuses on
young people’s practices of digital self-representation, and the role of
user-generated media (including social networking platforms) in formal
and informal sexual learning. Kath leads the Australian Research Council
Linkage Project ‘Safety, risk and wellbeing on digital dating apps’, with
industry partners ACON Health (formerly the AIDS Council of NSW)
and Family Planning NSW.
Grant Bollmer is the author of the books Inhuman Networks: Social
Media and the Archaeology of Connection (Bloomsbury, 2016) and
Theorizing Digital Cultures (SAGE, 2018). He is an Assistant Professor
of Media Studies at North Carolina State University, where he teaches in
the Department of Communication and the Communication, Rhetoric,
and Digital Media Ph.D. program, and is an Honorary Associate of the
Department of Media and Communication at the University of Sydney.
Paul Byron is a Research Associate at Swinburne University’s
Department of Media and Communication. He researches digital media
and cultures of care, including LGBTIQ+ young people’s practices of
peer-based support, and dating and hook-up app use as everyday prac-
tice. His work centres on uses of digital media for practicing health, inti-
macy, and friendship. Follow Paul on Twitter: @paulibyron.

xi
xii    Notes on Contributors

Earvin Charles Cabalquinto is a Lecturer in the School of Media, Film

and Journalism at Monash University. His primary research interests
include transnational communication, mediated intimacies, caregiving at
a distance, digitalisation of public and domestic spaces, and the politics
of mediated mobilities. To know more about his research, access www.
ecabalquinto.com. Follow Earvin on Twitter: @earvsc.
Nicholas Carah is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Communication
and Arts at The University of Queensland. He is the author of Pop
Brands: Branding, Popular Music and Young People (Peter Lang, 2010),
Media & Society: Production, Content and Participation (Sage, 2015),
and Brand Machines, Sensory Media & Calculative Culture (Palgrave,
2016). His research examines the intersections between brand culture
and media platforms. He has a particular interest in alcohol promotion
and consumption. Follow Nicholas on Twitter: @nnniccc.
Rob Cover is an Associate Professor at The University of Western
Australia. He has received Australian Research Council funding for pro-
jects on youth sexuality (2015–2018), and gender diversity in Australian
film (2018–2020). He has published widely on topics in digital media
theory and interactivity, youth sociology, health communication, and
resilience. Recent books include: Queer Youth Suicide, Culture and
Identity: Unliveable Lives? (Routledge, 2012), Vulnerability and Exposure
(Scholarly, 2015), Digital Identities: Creating and Communicating the
Online Self (2016) and Emergent Identities: New Sexualities, Genders and
Relationships in a Digital Era (Routledge, in press). Profile and links at:
http://www.uwa.edu.au/people/rob.cover.
Amy Shields Dobson is a Lecturer in Internet Studies at Curtin
University. Her work focuses on youth, gender politics, social media, and
feminine subjectivities. She is the author of Postfeminist Digital Cultures
(2015), published by Palgrave. Her recent projects include research into
cyber-safety and sexting education, female genital cosmetic surgery, and
girls’ and young women’s social media cultures. Follow Amy on Twitter:
@AmyDobsonCU.
Amanda Elliot is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Social
Policy at the University of Sydney. Her primary research interests include
the transformation of work and welfare in the twenty-first century and,
more recently, politics, identity, work, and play in the digital economy.
Follow Amanda on Twitter: @whimsical__001.
 Notes on Contributors    xiii

Adrienne Evans is Reader in Media in the Center for Post-digital

Cultures at Coventry University, UK. Past research explored sexiness;
current work develops accounts of digital culture, postfeminist mas-
culinity, and healthism. Her co-authored books include Technologies of
Sexiness: Sex, Identity and Consumer Culture (Oxford University Press,
2014) and Postfeminism and Health (Routledge, 2018).
Margaret Gibson is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology in the School of
Humanities, Languages and Social Science, Griffith University, Australia
and member of the Griffith Centre for Cultural Research. Her research
focuses on objects of mourning, memory and memorialisation and the
transnational, social interface of online mourning and memorialisation
practices. She is author of Objects of the Dead: Mourning and Memory
in Everyday Life (MUP, 2008) and co-author of Living and Dying in a
Virtual World: Digital kinships, Nostalgia, and Mourning in Second Life,
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
Jane Harris is a Ph.D. student at the Public Health Institute, Liverpool
John Moores University, UK. Her research interests focus on the role
social media plays in health promotion, young people’s engagement with
health risk and opportunity online and the boundaries between health
and digital media literacy.
Matthew Hart is a Lecturer in the School of Media, Communication
and Sociology at the University of Leicester, UK. His research primar-
ily focuses on young people’s risky, intimate, and social internet practices
within visual social media, particularly around the production and shar-
ing of nude selfies. Follow Matt on Twitter: @SociologyZombie.
Distinguished Professor Larissa Hjorth is an artist and digital eth-
nographer. Hjorth has two decades experience working in cross-cultural,
interdisciplinary, collaborative creative practice and socially innova-
tive digital media research. Hjorth is currently the Design & Creative
Practice ECP Platform director at RMIT University. The research
Platform focuses on interdisciplinary collaboration and creative solutions
to real-world problems.
Jenny Kennedy is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Media and
Communications at RMIT University. She researches the social conse-
quences of digital media and the internet in domestic contexts. Jenny
is author of Digital Media, Sharing and Everyday Life (Routledge,
xiv    Notes on Contributors

forthcoming), and co-author of Digital Domesticity: Media, Materiality

and Home Life (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), and Grand
Designs: Consumer Markets and Home-Making (Palgrave, forthcoming).
Sian Lincoln is Reader in Communication, Media & Youth Culture at
Liverpool John Moores University, UK. Her research focuses on youth
culture and private space and young people’s uses of social media in rela-
tion to identity and growing up. Sian is author of Youth Culture and
Private Space (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). She is co-editor of 2 book
series: Cinema and Youth Cultures (Routledge) and Palgrave Studies in
the History of Subcultures & Popular Music. Sian is on the management
group of the Interdisciplinary Network for the Study of Music, Subcultures
and Social Change.
Jozon A. Lorenzana is Assistant Professor in the Department of
Communication, School of Social Sciences, Ateneo de Manila University.
Dr. Lorenzana’s critical ethnographic research covers interrelated themes
of sociality, intimacy, identity, morality, emotions, and media practices
among Filipino middle classes, migrant groups and queer people.
Benjamin C. Pinkard is a Doctoral Candidate at the School of Social
Sciences, University of Tasmania. Ben’s research explores the connec-
tions between technologies and the body in online and offline spaces,
investigating the relationship digital technologies have to health and
wellbeing among gender diverse young Australians. Follow Ben on
Twitter: @bcpinkard.
Sarah Riley is a Reader in Critical Psychology at Aberystwyth University,
UK and leader for the Centre for Critical Psychology there. Her research
focuses on the psychological impact of neoliberalism, addressing ques-
tions of gender, embodiment, health, youth culture, and citizenship. Her
co-authored books include Critical Bodies (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2008),
Doing Your Qualitative Research Project (Sage, 2012), Technologies
of Sexiness: Sex, Identity and Consumer Culture (Oxford University
Press, USA, 2014), Postfeminism and Health (Routledge, 2018) and
Postfeminism and Body Image (Routledge, forthcoming). Twitter: @
sarahrileybrown.
Brady Robards is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Social
Sciences at Monash University. He studies digital culture, with a focus
on how people use and produce social media and how social media
 Notes on Contributors    xv

platforms operate as memory archives made up of digital traces of life

over years of use. Brady has studied social media use among particular
groups, such as LGBTIQ+ people, young people, tourists, and in the
context of alcohol consumption. For more, visit Brady’s website: brady-
robards.com. Follow Brady on Twitter: @bradyjay.
Michael Salter is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology in the School of
Social Sciences and Psychology at Western Sydney University, where he
leads the violence team of the Sexualities and Genders Research initia-
tive. He specialises in the study of complex and organised forms of sex-
ual violence, and he is the author of Organised Sexual Abuse (Routledge,
2013) and Crime, Justice and Social Media (Routledge, 2017).
Golie Talaie is a visual artist and researcher in the fields of photography
and death studies. In her work, she explores the relationship between
photography, memory, and death, from the sites of cemeteries (Until
Death Do Us Part, 2015) to the spaces of the Internet (A Transatlantic
Love, 2010). She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the School of
Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Griffith University,
Brisbane. In her thesis, titled ‘Funerary Images and their significance to
the bereaved’, Golie investigates the use of photography and video as
part of family imagery and one’s experience of the loss of a loved one.
Mair Underwood is an anthropologist of the body and Lecturer
in Anthropology and Sociology in the School of Social Science, the
University of Queensland. Her research focuses on the experience of the
body, with a special interest in body modifications such as tattoo and
bodybuilding. She is currently conducting an online ethnography with
recreational bodybuilders, and has published journal articles on numer-
ous aspects of their experience such as their emotion work and perfor-
mance and image enhancing drug use. You can find her on Facebook,
Instagram, and YouTube where you can keep up with her research and
discuss it with her. Her passion is community engagement and making
social science accessible to the general public.
Son Vivienne is a Lecturer and researcher in Digital Media at RMIT.
Son is also involved in community development and arts as an activist
and media-maker. Their principal expertise is digital self-representation,
online activism, queer identity, and rhetorical strategies/feminist practices
for speaking and listening across difference. Their work on digital sto-
rytelling is published as Digital Identity and Everyday Activism: Sharing
xvi    Notes on Contributors

Private Stories with Networked Publics (Palgrave, 2016). Son curates sev-
eral collective storytelling websites for queer (www.rainbowfamilytree.
com) and gender-diverse (www.storiesbeyondgender.com) communities
and has over twenty years of multimedia production and distribution
experience. For more info visit Son’s website: www.incitestories.com.au.
 List of Figures

Fig. 11.1 A typical NSFW selfie shared by Debra’s on her Tumblr,

aimed at promoting female body positivity and acceptance 184
Fig. 11.2 A collage of NSFW selfies Jesse had uploaded to his Tumblr.
Jesse shares images of his pre-op body to show other Trans
people that they are not alone on Tumblr 185
Fig. 11.3 Judith’s NSFW selfies allow her to create a safe space in
which to intimately connect with others on Tumblr who
struggle to find acceptance for their kinks elsewhere online
or offline 187
Fig. 15.1 A sample photo of Efren’s pair of shoes 255
Fig. 15.2 Dolor accessing Facebook in the family living room’s
desktop computer 258

xvii
 Introduction

From public grief and trauma gone viral on YouTube, to hook-up

and dating apps like Grindr and Tinder, to daily documentations on
Facebook of meals, coffees, dreams, births, deaths, new relationships,
breakups, and much more, intimate lives are being played out, recorded,
commodified, and constituted through social media. Even when we are
physically alone or isolated, affect travels through digital infrastructures:
fibre and copper, satellites, wifi signals, laptops, smartphones, and finger-
tips. Digital intimacies resonate, console, arouse, invite, surprise, compel,
distract, and disappoint.
Lauren Berlant writes that intimacy ‘involves an aspiration for a narra-
tive about something shared, a story about both oneself and others that
will turn out in a particular way’ (1998, p. 282–283). Berlant argues that
this story occurs most commonly within ‘zones of familiarity’—between
friends, between a couple, within families. Social media can function to
challenge or disrupt the boundaries of these zones. The boundaries of
‘private’ realms are also challenged by the ways in which social media
can make intimacies more public, for instance, as private messages can
be captured and shared in unintended contexts, and as long-forgotten
relationships can be resurfaced on Facebook. As Berlant notes, our inti-
mate lives ‘absorb and repel the rhetorics, laws, ethics and ideologies of
the hegemonic public sphere, but also personalise the effects of the pub-
lic sphere and reproduce a fantasy that private life is the real in contrast
to collective life’. Berlant sets out to ‘understand the pedagogies that
encourage people to identify having a life with having an intimate life’

xix
xx    Introduction

(1998, pp. 282–283). In this book we seek, in part, to advance this mis-
sion by bringing together a series of timely and carefully selected essays
by scholars of digital cultures who are engaging with ideas about inti-
mate publics, ‘intimacy’ in its many forms in networked publics, and the
kind of ‘mass intimacy’ social media facilitates and commodifies. As the
chapters in this collection make clear, social media platforms are now
centrally part of the process whereby pedagogies of intimate life as life
itself are learnt, (re)constituted, (re)formed, contested, and disrupted.
The study of social media practices has come to offer unique insights
into the kinds of questions raised by Berlant, among other queer and
feminist theorists, about what happens to power dynamics when intimate
practices are made public, and about intimacy as public and political,
as defined and shaped by cultural politics and pedagogies, institutions,
technologies, as well as geographies. In the following chapter, we chart
a theory of digital intimate publics in more detail. We note, following
Berlant (2008), that ‘Intimate publics can be understood as scenes—
centred around media and culture—of the commodification of intimacy,
self, and political identities; pedagogical discipline about normativity
and normative intimate desires for different groups of subjects; as well
as scenes that promise and generate feelings of belonging and consola-
tion’. The intimate publics of social media are increasingly the grounds
of our identities, affects, and politics. They are reshaping the institu-
tions of public life. The exploration, expression, and experimentation
with the intimate that unfolds on social media is both conditioned by,
and challenging to, the hegemonic public sphere. Berlant’s (2008) hope-
fulness for intimate publics is their capacity to foster ‘a porous, affective
scene of identification’ for ‘nondominant people’. This is one part of
the promise of social media cultures that create, as Berlant notes of inti-
mate publics, an ‘experience of belonging’ and ‘a complex of consola-
tion, confirmation, discipline, and discussion about how to live as an x’
(2008, p. viii). And yet, social media are also machines through which
intimate practices are publicised, privatised, commodified, and exploited.
On these platforms, intimate life is increasingly recognisable to machines,
and algorithms shape and order intimate identities and experiences. The
ubiquitous presence of platforms in our day-to-day flows of attention
and feeling entangle them with the doing of ordinary intimacies, and also
with intimate invasions of violence and abuse.
We see important connections between the ideas of queer and femi-
nist theorists of intimate publics, and current debates about the meaning
 Introduction    xxi

and value of social media networked publics and communities. For these
reasons, we see the title of this book as a generative frame for scholar-
ship of digital cultures, one we theorise in more detail in the following
chapter. Intimacy, as it is constituted, lived, and commodified in digital
communities and publics, and impacted in particular by social media, is
a topic of increasing international interest. Debates about this are cur-
rently playing out in both scholarly and non-scholarly contexts, across a
range of topics and interests, including identity politics, work and labour,
health, sexuality, death, and everyday life. This collection operates across
and bridges these multiple interests and themes via the frame of ‘digital
intimate publics’.

The Background to this Book

This book began as a coming together of scholars over the past four
years at an annual symposium we’ve come to call ‘Digital Intimacies’.
The first two events were held at the University of Queensland in
2015 and 2016, supported by UQ’s Institute for Advanced Studies in
the Humanities, UQ’s School of Communication and Arts, and the
University of Tasmania’s School of Social Sciences. Several of the essays
in this book originated as papers from those first two symposia.
Following the success of these first two events, another was held in
Melbourne at RMIT in 2017, with support from the Monash University
School of Social Sciences. At the time of writing, another is planned for
2018 at Curtin University in Perth. These symposia have spanned multi-
ple institutions across Australia, and have drawn in more than 100 scholars
over the past four years. A particular feature of the symposia is the gather-
ing of a new formation of scholars, many early-career or emerging, whose
work sits at the intersection of digital cultures and multiple strands of the
humanities and social sciences: cultural studies, sociology, criminology, psy-
chology, media studies, design studies, education, and more. We acknowl-
edge the more recent input from co-convenors of these symposia, Jenny
Kennedy (RMIT in 2017) and Tama Leaver (Curtin in 2018).
The popularity and endurance of this event points toward the signifi-
cant critical mass of scholars doing research on digital mediations of inti-
mate life in Australia and the Asia-Pacific, as well as the critical currency,
importance, and innovation happening in the area of digital intimacies
research across the globe. We hope this book serves as a step in continu-
ing this tradition of research and critical thinking into the future.
xxii    Introduction

The Structure of the Book

The book is divided into three parts: ‘Shaping Intimacy’, ‘Public Bodies’,
and ‘Negotiating Intimacy’. Each part of the book overlaps and inter-
sects with the other parts, but we hope this three-part structure gives the
book an accessible shape and serves to guide readers through a diverse
range of nuanced and cutting-edge case studies, research projects, empir-
ical data, and theory.

Part I: Shaping Intimacy

The chapters in Part I take up two issues. The first is a critical consid-
eration of how the protocols, interfaces, algorithms, and commercial
imperatives of social media platforms shape intimacy. The second is a
reckoning with how relations of intimacy and publicness are performed
via the infrastructure of digital platforms and devices. What the chapters
jointly contribute is a techno-social understanding of digital intimate
publics. Public intimacies are no longer formed just by the circulation of
texts, but also by the increasingly nuanced relationship between humans
and machines, and their differing modes of judgment. On the one hand
platforms afford, enable, shape, and constrain intimacies; on the other,
public intimacies are an important training ground in the development
of platforms algorithms, protocols, and interfaces. The more that social
life is lived via platforms, the more platforms are designed to do intimacy,
as well as capture, analyse and modulate it. These chapters examine the
paradox of digital public intimacies that are interdependent with private
for-profit platforms.
In Chapter 1, we begin by mobilising the theoretical frame of ‘intimate
publics’ to help understand how contestations over power play out in
social media spaces where the public and private intermingle. We unpack
what is at stake in public discourses and debates about ‘oversharing’ and
social media ‘excesses’, suggesting the generative political potential of
attending to unpredictable intimacies on social media that extend beyond
the boundaries of couples, families, and even ‘communities’, following
Berlant and Warner (1998). We then chart conceptualisations of digital
intimacy as both social capital and labour, arguing for the need for digital
cultures research to hold these perspectives together. We draw together
important work on ‘strategic’ and ‘affective’ intimacies on social media,
and affective and immaterial labour. The social capital and labour involved
 Introduction    xxiii

in digital intimate publics is unevenly distributed and so, it follows, are

the potential rewards, affordances, harms, and exploitations. We argue
for a ‘politics of publicness’ in relation to social media as both space and
property.
In Chapter 2, Michael Salter makes a critical intervention into theo-
risation of social media public/private dialectics as co-constitutional. He
charts the way online platforms encourage affectively intense intimate
expressions, but then open them up to publicisation, abuse, commodi-
fication, and exploitation. We feel this dialectical tension in the ways in
which social media open up new forms of public and democratic expres-
sion at the same time as they reproduce social relations of dominance like
misogyny and capitalist instrumentality, as Salter explains. In his account,
social media are not just products of these historically produced relations,
they also play a critical role in naturalising them. To develop this argu-
ment, Salter draws on examples of non-consensual circulation of intimate
or private material, and related public concerns over ‘revenge porn’ and
‘sexting’. Salter’s crucial contribution is to alert us to the dialectical ten-
sions of digital intimacies: At the same time as they afford voices once
excluded from public life, they open up those very same voices to new
kinds of harms. In paying attention to this contradiction the historical
reproduction of power, and its materialisation in technology, is laid bare.
Grant Bollmer (Chapter 3) offers an account of how digital inti-
mate publics bring to the fore the way in which relations of intimacy are
marked by absence. Like Salter, Bollmer offers us a nuanced account of
the constitutive contradictions of digital intimacies. He argues that social
media platforms invoke intimacy, closeness, and connectivity as affects
that displace attention to the irreducible distance that characterises
intimate relations, given how they depend on mediations and material
infrastructure. Bollmer makes a simple but provocative claim: intimacy
is unbearable. As he illustrates, the stakes of this claim matter: intimacy
sits at the interface between self and other, inner and outer, reality and
fantasy. He articulates how our interest in intimacy today is driven in part
by our recognition that social media platforms commodify and colonise
our inner-most desires and efforts to connect with one another. Bollmer
challenges us to understand how the materiality of social media is con-
joined with the body and its capacities to affect and be affected. He
offers an account of social media that is deeply techno-social, alive to the
interplay between the affective capacities of bodies and the infrastructural
qualities of media.
xxiv    Introduction

In Chapter 4, Larissa Hjorth argues that selfies are an important mode

of bearing witness. She develops this account via examination of the post-
humous selfies of victims of the sinking of the Korean Sewol ferry in 2014.
Hjorth examines how selfies operate as modes of witness, crafting haunted
forms of presence and telepresence between the living and the dead. This
chapter emphasises the political and personal import of these media prac-
tices, powerfully debunking claims of selfies as trivial and mundane.
Brady Robards, Sian Lincoln, Benjamin Pinkard, and Jane Harris
(Chapter 5) explore the ways in which Facebook serves as an intimate
public for remembering personal histories. They introduce their inter-
view method of ‘scrolling back’ through Facebook with their research
participants, as a way of reflecting on the role of the platform in medi-
ating nostalgia, memory, and collective remembering. Robards et al.
consider examples of teenage ‘fandom phases’, friends changing their
profile pictures to remember deceased loved ones, through to more
banal images that prompt rich memory-work related to friends, family,
and important moments in their lives. They argue that collectively, these
examples indicate the significance of Facebook as an archive of memory,
albeit with significant limitations.
In Chapter 6, Dobson argues for an orientation of research into intimate
and sexual media practices around power and social justice. She frames such
practices in terms of their potential social and economic value, rather than
in terms of risks and pathologies. Dobson, however, points to the limits of
understanding sexting and other kinds of intimate media practices as ‘agen-
tic media production’, through a careful consideration of research into
girls’ and young women’s digital media cultures. She suggests a clear ori-
entation around social justice is imperative in the context of techno-social
relations centred around quantified hierarchies of visibility and status.
The chapters in this part each attend to the paradoxes and ambivalent
relations that exist in digital intimate publics between the private and
public, connection and apartness, social recognition and abuse, liveness
and deadness, agency and exploitation.

Part II: Public Bodies

In Part II, the chapters examine how bodies and embodied experiences
are publicised and performatively constituted. Several explore how social
media affords visibility and spaces of connection for marginalised bodies
and over peripheral interests.
 Introduction    xxv

Rob Cover opens this part in Chapter 7, where he investigates men’s

intimate digital webcamming practices. Cover argues that these prac-
tices challenge normative understandings of masculine heterosexuality
by drawing on examples of amateur sexual webcammers who identify as
heterosexual but perform sexual acts for a gay male spectatorship, and
engage in practices routinely coded as non-masculine and non-heterosex-
ual. In this chapter, Cover demonstrates that masculine heterosexuality
is not necessarily the site of a closed normativity but, instead, may be
heavily implicated in the production of ambiguity, post-binary gender
and sexuality, flexibility, and porousness.
Next, Adrienne Evans and Sarah Riley (Chapter 8) analyse the website
TubeCrush, where public transport commuters share and discuss images
of men on the London Underground. They argue that TubeCrush fore-
grounds commonalities in the desires of straight women and gay men,
bringing together intimate publics and ‘workplace affects’. Evans and
Riley carefully argue that TubeCrush provides a sense of sociality and
community, alleviating the alienation of the post-Fordist city. At the
same time, however, they point out that this connection is produced
through an online distribution of images that orients the user to norma-
tive desires, closing down more radical potentials.
In Chapter 9, Jozon A. Lorenzana examines the Twitter hash-
tag #WalangForever. This hashtag is popular among Filipino Twitter
users, and is based on a film of the same title. Lorenzana explains how
#WalangForever has generated a communicative space where Twitter
users make witty references to the movie as a way to express feelings and
experiences of heartbreak. In analysing the hashtag, Lorenzana considers
when and why young Filipinos use #WalangForever, finding that young
Filipinos create momentary intimacies on Twitter. Through its everyday
circulation, #WalangForever opens up discursive spaces to protest con-
temporary notions of love and relationships.
Mair Underwood (Chapter 10) undertakes an investigation of ‘Zyzz’
fandom, a community of young men who celebrate and draw life inspi-
ration from the now-deceased Australian recreational bodybuilder Aziz
Sergeyevich Shavershian. Underwood explores narratives of belonging
and solidarity within the fandom, with the goal of better understand-
ing homosocial gender relations between men in order to transform
gendered power relations. Underwood argues that aside from the overt
misogyny present within this digitally mediated community, there are
xxvi    Introduction

progressive elements of these homosocial relations, as Zyzz and his fans

are able to subvert and destabilise some performative aspects of hegem-
onic masculinity.
In Chapter 11, Matthew Hart explores young people’s nude selfie
sharing practices in Tumblr Not Safe for Work (NSFW) communities.
He considers how public displays of naked bodies on Tumblr figure
into a sense of both emotional and embodied ‘authenticity’, producing
an intimate public. Framing Tumblr as a safe space for young people
with diverse bodies and identities, Hart suggests that the platform can
work productively as a site for exploring desire and sexuality. He argues
that this analysis can speak back to negative media discourses that frame
naked self-representations as inherently risky.
In the final chapter in this part, Son Vivienne (Chapter 12) sets out
and draws on a social media storytelling initiative called Stories Beyond
Gender. Vivienne is particularly interested in how gender-diverse and
transgender people might engage with social media in identity explora-
tion while facilitating collective ‘world building’ practices. The case study
is centred on workshops undertaken in regional and urban centres in
South Australia, where participants experimented with different forms of
self-expression from Twitter poetry to creating memes, blogging about
how abstract experiments can come to represent fragmentation and
fluidity in gender identity.

Part III: Negotiating Intimacy

In Part III of the book, the final five chapters examine how intimacy is
negotiated in a range of digital social spaces, from queer hook-ups and
#GamerGate, to funeral recordings on YouTube. This part is concerned
with the rules and conventions that govern our digital intimacies.
In Chapter 13, Paul Byron and Kath Albury draw on research from
their study into how same-sex attracted young people use dating and
hook-up apps. Their participants suggest that these apps are unregulated
spaces that require users to develop their own rules and codes of con-
duct. Byron and Albury consider a range personal rules that have evolved
through the use of dating and hook-up apps. As they demonstrate, dat-
ing and hook-up apps afford much surveillance and discipline (of self and
others), through which codes of conduct are continually produced, chal-
lenged, and revised.
 Introduction    xxvii

In Chapter 14, Amanda Elliot delves into the highly contentious and
vitriolic Gamergate phenomenon to provide a rich and nuanced history
of the phenomenon, and how the video game industry is deeply impli-
cated in it. As Elliot explains, Gamergate sparked a series of flashpoint
issues within the sector, including the exclusionary nature of a ‘core’
gamer identity, resistance to non-technical, cultural, and gendered cri-
tiques of video games, and the gendered employment practices of this
post-Fordist industry. Elliot pertinently argues that the phenomenon of
Gamergate should be seen as deeply connected to transformations in the
nature of economic activity and labour post-Fordism, and the marketing
practices of the industry.
Earvin Cabalquinto (Chapter 15) considers the role social media play
in maintaining connections between Overseas Filipino Workers and their
families at home. Cabalquinto explains how Facebook in particular stirs
‘contradictory affective experiences’ and ‘ambivalent intimacies’ where
social media connects but also reminds people of the distance between
them and their loved ones. He explores the entanglement of ‘pains’ and
‘gains’ of Facebook use, shaped by the interdependence of gendered
familial expectations and socio-economic conditions in transnational
Filipino family life.
In Chapter 16, Jenny Kennedy seeks to answer the question: is
oversharing—sharing ‘too much’ on social media—such a bad thing?
Kennedy argues that the notion of oversharing as simply being public
with what ought to be private is limiting and neglects the complex social
relations and desires being enacted in the process of sharing on social
media. In digital spaces, there is constant negotiation of what it means to
be a digital subject. Kennedy argues that oversharing is a process of this
negotiation. She explores the ways in which oversharing is indicative of
desires for belonging and connection, and considers whether oversharing
can be a productive and potentially rewarding practice.
To close the book, in Chapter 17, Margaret Gibson and Golie Talaie
consider the mediation of intimacy in a funeral recording shared and dis-
cussed on YouTube, several years after the funeral took place. Gibson
and Talaie draw on the comments from strangers on the YouTube
video—and the responses from the mother of the boy whose death the
funeral video marks—to develop a broader argument about what they
describe as an ‘age of extimacy’. They explain that this age of extimacy
is characterised by personalised intimacy routinely exchanged between
xxviii    Introduction

strangers through social media. Gibson and Talaie suggest that these
kinds of digital traces constitute ‘digital archives of sadness’, valuable for
demystifying bereavement experiences.
Each of the seventeen chapters that make up this book are grounded
in timely, engaging case studies, and research that will appeal to a wide
audience of readers with an interest in how intimate lives are played
out, shared, commodified, exploited, and reflected upon in social
media spaces. The cases and data at the core of each chapter are drawn
from Australia, the UK, the Philippines, South Korea, and of course in
international digital spaces that cross national boundaries. The collec-
tion breaks new ground in how we think about social media, and takes
account of social media structures and technical infrastructures, together
with the modes of innovative participation and generative politics flour-
ishing in relation to it. We hope you enjoy reading theses contributions
as much as we have enjoyed bringing them together here.

Amy Shields Dobson

Brady Robards
Nicholas Carah

References
Berlant, L. (2008). The Female Complaint. Durham and London: Duke.
Berlant, L. (1998). Intimacy: A Special Issue. Critical Inquiry, 24(2), 281–288.
 PART I

Shaping Intimacy
 CHAPTER 1

Digital Intimate Publics and Social Media:

Towards Theorising Public Lives on Private
Platforms

Amy Shields Dobson, Nicholas Carah and Brady Robards

We usually think about intimacy as to do with our private, personal

lives, as describing feelings and relationships that are most inner, most
‘inward to one’s personhood’ (McGlotten 2013, p. 1), and concerned
with relationships that are most important to us. Sociologists have the-
orised intimacy as centrally involving mutual self-disclosure (Giddens
1992), time spent in co-presence, physical affection, and acts of practi-
cal care (Jameison 2011). But, as queer theory and sexuality studies tell
us, intimacy is very much socially sanctioned, defined by institutions,
laws, and normative social pressures (Berlant 1998; Plummer 2003).

A. S. Dobson (*)
Curtin University, Perth, WA, Australia
e-mail: amy.dobson@curtin.edu.au
N. Carah
University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
e-mail: n.carah@uq.edu.au
B. Robards
Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
e-mail: brady.robards@monash.edu
© The Author(s) 2018 3
A. S. Dobson et al. (eds.), Digital Intimate Publics and Social Media,
Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97607-5_1
4 A. S. DOBSON ET AL.

The sociology of intimacy helps illuminate what, specifically and empiri-

cally, is involved in the doing of intimacy in different places and cultures,
and for different genders, classes, and social groups. Queer and feminist
critical cultural theorists like Berlant have explained how, in late modern
cultures, having a ‘life’ has become equated with having an intimate life
(Berlant 1998, p. 282). Further, as Cefai and Couldry note, ‘What queer
theory has taught us is that heteronormativity shapes what can appear
to us as “intimate” even in settings where questions of sexual identity
are typically not articulated as such’ (2017, p. 2). Understandings of inti-
macy are culturally and socially specific, rather than ‘global’ or ‘universal’
(Jameison 2011). However, in many places right now intimacy names
‘the affective encounters with others that often matter most’ (McGlotten
2013, p. 1). From the perspective of poststructuralist queer and feminist
theory, producing intimacy can be understood as part of subjectification
processes that centrally involve the hierarchical ordering of relationships
and psychic concerns, in socially legible ways, in order to make sense of
ourselves and those around us. How social media figures in such pro-
cesses of psychically and materially ordering relationships and shaping
what appears as intimate is part of what we consider in this collection. In
this chapter, and this collection more broadly, we are interested in how
social media practices challenge and disrupt, as well as how they rein-
force and concretise (hetero)normative notions of intimacy as a concept
that creates boundaries around certain relationships and ethics of care.
Social media are now centrally involved in processes whereby pedagogies
of intimate life as life itself are learnt, reproduced, given value, contested,
and exploited.

Theorising Digital Intimate Publics

Excessive and Ambivalent Publicisation

Shaka McGlotten (2013, p. 2) argues that social concerns and ‘techno-
phobic panics’ about the impact of new technologies on our lives have
always turned on questions of intimacy. These concerns are intensified
by the ubiquity of smartphones, social media, and hook-up apps. ‘Virtual
intimacies’, McGlotten suggests, are often publicly constructed as ‘failed
intimacies that disrupt the flow of a good life lived right, that is, a life
that involves coupling and kids, or at least, coupling and consumption’
(2013, p. 7). Other scholars of digital intimacies have observed similarly
 1 DIGITAL INTIMATE PUBLICS AND SOCIAL MEDIA … 5

derisive cultural attitudes towards digital, mediated, and ‘virtual’ forms

of intimacy as potentially ‘diminished and dangerous corruption[s] of the
real thing’ (McGlotten 2013, p. 7; see also Attwood 2006; Chambers
2013; Jamieson 2013; Hobbs et al. 2016). However, intimacies medi-
ated via contemporary social media platforms need to be understood not
only in relation to moral panics over the potential weakening of social
ties and intimate relations in the digital age, but also in relation to the
commodification of relationships built into social media platform infra-
structure; that is, in relation to privately owned platforms as places where
(hetero)normativities and ‘good lives’ are represented, circulated, consti-
tuted, and sold (back) to us (Bucher 2012; Dean 2010; Van Dijk 2013;
Marwick 2013; Duffy and Hund 2015). In short, digital intimate pub-
lics, like the intimate publics Berlant (2008) describes as constituted via
other kinds of mass media address and representation, are complex and
‘ambivalent’ (Banet-Weiser 2012) in their aesthetics and politics.
Berlant (2008) describes the creation of intimate publics through
mass media discourses and texts as scenes of mass intimacy, identification,
and subjectification. An intimate public operates, she suggests, ‘when a
market opens up to a block of consumers, claiming to circulate texts and
things that express those people’s particular core interests and desires’
(2008, p. 5). Intimate publics create shared worldviews and shared emo-
tional knowledge. They are ‘a space of mediation in which the personal
is refracted through the general’ (2008, p. viii). An intimate public, she
writes, ‘flourishes as a porous, affective scene of identification among
strangers that promises a certain experience of belonging and provides
a complex of consolation, confirmation, discipline, and discussion about
how to live as an “x”’ (2008, p. viii). Intimate publics can be under-
stood as scenes—centred around media and culture—of the commodi-
fication of intimacy, self, and political identities; pedagogical discipline
about normativity and normative intimate desires for different groups of
subjects; as well as cultural scenes that promise and generate feelings of
belonging and consolation.
Such scenes now play out across social and mobile media, as the
chapters in this collection illustrate vividly. Social media, as Hjorth and
Arnold (2013, p. 125) argue, ‘constitute a new socio-technical insti-
tutionalisation of public intimacy’. Some scholars have suggested that
new modes of intimacy and visual sexual practices are emerging due
to a confluence of social, historical, material and design ‘actants’ (Race
2015; Dowsett 2015; Cover, this volume; Hart, this volume). In more
6 A. S. DOBSON ET AL.

mundane, less spectacular ways, the social and cultural meaning of ‘inti-
macy’ is currently being contested and struggled over via debates about
and use of social media. Media commentary about social media fre-
quently air concerns about the ‘excessive’ publicisation of intimate rela-
tions and experiences. Are people ‘oversharing’ information deemed
personal (see Kennedy, this volume)? Do they speak too publicly, too
frequently, or share too many images documenting aspects of everyday
life deemed pedestrian, mundane, uninteresting or crass? Concerns fre-
quently revolve around the possibility that social media makes it possible
for people to: document the routines of their everyday lives (Kofoed and
Larsen 2016); fashion themselves as micro-celebrities and seek ‘atten-
tion’ (Senft 2008; Marwick and boyd 2011; Abidin 2016); view and
share images of sex and bodies (Mulholland 2013; Albury 2015; Dobson
2015); and, that young people in particular are harmed by sharing
images of their own bodies and sexuality (Ringrose et al. 2013; Albury
2015; Dobson and Ringrose 2016; Dobson and Coffey 2015). Such
concerns are symptomatic of cultural contestations over the meaning of
intimacy in the era of social media. These concerns revolve around the
moralisation of certain ‘excesses’: of personal information, images, bod-
ies, self-images, emotions (Hendry 2014). Further, public self-telling and
display are coded as ‘excessive’ and pathological for some bodies, while
celebrated for others in ways that are deeply structured by gender, race,
and class (Senft 2012; Skeggs and Woods 2012; Pitcan et al. 2018).
The theoretical frame of ‘intimate publics’ helps us think about how
contestations over power play out in the generative, liminal space where
the public and private intermingle. Berlant and Warner (1998) advo-
cate for a publicisation of the intimate that speaks against privatisation,
in the sense of both space and property, with an understanding of the
deep connection between the prioritisation of private property rights and
private (heteronormative) spaces and familial relations. In their account,
the politics of intimacy in public, beyond seeking safety and acceptance
of a range of sexual and gender practices and identities, is about ‘the
changed possibilities of identity, intelligibility, publics, culture, and sex
that appear when the heterosexual couple is no longer the referent or the
privileged example of sexual culture’ (1998, p. 548). They advocate then
for a ‘publicisation’ of not just sex, but other significant forms of care,
love, and intimacy, with a view to imagining attachments and relations
beyond the domain of private, heterosexual, family life, and even beyond
‘communities’; towards reimagining ourselves as part of broader publics
 1 DIGITAL INTIMATE PUBLICS AND SOCIAL MEDIA … 7

and counter-publics with capacities for less-bounded forms of intimate

care and pleasure.
On social media platforms, communication and representational prac-
tices related to politics, civic action, work, creativity, social belonging,
relationality, friendship, family, desire, and intimacy often intermingle
and even co-constitute one another. The tensions between ‘public’ and
‘private’ produced by communicating in a digital space of ‘collapsed’,
flattened social contexts (Marwick and boyd 2011) are dynamic, com-
plex, and ambivalent in terms of the risks and opportunities engendered
for individuals. Things get especially risky for those marginalised along
lines of gender and sexual identity, race, and class (Duguay 2014; Rubin
and McClelland 2015; Vivienne 2016; Pitcan et al. 2018). Nonetheless,
the way people use social media makes it increasingly difficult to sustain
the illusory separation of politics from intimate life, of both ‘chosen’ and
‘unchosen’ identities from politics, and the illusion of the ‘private’ heter-
onormative family as the ideal primary source of intimacy and pleasure,
rather than broader communities and publics. Beyond the visual display
of social connections, being able to trace the words of care and support
that people share with each other, read about people’s crises and chal-
lenges at work, with family and loved ones, unforeseen health problems
and accidents, as well as seeing when and how certain identities, images,
words or interactions results in conflict and abuse, raise a potentially
important challenge, if we recognise it as such, to the hetero-patriarchal
framework of privatised intimacy, boxed and bounded within families,
that Berlant and Warner (1998) critique.
Further, Berlant calls for a consideration of less organised, ‘more
mobile processes of attachment’ in imagining forms of intimacy out-
side normative relational forms and beyond the purview of institutions,
states, nations, and ‘an ideal of publicness’ (Berlant 1998, p. 284). More
recently, and specifically in relation to digital cultures and social media,
McGlotten theorises ‘virtual intimacy’ as a means to imagine and recu-
perate ‘forms of connection and belonging that are not necessarily iden-
titarian and that do not fit neatly into our beliefs about how we might
belong to a couple, a family, or nation’ (McGlotten 2013, pp. 10–11).
In theorising power and the inscription of intimacy via social and mobile
media, Lasen and Hjorth (2017) note the political importance of ‘shifts
in the regime of attention—in what is perceived, noticed, and affec-
tively witnessed’ (Lasen and Hjorth 2017, p. 130). What are the power
dynamics thrown into question through the kind of everyday, mundane,
8 A. S. DOBSON ET AL.

excessive, and intimate ‘digital inscriptions’ (Lasen and Hjorth 2017)

made by and on social and mobile media, and the associated shifts in the
‘regime of attention’?
In this chapter and this collection, we are interested in the possibili-
ties engendered by social media for intimacies that are not fully realised
yet, not captured by form or discourse, not overdetermined with nor-
mative meanings. More mobile, less organised forms of attachment can
and do form on social media platforms. We see it as important to name
and theorise the productive possibilities of such, especially in the context
of—not despite—social media platforms’ private for-profit ownership, and
platform infrastructures that are designed to exploit people’s data, time,
attention, and affective capacities. Noticing and naming more mobile
processes of attachment, forms of connection that ‘don’t fit’, shifts in the
‘regime of attention’—what we might broadly call ‘queer intimacies and
attachments’ on social media—has become extra-significant to aesthetic
and political processes because of the importance of human attention to
algorithmic machine learning. But crucially, we must hold on to the dou-
ble sense of public as referring to both space and property ownership. In
the context of social media’s digital intimate publics that means critically
examining the relationship between the political valence of public perfor-
mances of all kinds of intimacy on platforms that privatise, as in commer-
cialise and take ownership of, that intimacy.

Excessive, Unambivalent, Privatisation

Machine learning generates new and complicated paradoxes in relation
to the institutionalisation of public intimacy via social media. On the one
hand, the algorithmic architecture of social media platforms can be seen
as a powerful tool for reproducing normative identities and intimacies,
because algorithms are programmed to extend, rather than disrupt, flows
of attention. On the other hand, a social media platform can enable a
wider array of non-dominant intimacies and identities because it has the
technical capacity to mass-customise attention. The commercial models
of social media depend on deeper, faster, and richer flows of affect, atten-
tion, and expression. There are two ways in which intimate encounters
and self-representations on social media generate value. First, by gen-
erating more and/or deeper social connections; and second, by gener-
ating more and/or deeper platform ‘engagement’ (time spent paying
attention and generating data). The generation of both kinds of value are
 1 DIGITAL INTIMATE PUBLICS AND SOCIAL MEDIA … 9

explicitly intertwined on social media. With this in mind, we can begin to

ask about the ways in which certain kinds of embodied interactions and
intimate self-telling and displays in digital spaces become coded as both
normative and valuable.
The function and politics of this value are often understood quite dif-
ferently via a common dichotomy of disciplinary concerns. Sociological
and cultural studies concerns often centre around people’s digital media
participation practices, habits, and identities, while critical media studies
of digital cultures often centre on the political economy of data and social
media platforms. For scholars concerned primarily with the dynamics and
nuances of people’s social media participation and content production,
digital intimacies can be understood as constitutive of a kind of social cap-
ital that structures experiences and mobilisations of intimacy, identity,
and belonging, and that can be mobilised potentially into other kinds of
capital (Hopkins and Ryan 2014; Harvey and Ringrose 2015; Lambert
2016; Abidin 2018; Raun 2018; Berryman and Kavka 2018; Dobson,
this volume). When people’s sharing practices are viewed primarily in
relation to the commercial business models of social media, intimate
communication can be seen as a kind of free labour (Terranova 2000;
Andrejevic 2011; Jarrett 2016; Athique 2017). That is, the media prac-
tices involved in the doing of intimacy online double as the generation of
valuable content, attention, social networks, and data. Social media can
be critically understood as machines that capture and channel the human
capacity to affect one another (Clough 2009; Dean 2010; Carah 2014).
In the sections that follow, we outline in more detail these two crit-
ically important perspectives on social media’s digital intimate publics:
digital intimacy as social capital and digital intimacy as labour. We high-
light the need to hold these together in order to help us think through
the constitution of digital intimacies on social media as intertwined pro-
cesses of human socialisation, subjectification, algorithmic sorting, and
machine learning (Bucher 2012, 2017; Carah and Dobson 2016; Carah
and Angus 2018). We intend these perspectives to take up both parts
of a conceptualisation of public intimacy in terms of space and property
(Fraser 1990; Berlant and Warner 1998; Warner 2002; Berlant 2008).
We go on to argue towards a ‘politics of publicness’ on these two fronts.
In the sections below we suggest that beyond requiring new, often
nuanced, modulations of intimacy-related norms, the digital intimate
publics of social media might, in their excesses and transgressions, also
productively provoke an explicit questioning of, or challenge, to (hetero)
10 A. S. DOBSON ET AL.

normative intimate relational norms and hierarchies. However, we also

chart the political risks of digital intimate publics and their excesses, as
they congeal into privately owned and controlled platform infrastruc-
tures. The political challenge then is to imagine and cultivate public
intimacies where both the relations and performative practices and their
infrastructure are publicly held.

Digital Intimacy as Social Capital

Social media powerfully represent, facilitate, and archive people’s social
and emotional investments. This is part of what has made them so suc-
cessful. Bollmer (this volume) argues that intimacy is a ‘structure of feel-
ing’ often arranged more around the imagined presence of others and
longings for connection, rather than around direct reciprocity. Searches
for, and imaginations of, the ‘good life’ promised by intimacy is part
of what keeps people logging on (McGlotten 2013, p. 135). Robards
(2014), for example, has written about how Facebook has capitalised on
the long-term use of the site, by packaging and repackaging historical
digital traces of users’ lives and relationships, and resurfacing these for
users through ‘look back’ videos, ‘year in review’ functions, and ‘on this
day’ posts. Robards and Lincoln (2016, 2017) study how people make
sense of their own social media archives, to remember past relationships
and connections, revisit teenage years, and also to erase the past to pre-
pare for imagined futures (see also Robards et al., this volume). Hopkins
and Ryan (2014) suggest that fostering affective connections and social
belonging through practices of sharing self-images, jokes, and memes on
Facebook is key to social mobility for the young people in their study
from profoundly disadvantaged rural areas, starting university together.
Facebook, they suggest, provides these young people with a vital means
of building community, support networks, and confidence before enter-
ing university. What these kind of examples make clear are the affective,
potentially enduring charges associated with intimate and everyday shar-
ing on social media.
Some emergent empirical work is also mapping ways in which people
form unpredictable, strange, and mobile connections and attachments,
as well as potentially new kinds of kinship groups and communities.
For example, Andreassen (2017) suggests that new family and kinship
groups are forming online in relation to intimate public donor sibling
groups on Facebook and extended donor sibling families. Evans and
 1 DIGITAL INTIMATE PUBLICS AND SOCIAL MEDIA … 11

Riley (this volume) theorise the intimate public of female commuters in

London that has formed on TubeCrush.com, a site dedicated to admir-
ing the bodies of men on the London Tube. Underwood (this volume)
investigates the gender politics of the online global community of
young men that connect over a shared love of ‘Zyzz’—bodybuilder Aziz
Shavershian who died of a heart attack at the age of 22, in 2011. She
notes the intensity of emotion that young, often socially marginalised
men are able to express to each other around this now somewhat myth-
ological figure. Vivienne (2016) documents digital storytelling practices
by LGBTQI parents and families, HIV positive people, and LGBTQI
people from rural areas and Islamic countries. For such individuals, sim-
ply telling stories from their daily lives on digital platforms constitutes a
form of ‘everyday activism’ and contributes to shifting notions of family
and society. Such sharing practices, Vivienne argues, thus have a politics
that extends beyond the individual. These are just a few brief examples
of research mapping the ways in which people share and connect over
interests, experiences, and identities on social media, in ways that facil-
itate, or perhaps promise to facilitate, some sense of shared knowledge
and belonging, as well as having political valence.
As Illouz reminds us, ‘for a particular form of cultural behaviour to
become a capital, it must be convertible into economic and social ben-
efits’ (2007, p. 63). Social media connections, attachments, relations,
and the kind of ‘everyday activism’ that can be involved in intimate
world-building through digital media does not always convert directly
into capital or social mobility. The point of conceptualising digital inti-
macies as potentially a kind of social capital, or as key to its acquisition,
is to highlight such media practices as valuable resources for people,
and unevenly distributed ones (Lambert 2016; Dobson, this volume).
Intimacy can be seen as a resource tied to knowledge and power because,
as feminists have long pointed out, we are not only ‘rational’ thinkers
and decision makers, but beings with significant social and emotional
investments, whose actions and biographies are informed and consti-
tuted by these investments, rather than by ‘purely’ cognitive processes.
As Illouz suggests, one’s emotional attitude and ‘style’ define one’s social
identity, and is crucial to ‘how people acquire networks’ and build social
capital (Illouz 2007, p. 66). Illouz argues that over the course of the
twentieth century, particularly in relation to the rise and popularisation
of therapeutic language and psychology as a formalised discipline, a par-
ticular emotional style has become valued and valuable. She suggests that
12 A. S. DOBSON ET AL.

being able to narrate the self in ways that constitute it as a ‘transparent’

and ‘authentic’ expression of ‘internality’ has become a cultural precon-
dition of forms of happiness and well-being. Key to Illouz’s argument
is that therapeutic language and the particular form of emotional habi-
tus it has produced as culturally valued is not merely a ploy to discipline
subjects and pathologise those unable to conform, but is a resource that
is good for ‘addressing the volatile nature of selfhood and of social rela-
tionships in late modernity’ (2007, p. 71). Illouz helps us understand the
social, material, and psychological stakes of getting a ‘transparent’ emo-
tional habitus ‘right’ in one’s social context.
Lambert’s findings on how people learn to negotiate intimacy in
digital spaces make clear the complexity and nuance involved in nego-
tiating emotional style and habitus via social media. Participants in his
study were ‘highly wary’ of the kind of ‘unashamed’ public intimacy,
attention-grabbing, and ‘overtly emotional confessions’ that have been
the source prominent public discourse about the excesses of social media
(2016, p. 2568; see also Kennedy, this volume). Public declarations of
love for partners and close friends, and of sadness and longing for rela-
tives living far away were given as examples by his participants of ‘overly
intimate’ sharing that, Lambert suggests, alienated the Facebook users
with whom he spoke. Sharing about daily consumption practices, such as
meals, was seen as ‘mundanely personal, rather than interpersonal’, and
thus ‘not intimate enough’ (2016, p. 2568) by his participants. Lambert
suggests that ‘rewarding’ performances of connection on Facebook com-
monly occur through light-hearted, playful, and gregarious emotional
tones. He proposes the concept of ‘intimacy capital’ as a recognition
that ‘the cultural and socio-technical competencies required to negoti-
ate intimacy and thus have rewarding and “safe” exchanges on Facebook
are not distributed evenly in society’, and people negotiate intimacy on
social media differently based on cultural and socio-economic back-
ground, levels of education, and digital literacy (2016, p. 2571).
The conversion of a ‘transparent’ emotional style, and intimate rev-
elations and performances on social media into social capital is perhaps
most obviously notable in relation to micro-celebrities and influencers
(Marwick 2015; Abidin 2018). Recent research in this area makes clear,
however, that intimate public revelations and performances need to be
understood beyond simple dichotomies of ‘strategic’ or ‘instrumental’
versus ‘authentic’, ‘affective’ intimacy. Raun (2018), for instance, exam-
ines transgender vlogger Julie Van Vu as a subcultural micro-celebrity
 1 DIGITAL INTIMATE PUBLICS AND SOCIAL MEDIA … 13

who he suggests transgresses this dichotomy. Vu combines activism,

affective connection, and overt monetisation through product place-
ments and sponsorships. In filming her pubic hair laser removal along
with breast augmentation surgery, and other transgender surgical pro-
cesses, Vu’s content ‘appears simultaneously as personal life-story tell-
ing, knowledge sharing and product placement’ (2018, p. 104). Raun
(2018) suggests what matters is ‘not whether the intimacy commu-
nicated is authentic or not’ but rather how it works as a genre in the
techno-cultural setting, creating and channelling the expectations,
attachments, and affects of one’s audience adeptly. Berryman and Kavka
(2018) analyse ‘crying vlogs’ and ‘anxiety vlogs’ by well-known young
female beauty vloggers on YouTube, where young women film them-
selves breaking down in tears, or describing their psychological and bod-
ily insecurities. They suggest that such videos may have lower advertising
revenue potential within the economic structure of YouTube. However,
crying and anxiety blogs can function as a means of demonstrating
vloggers’ ‘authenticity’, and thus fostering valuable intimacy between
vloggers and their audience. They suggest such vlogs also function as
emotional outlets for the vloggers in visual social media cultures struc-
tured by a perceived compulsory emotional ‘positivity’, and dominated
by emotional tones of ‘the aspirational and the comic’ (2018, p. 86; see
also, Marwick 2015; Kanai, in press).
These ‘negative affect vlogs’, along with other research such as
Lambert’s, and recent practices like ‘finstagram’ (fake Instagram)
accounts, then also speak to the perception of an overly-­ prescriptive
emotional habitus on social media platforms as required to mobi-
lise and build social capital. The kind of positive, aspirational, and
chipper-­ and-playful but not-overly-emotional affective style noted by
Lambert (2016) and the other scholars cited above as ‘normative’ in
facilitating ‘rewarding’ interactions on social media is commonly associ-
ated with, and more easily within reach of, certain bodies with certain
social histories, over others. We suggest that a classed, raced, and gen-
dered emotional habitus, profoundly entwined with people’s ability to
belong and to acquire social capital, is being constituted, judged, evalu-
ated, and struggled over via public discourses as well as private and psy-
chic musings around ‘oversharing’, excess, and the digital mediation of
intimacies on social media. Drawing on Illouz and on sociological and
cultural research into digital intimacies, we can begin to think about
what it is that people navigate in order to develop a ‘valuable’ emotional
14 A. S. DOBSON ET AL.

habitus in digital intimate publics. We can begin to imagine the kind of

digital, emotional, and psychosocial literacies that come into play when
making subtle distinctions and fast, often less-than-conscious, choices
about intimate sharing in networked publics. These are distinctions and
choices about the kind of sharing, liking, tagging, and commenting that
humanises an individual and strengthens belonging among those with
whom it is needed, desired, and valuable, and the kind of intimate shar-
ing and relationality that conversely provokes discomfort, disgust, bore-
dom, annoyance, exclusion, rejection, pathologisation, and feelings of
shame that may be associated with the judgement of being ‘excessive’
(Senft 2012). Socially marginalised bodies and groups have particular
investments in working out the subtle differences between a valuable
‘network building’ emotional habitus online and a potentially detrimen-
tal, pathologised one.

Beyond Social Capital, Towards an Ethics

of Expanded Care?

In conceptualising digital intimacies as potential social capital, or at

least, as deeply implicated in the acquisition of it, the temptation/risk is
then to frame ‘intimacy capital’ as the ‘new good literacy’ that people of
‘diverse backgrounds’ need to somehow develop. Following the queer
and feminist theoretical trajectories signalled above, we are led to ques-
tions such as: Do marginalised people and groups require more ‘intimacy
capital’ and ‘digital literacy’ to publicly thrive? Does ‘intimacy capital’ as
a perceived good too easily dovetail with individual responsibilisation dis-
courses and victim blaming/shaming when public intimacy online ‘goes
wrong’? Is the kind of ‘intimacy capital’ gestured to by Lambert and oth-
ers akin to heteronormative social reproduction in digital spaces (Jarret
2016)? A more transformative politics of digital intimate publics might
move towards an ethics of expanded care and radical shamelessness (Senft
2012; Dobson 2015) in relation to public intimate traces, disclosures,
and performances for anybody who desires or needs such; towards cul-
tures where intimacies and emotional styles of diverse kinds can be per-
formed publicly without shame or judgement. We suggest such moves
centrally involve considerations of/attention to ‘more mobile processes
of attachment’ (Berlant 1998), shifts in the ‘regime of attention’ (Lasen
and Hjorth 2017), and ‘queer intimacies and attachments’, as well as
 1 DIGITAL INTIMATE PUBLICS AND SOCIAL MEDIA … 15

‘intimacy glitches’: small mistakes, and social missteps that might pro-
voke us to question the boundaries of our care and pleasure. Perhaps it is
when people get normative intimacy ‘wrong’ that there are nascent pos-
sibilities and generative spaces opened up for questioning the underlying
value/s of such. We suggest, in short, the importance of making space in
debates about ‘oversharing’ and social media excesses to critically ques-
tion what counts as normative intimacy what does not, and the politics
of this.
Social media platforms are spaces of interaction where social con-
texts (family, work, school, sexuality, subcultural interests, and so on) are
often quite radically collapsed, as we’ve mentioned, and often such con-
text-collapse becomes an involuntary precondition of participation, or
is at least only partially conscious, controlled, and consensual (Marwick
and boyd 2011). In such collapsed contexts, an expanded ethics of care
and pleasure beyond ‘intimates’ and even beyond ‘communities’ (Berlant
and Warner 1998) becomes all the more important. In digital intimate
publics we are sometimes proximate to, witness to, and called or ‘tagged’
to others’, sometimes effusive, expressions of love, pleasure, pain, suffer-
ing, and need from a network of friends, colleagues, acquaintances, fam-
ily members, and others in a digital network with whom we are close and
not so close. The now-normative collapsed contexts of social media do
not mean the loss of all hierarchy in personal relationships and the loss
of all contextual meaning in the ways in which people share and inter-
pret the shared and exposed data of those around them (Albury 2017).
But it does perhaps warrant an expanded ethics of care, of ‘queer com-
raderies and generosity’ (Warner, cited in Albury 2017, p. 720), and
potentially new digital intimacy practices and modulations that cross
(hetero)normative boundaries of intimates and non-intimates and may
transgress emergent intimacy norms. Digital intimate publics call for a
consideration of how to make space for, and be generous towards, the
excesses of girls, of queers, of gushing mothers, lovers, and ‘weird’ social
media friends who don’t know (remembering the complexities of habitus
knowledge) what to comment on and what to scroll past without leaving
a trace; from the excesses and transgressions of queer and trans micro-­
celebrities (Raun 2018) to those of girls uploading selfies (Abidin 2016),
crying, and asking ‘Am I pretty or ugly?’ (Dobson 2015; Berryman and
Kavka 2018), to the kind of ‘everyday activism’ of LGBTQI communi-
ties and families who make their everyday lives publicly visible (Vivienne
2016). They call for a consideration of how to ethically witness, and
16 A. S. DOBSON ET AL.

sometimes respond, to those around us who are compelled to, who need
to, or who less-than-consciously ‘collapse’ their broadcast contexts and
publicly ‘overshare’, seek help, care, pleasure, and attention (that dirty
word) from the digital intimate publics around them.
We intend these thoughts as generative suggestions; ones that require
much further development and fleshing out (that is, grounding in the
experience of bodies) via theory and research. In the sections above we
have mapped a conceptualisation of digital intimacy as potential social
capital, and tried to think through some of the ways in which developing
or acquiring it involves learning about, co-creating, and practising norms
and new modulations of intimacy. On social media this happens through
the registration of embodied affects and relations of attention in platform
databases, as we explain below in further charting a conceptualisation of
digital intimacy as labour.

Digital Intimacy as Labour

The feminist critique of the immaterial, emotional, and affective labour
of social reproduction offers a foundation for conceptualising digital inti-
macy as labour that needs to go hand in hand with conceptualisations
of digital intimacy as social capital. What such critique helps illuminate
is how the intimate labour of care and of producing and maintain-
ing shared feelings, affects, and intimate and social relations becomes
more productive under conditions of digital capitalism. In being made
productive, practices of digital intimacy lose important aspects of their
publicness. The labour of intimacy sustains the business model of social
media platforms. But, as Jarrett argues, that does not mean ‘immaterial
labour was only “invented” when it moved out of the kitchen and onto
the internet’ (2014, p. 15). Feminists have illuminated how, in spheres
of intimate life and caring practices, gendered labour practices have long
been deeply entwined with emotions and sociality, so that rather than
‘alienated’ from the labour of the household and care, female subjects
feel deeply and authentically engaged in such labour (Weeks 2007).
Jarret (2016) applies these insights directly to digital and social media.
She argues that the affective and immaterial labour integral to domestic
work is ‘precisely the kind of labour involved in the economically signif-
icant social networks of digital media’ (2016, p. 5). Practices of digital
intimacy, following Jarret, are mostly unpaid, and stem from relations of
care, enjoyment, and social recognition. They are motivated by the desire
 1 DIGITAL INTIMATE PUBLICS AND SOCIAL MEDIA … 17

to affect and be affected. Domestic, affective, and immaterial labour have

been understood by feminist scholars as animated by a tension between
the social meaning and agency that can emerge from relations and prac-
tices of care, and the exploitation of women in social reproduction. For
Jarret, it is this same tension that animates the politics of digital media
(2016, p. 11). Feminist critiques of affective labour then offer a criti-
cal starting point for understanding digital intimacy as labour, because
any claim about the exploitative qualities of digital intimacy on commer-
cial media platforms must proceed from the acknowledgement of this
tension.
Terranova’s (2000) concept of ‘free labour’ offers a critical early
intervention in debates about the appropriation of the affective labour
of social reproduction in the digital economy. She ‘identified the role of
voluntary, unpaid contributions’ of internet users (Jarrett 2014, p. 16),
demonstrating how their social capacities shaped the emerging digi-
tal media platforms. Crucially, their activity was ‘free’ in a double sense:
both freely given and unpaid, simultaneously enjoyed and exploited
(Terranova 2000; Jarrett 2014). Andrejevic (2011) argues that ‘free’
labour, even though it may be chosen, pleasurable, and socially and polit-
ically meaningful, is simultaneously exploited. He argues that ‘the mere
fact someone benefits from the efforts of another does not, in itself, con-
stitute exploitation’ and suggests that we consider exploitation as a situa-
tion characterised by a ‘loss of control over one’s productive and creative
activities’. Thus, it is possible to argue that the mere fact digital intimate
publics double as data that feed the commercial model of advertiser-­
funded social media platforms does not undermine the political valence
of their publicness. However, over time, the existence of digital inti-
mate publics primarily on commercial platforms becomes exploitative
in the sense that these publics congeal into the material form of the
platform.
When we enact intimacy through private social media platforms, we
render intimate relations not just visible to, but also owned by, private
platforms. When we use a platform for years and years, we contribute
to the gradual training of the platform architecture. We might decide
eventually to delete our account on a platform, and all the data that goes
with it. But what we cannot recover are the contributions we make to
the engineering of the platform itself—its algorithmic capacity to shape
and reproduce social relations, to make judgments about people like us
and our affective capacities. Here then, current prominent debates about
18 A. S. DOBSON ET AL.

‘privacy’—either individual responsibility for protecting one’s privacy

online, or privacy rights for individual users—divert us from the big-
ger picture. Social media are historically significant not just for the way
they ‘invade’ privacy by accumulating personal information, but also
because of the way they digitally enclose and erode the public commons
(Andrejevic 2007). Public intimacy builds the interfaces, protocols, and
algorithms of privately owned commercial platforms, and with that the
capacity of media to calculate and shape intimate relations. The politi-
cal stakes of this are most acute for those already marginalised along
long-standing axes of social inequality including class, race, gender, and
sexuality.
To examine the politics of digital intimate publics more fully, then, we
need to account for their productiveness within a capitalist digital media
economy. Digital intimate publics need to be understood as part of larger
historical shifts toward the rendering of intimate life, emotions, care, and
social relations, into private capital (Illouz 2007; Fraser 2013; Hearn
2008; Skeggs 2014; Jarret 2016). That digital intimacy can function as
productive labour must be understood as the outcome of a social and
historical process through which the work of social reproduction—work
that is unevenly distributed and rewarded—is incorporated into the busi-
ness models of social media platforms (Jarret 2016). Below we explore
some of the qualities of digital intimate publics that make them particu-
larly productive in terms of providing labour for commercial social media
platforms: allowing for excessive and transgressive intimacies; the digiti-
sation of social reproduction; and, the training of platform algorithms.

The Labour of Being Excessive

Above, we have suggested that public debate about digital public inti-
macy often focuses, in a moralising way, on its ‘excessiveness’ (Kennedy,
this volume). The lens of digital intimate publics enables us to discern
‘excess’ as an important and politicised quality of digital intimate publics;
a quality that appears to be intensified by the past decade of the engi-
neering of loops of engagement and attention by major social media
platforms. Digital intimate publics can potentially trouble or call into
question the dominant hierarchies of social life because they can make
visible ‘excessive’ and socially transgressive relations and identities once
more concealed from public spaces (such as those of girls, queers, moth-
ers, lovers, and others mentioned above). While the public visibility of
 1 DIGITAL INTIMATE PUBLICS AND SOCIAL MEDIA … 19

such ‘excesses’ and transgressions is crucial to the political potential of

digital intimate publics, it is also crucial to their value under conditions
of digital capitalism. Socially transgressive, ‘excessive’, and spectacular
relations and performances create vibrant circulations of affect and atten-
tion, and thus generate new kinds of value: unique data sets, audience
segments, and cultural innovations. The participatory culture of digital
capitalism thrives on subjectivities and counter-publics that appear resis-
tive and critical, because this generates new identities and social forma-
tions for commercial appropriation (Zwick et al. 2008). Many of the
spaces within which such social expressions unfold always-already double
as machines for appropriating creativity and affective capacities as value.
Further, the same cultural and sociotechnical conditions that enable
marginalised identities and communities public visibility also enable the
rise of uncontrolled and excessive forms of violence, abuse, and hate
speech (Elliot, this volume; Salter, this volume). Excesses, transgressions,
and spectacle are good from the perspective of platform economics, even
when they affect other users negatively. That is, even excessively queer
relations, excessive expressions of love and care, excessive mundane
‘oversharing’, violence, and hate speech that might make others in the
network upset, uncomfortable, disgusted, or otherwise inclined to switch
off, are productive under digital capitalism, because at the very least they
help train algorithms, teaching them what and who to tune out and in,
of whose feeds. Social media platforms afford a multiplicity of expres-
sions, identities, and interactions precisely because they exercise control
at the level of sorting and classifying, choosing who gets to pay attention
to what kinds of performances.

The Labour of Digitising Social Reproduction

Following the longer lineage of affective labour, the doing of intimate
relationships on social media doubles as the work of reproducing the
social as flows of images, videos, comments, and so on—as digital shad-
ows or traces (Andrejevic 2007; Robards 2014; Lasen and Hjorth 2017).
Digital intimacy involves reproducing social relations as data, transcrib-
ing social relations into databases. While the work of social reproduction
is not new, as Jarrett (2014) and Weeks (2007) illustrate, what is new is
the form and scale with which digital social media platforms institution-
alise this work. Each time a person likes, comments, or shares a photo or
message publicly and/or intimately, each time they swipe, scroll, or filter,
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 Sie wollte erst zu ihrem Manne. Dann besann sie sich. Nein —
an dem hatte sie keine Stütze in der Frage, an dem nicht. Das
mußte in der Landgrafenstraße durchgefochten werden. Karla war ja
mit schuld an der ganzen Sache! Hatte Blumen von dem Manne
angenommen, hatte es gelitten, daß Vicki mit ihm im Tiergarten
herumspazierte vor ihrer Nase ...
Es war bereits sieben Uhr, als sie an der Klingel in der
Landgrafenstraße zog.
Karla saß im Schlafzimmer vor ihrem Ankleidespiegel und
summte leise ein paar Töne vor sich hin. Sie war so froh, in so
seeliger Stimmung. Heute war das große Fest in der Philharmonie
— Gaudlitz hatte drei wundervolle Teerosen geschickt, „zum
Anstecken“, in einem schlanken, schillernden Tiffanyglas. Ihr süßer
Duft erfüllte das ganze Zimmer wie mit einem Vorahnen allerhand
schönen Erlebens.
Karla hatte eben ihr neues Konzertkleid bekommen — weiß mit
gold. Sie hatte kaum die Rechnung angesehen.
Für den heutigen Abend war ihr nichts zu schön, zu kostbar. Und
ein jäh aufsteigendes Erschrecken über ihren Leichtsinn
beschwichtigte sie mit einem: Für Wien brauche ich es ja doch ...
„Bildschön sehen gnädige Frau darin aus“, hatte ihr die große
Schneiderin gesagt.
Daran mußte sie jetzt denken, und wie ein hüpfendes helles
Licht, so spukte ein immer wieder auftauchendes Lächeln über ihr
noch immer junges, hübsches Gesicht, vertiefte die schelmischen
Grübchen in Kinn und Wangen, die ihm so leicht etwas Kindliches
gaben ...
Oh, wie sie sich freute! — — —
Da stürzte fast ohne Anklopfen Adele in ihr Zimmer, hinter ihr
Luise. Und Luise rief:
„Ernst ... so komm doch, Ernst ... es ist etwas Wichtiges ...“
Da standen nun die drei Altmannschen Geschwister — Adele in
der Mitte, trotz ihrer Rundlichkeit wie Schutz suchend zwischen dem
Bruder und Luise.
„Hättest du mir doch gleich gesagt, Karla ... Es war deine Pflicht
... aber du zogst es vor, Heimlichkeiten mit Vicki zu haben ...“
So waren Adelens erste Worte. Nicht überlegt, ganz triebhaft
entlastete sie sich selbst durch die unsinnigste Beschuldigung
anderer.
Karla verstand nichts ... nur auf ihre Freude senkte sich plötzlich
eine schwere, schwarze Wolke ...
„Beruhige dich, Adele ... beruhige dich, meine Liebe ...“, sagte
Altmann und hielt schon Bodo Völkels Brief in der Hand; Luise las
über seine Schulter hinweg mit. Adele schluchzte und fiel auf das
Ruhebett, so nahe dem wundervollen weißen Kleid, daß ihr alter
Mantel es bei jeder Bewegung streifte, seine Spitzen verknitterte.
Aber wer achtete noch darauf ...
Hier wurde über zwei Menschenleben zu Gericht gesessen.
„Er ist ein Schuft, aber Vicki muß seine Frau werden ...“
Adele wiederholte es wieder und immer wieder.
Karla zog ihre feine, weiße Frisierjacke enger um die Schultern.
Es war ihr, als würde sie in Eiswasser getaucht. Wie schrecklich war
das alles ... Wenn er ein Schuft war, d u r f t e Vicki ihn doch nicht
heiraten! ...
„Sprich keinen Unsinn“, schnitt Altmann erregt ab.
Luise sagte gar nichts. Sie biß an der Unterlippe. Ihre lange,
hagere Gestalt drückte tiefsten Widerwillen aus, um ihren Mund
lagen Ekel und Empörung. Ihre starre, nie bedrohte Tugend faßte es
nicht, daß das Kind ihrer leiblichen Schwester sich so weit hatte
vergessen können. Aber schließlich sagte auch sie, wenn auch
stockend und mit tiefem Abscheu: „Er muß Vicki heiraten — er muß!“
„Den Kerl knöpf ich mir vor“, erklärte Altmann.
Adele griff nach seiner Hand.
„Ich wußte ja ... du bist der einzige ...!“
 „Aber wenn Vicki jetzt nicht mehr will ...?“ kam es scheu von
Karlas Lippen.
Adele sprang mit einer Behendigkeit auf, die in grellstem
Gegensatz stand zu ihrem sonst so würdevollen Wesen.
„Was heißt das: nicht will?“
„Ruhig, Adele ... ruhig. Auf Wollen oder Nichtwollen kommt es
jetzt nicht an, mein liebes Kind“, wendete er sich gleich darauf an
Karla. „Sie muß. Sie hat jedes Recht auf eigenes Wollen verwirkt!“
Karla nahm die Tiffanyvase vom Frisiertisch und drückte ihr
Gesicht an die Blumen.
Nun sprachen alle drei auf einmal ... die Schwestern machten
Vorschläge ... Altmann sollte Bodo Völkel aufsuchen ... sofort ... Er
war Leutnant der Reserve ... man könnte ihn vielleicht beim
Regiment ...
„Nein“, sagte Altmann. „Hat er nicht so einen Erbonkel, sagtest
du nicht, Adele? Ja? Also zu dem gehe ich!“
Adele schlug in die Hände, lachte beinahe. Es war wie
Schadenfreude.
„Ja ... zu dem ...“
„Selbstverständlich ... nur zu dem“, bestätigte Luise.
Und wieder sprachen sie durcheinander — bis Altmann mit einer
Bewegung Ruhe gebot.
„Seid unbesorgt ... ich bringe die Sache in Ordnung. In vier
Wochen ist Vicki verheiratet. Wenn der Onkel sich sperrt — so viel
kratzen wir noch zusammen, um ihnen ein paar Zimmer
einzurichten!“
„Selbstverständlich“, sagte Luise. „Wenn man sich zum Beispiel
ein paar Kleider weniger machen läßt, dann bleibt genug übrig. Für
einen Fetzen fünfhundert Mark auszugeben, das ist meiner Ansicht
nach ein bißchen übertrieben ... Ich meine nur, Karla ... man kann
sich’s auch billiger einrichten ... Daran darf doch das Lebensglück
unserer Nächsten nicht scheitern.“
 Das Tiffanyglas fiel hart gegen den Teppich und zersprang in
Scherben, das Wasser leckte in breitem Bächlein an Karlas
weißseidenen Schuhen.
„Nein — daran scheitert es nicht ... daran nicht — aber —“
Ein Zorn, wie er kaum je in ihr aufgelodert war, erstickte ihre
Stimme. Sie streckte den Arm aus.
„Geht! ... Im Guten sag ich euch, geht! ... Ich muß singen heute
abend ... Wißt ihr, was das heißt? Singen! Verdienen! ... Ja!
Verdienen! ... Damit etwas abfällt für ...“
„Karla ... hast du den Verstand verloren?“
Altmann warf beide Hände auf ihre Schultern und schüttelte sie
leicht, als wollte er sie zur Besinnung bringen.
Sie entwand sich ihm heftig.
„Ach laß ... laß mich ... seit du hier bist ...“
„Was, bitte? Sage gefälligst, was ... ‚seit ich hier bin?‘ Verdiene
ich zu wenig, ja? ... So sag’s doch gerade heraus! Bitte! Hast eben
eine schlechte Partie gemacht! Hättest dir’s überlegen sollen ...
Vorläufig genügt’s, um mich zu erhalten. Meine Pension hier bezahle
ich redlich! ..“
Adele überkam die Angst, daß das, was ihr am Herzen lag, in
Vergessenheit geraten könnte über das Neue, Böse, das sich
plötzlich zeigte. Eine Kluft hatte sich aufgetan zwischen dem Bruder
und Karla ... eine Kluft ... Nicht erst von heute.
Luise wechselte die Farbe.
„Was redest du, Ernst ... Karla dachte doch nicht daran ... nicht
wahr, Karla?“
Karla hatte sich abgewendet. Tränen hatte sie nicht mehr für das,
was von „denen“ kam, und ihrem Manne hatte sie nicht weh tun
wollen. Aber wahr blieb es ... Immer neigte er sich dahin, von wo
man ihn anrief. Sie hatte ihn lange nicht angerufen ... und so war er
ihr entrückt ... ganz weit weg, auf ein anderes Ufer — —
 Ganz lange ging man zusammen einher und merkte es nicht, und
dann — plötzlich — war es da, das ferne Fremde.
Nur so war es möglich, daß er ihr vorhielt, woran sie nie gedacht
hatte. Ob sie mehr verdiente als er, ob weniger — keinen Augenblick
war ihr das ins Bewußtsein getreten. Nur die anderen sprachen
immer davon ... Luise ... er selber ...
Es sollte alles nach ihrem Wollen, nach ihren „Anschauungen“
gehen. Auch Vicki mußte heiraten, ob sie noch wollte oder nicht!
Was galt ihnen inneres Leben? Sie sahen es nicht. Hatten es nie
gesehen —
„Verzeih, Karla, ich war erregt ... ich hatte unrecht.“
Es war selten, daß Altmann ein Unrecht zugab. Karla sah ihn
groß an. Aber in ihren Augen lag mehr Staunen als Freude — —
Luise schob sie an ihn heran.
„Vertragt euch, Kinder ... Einig muß man sein — einig. Dann trägt
sich alles leichter.“
„Na ja ... eben. Ich werde jetzt also ... das heißt, jetzt um diese
Zeit? Ein bißchen spät für einen Besuch bei dem Herrn Onkel ...“
Adele schüttelte den Kopf.
„Nein, nein ... gerade ... daraus sieht er die Dringlichkeit, das
Wichtige ...“
„Ich glaube auch“, unterstützte Luise.
Die Schwestern drängten ihn zur Tür, als es draußen klingelte.
„Geht ... so geht doch ... ich werde abgeholt ... und ich bin nicht
fertig ...“
Im Speisezimmer nahm Luise dem Mädchen die Karte von
Gaudlitz ab.
„Schon wieder der? ... Karla hätte wahrhaftig auch allein fahren
können —“
 Adele winkte ab. Wie ungeschickt Luise war ... was ging sie jetzt
Karla an und ein Herr, der sie abholte —? Um i h r e Tochter, um Vicki
handelte es sich!
Durch die Glastür des Empfangszimmers sah man Licht brennen
und den schlanken, großen Schatten eines Mannes. Es kostete
Altmann Überwindung, jetzt nicht hineinzugehen ... Aber Adele
drängte. Alwin — dieser „Waschlappen“, war zu nichts zu
gebrauchen! Er selbst mußte eben ... und wenn das Haus
zusammenstürzte — er m u ß t e ...!
Luise blieb eine Weile am Treppengeländer stehen und blickte
den Geschwistern nach. Ihre Lippen lagen hart aneinander, und ihre
Gestalt steifte sich wie in Abwehr gegen das Leben, das ihr erschien
wie ein großes Ungeheuer mit langen Pranken. Mit diesen Pranken
griff es ein in das stillste, verschlossenste Haus, mit diesen Pranken
riß es die Nächsten auseinander und zerfleischte ihnen das Herz.
Adele hatte nichts gesehen ... der Bruder sah nichts ... Spielerisch
gaukelte ihnen das Ungeheuer Freundliches vor — um sie desto
sicherer zu umgarnen, zu vernichten! Aber sie wenigstens wollte
sehen, wissen, wen das Ungeheuer sich hier ausersehen hatte, sein
Vernichtungswerk einzuleiten ...
Da drückte sie die Klinke des erleuchteten Zimmers nieder. Und
sie sah einen hochgewachsenen Mann im Frack und weißer,
seidener Weste, mit einer weißen Nelke im Knopfloch, einem
schrägen, blonden Scheitel und einem kurzgehaltenen blonden
Schnurrbart. Er verneigte sich und blickte ihr mit schönen, offenen
blauen Augen entgegen.
„Meine Schwägerin läßt Sie bitten, sich noch ein wenig zu
gedulden ...“
„Bitte sehr, Gnädigste.“
Einen Augenblick zögerte sie, dann fügte sie schroff hinzu:
„Meine Schwägerin hat sich sehr verspätet ... Es ist vielleicht besser,
Sie warten nicht ... meine Schwägerin fährt dann allein.“
„Ich habe keine Eile Gnädigste ... Ich werde warten.“ Sehr hart
konnten die hübschen blauen Augen plötzlich blicken.
 „Wie Sie wünschen ...“
Die Tür schloß sich hinter ihrer hageren Gestalt, noch ehe
Gaudlitz die grüßend geneigten Schultern erhoben hatte.
Karla vollendete hastig ihr Ankleiden. Die kleine Wasserlache
stand noch immer auf dem Teppich, umgeben von Glasscherben,
und die schönen sanften Teerosen lagen von Schritten verschleppt
und zertreten herum ...
„Nicht angesteckt die Rosen?“ war Gaudlitz’ erste Frage,
während er ihre Hand an die Lippen zog.
„Bitte nicht fragen ... ich war so ungeschickt ... oder vielmehr nein
... so wütend war ich ... bitte, bitte, nicht davon sprechen.“
Er fühlte ihre Erregtheit heraus, und sie tat ihm plötzlich so leid,
als hätte er alles aus ihrem Munde vernommen, was er sich ganz
allmählich zusammenreimte.
„Nein, nein ... liebe gnädige Frau ... nicht fragen und nicht reden.
Sie sind da und sehen wunderschön aus ... mehr will ich gar nicht
wissen.“
Vor dem Hause stand sein Auto. Auf dem Rücksitz lag ein großer
Strauß glutroter Rosen, mit breiter Schleife.
„Vom Komitee ...“
Stumm saßen sie nebeneinander. Gaudlitz wußte, daß man
Sängerinnen vor ihrem Auftreten Ruhe gönnen muß. Aber plötzlich
brach Karla das Schweigen, wie aus einem langen Gedankengang
heraus: „... und die wunderbare kleine Vase habe ich auch auf den
Boden geworfen ... Scherben sind alles, was geblieben ist ... Ich
könnte mich — ja wirklich, ich verdiene Ohrfeigen ... aber ich war
immer so ... Wenn mich der Zorn packt, dann — Wissen Sie, Graf,
ich glaube, das ist eben, wenn man zu früh aus dem Elternhause
kommt ... So, was man Erziehung nennt ... das habe ich eigentlich
nie recht gehabt. Erst später ... da haben sie alle an mir
herumerzogen ... aber das nützt dann wohl nicht mehr viel ... Darum
darf ich ja auch mein eigenes Kind nicht erziehen ... vielleicht kann
ich’s auch wirklich nicht ... es ist doch furchtbar schwer, scheint es ...
Selbst die besten Mütter ... wissen Sie, so die bürgerlichsten, meine
ich ... selbst denen gelingt’s nicht immer ...“
„Sie haben Ihr — Schmerzchen heißt es doch? — das haben Sie
wohl s e h r lieb?“
„Ob ich das liebhabe!“
Ihre Augen waren plötzlich wieder feucht. Er sah sie von der
Seite an und sagte: „Sie sind so wie Ihre Stimme. Alles Empfinden
quillt so natürlich aus Ihnen heraus. Meine Schwester wird vernarrt
in Sie sein. Wenn sie nicht den Reichenberg geheiratet hätte, sie
wäre gewiß auch zur Bühne gegangen. Sie hat lange Jahre bei der
Marchesi in Paris studiert ... ist durch und durch Künstlerin. Alles,
was Ruf und Namen in Wien hat, verkehrt bei ihr.“
Er brach ab und fragte unvermittelt: „Wird von Ihrer Familie
jemand in der Philharmonie sein?“
„Mein Mann sollte kommen und mein Schwager mit Frau und
Tochter ... ich habe ihnen die Freikarten gegeben. Aber — heute
kommen sie gewiß nicht ...“
Als Karla, von warmem Beifallsrauschen empfangen, das Podium
betrat und ihre Augen über das Publikum flogen, setzte ihr Herz
plötzlich im Schlagen aus. In der sechsten Reihe hatte sie Alwin
Maurer und Vicki erblickt. Vicki war sehr blaß und hatte dick
geschwollene Lider. Ihre Augen jagten unstet die Reihen entlang;
sehr oft wendete sie den Kopf, um hinter sich zu sehen. Alwin
Maurer hatte die Hände mit dem Programm übereinandergelegt.
Sein Gesicht war ruhig und drückte nur ein freudiges Vorgenießen
aus. Unter den Herren, die sich seitwärts an den Logen drängten,
stand Bodo Völkel. Er war kaum zu erkennen, weil er sich den
spitzen, dünnen Schnurrbart hatte abnehmen lassen. Jetzt trat die
harte, verbissene Linie seiner Lippen erst recht hervor, aber das
Gewöhnliche, vor dem Karla eine starke, unbewußte Abneigung
hatte, war verschwunden.
Karla hatte an diesem Abend ihren größten Erfolg in Berlin.
Immer und immer wieder rief man sie heraus, brüllte ihren Namen.
 Gaudlitz, umringt von einigen seiner Freunde aus dem
Automobilklub, fachte das Feuer der Begeisterung immer aufs neue
durch dröhnendes Klatschen an. Sie sollte mal eine recht große
Freude haben, die Karla König!
Und wie sie herauskam — nichts Gemachtes, nichts
Hoheitsvolles — auch nichts Herausforderndes war an ihr. Ein
einfach lieber Mensch kam daher, der dankbar war für die
Begeisterung, die man ihm entgegenbrachte ...
So empfand es auch Alwin Maurer und konnte es doch nicht über
sich gewinnen, ihr zuzuklatschen wie ein Fremder.
Vicki stand abgewendet vom Podium — ihre Augen suchten in all
dem Lärm und Rufen und Klatschen nur einen. Mochte die Mutter —
wenn sie erfuhr, daß sie mit dem Vater zum Konzert gegangen war
— sie schelten, sie schlagen, diese eine letzte Gelegenheit, ihn zu
sehen, mit ihm zu sprechen, mußte sie ergreifen. Ein letztes,
einziges Mal mußte sie sich an ihn klammern, ihn an ihre Liebe
erinnern ... Was wußte sie auch mit ihren achtzehn Jahren von
Männern, die für den Hund des Nachbarn mehr Gefühl haben als für
die Frau, die ein abgeschlossenes Kapitel in ihrem Leben bedeutet!
Sie stieß und ruderte sich hindurch zwischen den vielen
Menschen, wie geschützt durch den Aufruhr der Begeisterung, durch
den tosenden Lärm.
Und nun stand sie vor ihm.
„Bodo ...“
Flammender Zorn brach aus seinen dunklen Augen.
„Was wünschen Sie ...?“
Sollte das nie aufhören — nie? Sollte sie immer das Recht
haben, ihn aufzuspüren? — War das der Dank für die Schonung ...
den letzten liebevollen Brief? — Was wollte, was hoffte, was glaubte
sie? Hatte er ihr nicht hundertmal das Einmaleins des Lebens
vorgerechnet, hatte er ihren Zärtlichkeiten nicht gewehrt bis zur
äußersten Möglichkeit — mußte er eine Ballbekanntschaft, ein paar
Stelldicheine, ein paar leichtsinnige Liebesworte büßen bis an sein
Lebensende? — —
„Was wollen Sie noch?“ fragte er rauher, roher noch als das
erstemal.
Da senkte sie den Kopf und faltete stumm die Hände, lieferte sich
ihm aus, seinem Zorn, seiner Rache — ergeben, bedingungslos.
Ein Zittern überflog seine Gestalt, seine Nägel krallten sich in
seinen Handrücken ein. Keine schamlose Maitresse, keine
aufdringliche Liebeswerberin stand da vor ihm — ein junges,
keusches Geschöpf, ein kleines, hilfloses Mädchen, das ihm noch
einmal sein Herz hinhielt, sein zuckendes, blutendes Herz ...
„Du wolltest meine Briefe nicht mehr öffnen — darum mußte ich
dir’s sagen: meine Mutter hat deinen letzten Brief gefunden ... Ich
weiß nicht, was jetzt werden soll ...“
Kalter Schweiß trat ihm auf die Stirn, und einen Augenblick war
es ihm, als müßte er sich hier, mitten unter den Menschen, auf sie
stürzen.
„Du solltest doch ... keinen Brief solltest du nach Hause
mitnehmen ... Ich habe es dir doch verboten ... verboten ...“
Er schrie es fast laut heraus. Er hätte sie geschlagen, wenn sie
irgendwo allein einander gegenübergestanden hätten.
Sie schüttelte den Kopf.
„Ich konnte es nicht ... ich hab’ sie alle ... deine Briefe ... deine
lieben Briefe ... Keiner fehlt ... Jetzt werden sie verlangen, daß du
mich heiratest ... aber ich werde ...“
Er packte sie am Handgelenk, sah ihr in die Augen, haßerfüllt.
„Ich werde ‚nein‘ sagen,“ kam es mühsam über ihre Lippen, „das
verspreche ich dir ... nein ... du sollst wissen, daß ich dich wirklich
liebhabe ... wirklich ...“
„Pssst ..!“
Ein paar Leute drehten sich nach ihnen um.
 „Rücksichtslosigkeit ...!“
Vicki blieb wie erstarrt, mit halbgeöffnetem Munde stehen. Nichts,
was das Leben ihr auch bieten oder versagen würde, konnte der
Tragik und Größe dieses Augenblicks gleichkommen. Mit achtzehn
Jahren hatte sie den Gipfel all dessen überstiegen, was es für ein
Frauenleben an Heldentum und Demut gab!
Oben auf dem Podium sang Karla König ein süßes Wiegenlied.
Sie hatte gelernt, Lieder singen — den Frauen wurden die Augen
dabei feucht.
Vicki war es, als hielte sie dort oben ihr Herz in ihren Händen, als
wiege sie es ein: „Schlaf, mein Kind, schlaf ...“
Als sie aufblickte, war Bodo Völkel verschwunden. Da fiel sie hin,
zwischen die Stühle und Menschen — ganz lautlos und bescheiden.
Der Vorhang hatte sich über dem größten Akt ihres Lebens
gesenkt. — —
Karla war durch kein Toben mehr zum Wiedererscheinen zu
bewegen. Vom Podium aus hatte sie das Zusammensein Vickis mit
Bodo Völkel und ihr Umsinken bemerkt.
„Die Tochter meines Schwagers ist ohnmächtig geworden ...
mein Schwager ... ja, dort in der sechsten Reihe ... der Herr im
Gehrock mit dem kurzen, blonden Bart und dem welligen Haar ...
kleine Glatze, ja ... Das junge Mädchen liegt dort auf den
Treppenstufen ... ich fahre gleich mit ihnen nach Hause.“
Gaudlitz lief zu Alwin Maurer, setzte ihn mit wenigen Worten von
dem „kleinen Unfall“ in Kenntnis, lief zu Vicki, die mit gelösten
Zöpfen, totenblaß, wie aus einem tiefen Schlaf erwachend, um sich
blickte, und führte sie aus dem Saal.
In seinem Wagen fuhren Alwin Maurer, Karla König und Vicki
nach der Motzstraße. Karla hatte den Arm um Vicki gelegt und ließ
die jungen, heißen Tränen auf ihre Spitzen, auf den prächtigen
Goldbesatz ihres weißseidenen Kleides tropfen.
„Was ist denn geschehen ... was ist denn los mit dem Mädel?“
fragte Alwin Maurer.
 Karla winkte ab — und so bittend war der Ausdruck ihrer
schönen braunen Augen, daß er verstand. Nur um einen Schatten
blasser wurde er. Und er dachte, wie seltsam es doch war, daß alles
bei ihm zu Hause an ihm vorbeilebte, daß sich Schicksale wendeten,
ohne daß er auch nur ahnte, wie viel seine Nächsten der Vorsehung
ins Handwerk pfuschten ...
Adele stand drohend wie ein Strafgericht im Vorzimmer.
Zornbebend, hämisch brach sie aus:
„So ... das Fräulein amüsiert sich noch an einem Tage wie heute?
... Das ist ja ...“
Sie stockte, als sie Vickis Gesicht sah.
„Na ... na ...“
„Sei gut zu ihr ... Adele ...“
Alwin Maurer brachte Karla zurück an den Wagen.
„Willst du mir nicht sagen ...“
Karla schüttelte den Kopf; auch sie sah blaß und zu Tode
erschöpft aus.
„Was ist da zu sagen, mein guter Alwin ... Die eine trifft’s früher,
die andere später — Kummer und Tränen hängen wohl immer an so
was, und wer es gut meint, der rührt nicht daran!“
Alwin Maurer war hellhörig geworden in der letzten Zeit.
Erschreckt blickten seine fettumpolsterten Augen aus dem
grauweißen Gesicht.
„Karla!“ ...
Sie hüllte sich fester in ihren Pelz und warf sich zurück in das
Dunkel des Wagens. Sehr langsam, mit tief gebeugtem Haupt, stieg
er die Treppe wieder hinauf.
Da fuhr sie nun, die große Karla König, der Tausende eben
zugejubelt hatten, die große Primadonna, der die Pferde
ausgespannt worden waren und auf die ein Regen von Gold und
Edelsteinen niedergerieselt war ... fuhr nach Hause, einsam, mit
schmerzlichen Gedanken, in ihre kleinbürgerliche Wohnung, in der
sie sich nie heimisch fühlte, zu einem ewig schulmeisternden Mann,
zu einem Kinde, das eifernde Herrschsucht ihr fernhielt, zu Sorgen
aller Art, die sein — Alwin Maurers — Haus ihr noch aufgebürdet
hatte ... saß in dem Wagen eines fremden Mannes, der ...
Alwin Maurer fuhr sich erregt durch sein stellenweise schon
graublondes Haar. Er hatte den Blick des Mannes aufgefangen, als
er Karla in den Wagen geholfen hatte ... und ihren Blick ... so
vertrauend und dankbar und lichterfüllt ... Nein, nein ... wer es gut
meinte, der rührte nicht daran ... nie ...
Und jetzt erst fiel ihm Vicki ein — Aber die war ja noch so jung ...
und sie war Adelens Tochter ...! Ernstlich um sie bangen, das —
brauchte er wohl nicht ... ein kleiner Liebeskummer.
Er zog die Wohnungstür hinter sich zu — ganz leise. Wenn Adele
heftig zu dem Mädel wurde, dann ... dann war er auch noch da ...
Aber es war still im Gang. Er lauschte an Vickis Zimmertür, hörte
leises, ersticktes Schluchzen und die Stimme seiner Frau:
„... So sei doch vernünftig ... es wird ja alles gut ... wozu bin ich
denn da? ... Alles wird gut ... das mach’ ich schon!“
Da huschte ein blasses Lächeln über sein Gesicht. So ähnlich
hatte wohl auch Adelens Mutter einst gesprochen. Es blieb immer
dasselbe Lied ...
Um Vicki brauchte er sich keine Sorge zu machen!
 echs Wochen nach diesem Abend sollte Vicki Bodo Völkels
Frau werden. Sie hatte nicht viel gefragt, wie dieser
Umschwung gekommen war — vielleicht hatte sie im tiefsten
Grunde ihres Herzens nie einen anderen Ausgang erwartet ... Sie
war drei Tage so krank gewesen — das hatte er wohl erfahren und
war gekommen, sein Unrecht gutzumachen. Vicki glaubte noch an
die Romantik der Krankheit! Bodo Völkel widersprach nicht, und die
Mutter ließ sie bei ihrem Wahn. Alwin Maurer zeigte einen
Nachhilfekursus für Reifeprüfung an, ließ sich Privatschüler
empfehlen. Adele war bereit, zwei Knaben als Pensionäre bei sich
aufzunehmen. Aus dem Alleinbleiben mit ihrem Mann wurde nun
nichts, und die Arbeit im Hause vermehrte sich — aber mit Hilfe des
Bruders ließ sich die neue Wirtschaft einrichten und stützen.
Karla hatte den Erlös eines viermaligen Gastspiels in Leipzig und
eines zweimaligen in Hamburg ihrem Manne eingehändigt — für
Vicki. Ihre Sommererholung, deren sie dringend bedurfte, wollte sie
auf drei Wochen in einem kleinen Ostseebad beschränken.
„So wird es schon gehen“, meinte sie.
Altmann war sehr bewegt.
„Meine liebe Karla ... mein liebes Kind ... glaube mir, wenn es
nicht so ernst wäre, nie hätte ich gestattet — nie, daß neue
Ansprüche an dich herantreten. Aber, nicht wahr ... wenn es die
eigenen Leute betrifft — einer für alle, alle für einen ... daran habe
ich immer festgehalten, und das wollen wir auch weiter so befolgen.“
Sie nickte hastig, wurde rot, winkte ab.
„Ja ... ja, natürlich ... sagt es nur Alwin nicht ... dem ist es
peinlich.“
Luise bestand darauf, daß man das Brautpaar mit den Eltern zu
Tisch lüde.
„Wenn du meinst ...“, sagte Karla.
Ihr war auch manches peinlich, aber sie wagte sich nicht vor
damit. Es ging alles leichter, als sie gedacht hatte. Vicki war glücklich
und ungewohnt still. Selbst Fritz traute sich mit seinen kleinen
Anrempeleien nicht an sie heran. Völkel war höflich, beschränkte
seine Worte auf das Nötigste und zuckte kaum merklich mit den
Brauen, wenn Vicki nach seiner Hand griff. Er träumte von Palästen
und mußte aufmerksam zuhören, wenn die Schwiegermutter ihm die
Vorteile der von ihr gemieteten Dreizimmerwohnung pries.
Fritz fand den Schwager „schneidig“. Der hatte Haare auf den
Zähnen! Die „Weiberwirtschaft“ zu Hause hatte ihm schon lange
nicht gefallen. Vicki würde er „Kandare reiten“ ...
Einige Tage vor der Hochzeit kam Adele, die telephonisch
erfahren hatte, daß Karla noch auf der Probe war, an den
Bühneneingang. Sie sah sehr geschäftig und geheimnisvoll aus.
„Ach, höre mal, Karla, ich habe eine kleine Bitte an dich.“
Karla war abgespannt und lächelte müde. „Ja ... also, Adele, was
soll es ...?“
Sie schritt, trotz Müdigkeit, ihrer Gewohnheit nach rasch aus in
dem sandfarbenen Schneiderkleid, unter dessen Jacke eine weiße
Batistbluse hervorquoll. Ein flotter, einfacher Frühlingshut saß schräg
auf ihrem dunklen Haar. Wenn sie ging, raschelte das seidene
Futter, und ihr goldenes Täschchen mit den vielerlei Anhängseln,
das Geschenk einer in Brasilien ansässigen deutschen Kolonie,
glitzerte in dem warmen Gefunkel der Sonne. Wie sich die
rausgemacht hat, dachte Adele. Ein klein wenig Neid lag stets auf
dem Grunde ihres Wesens gegen alles, was sie überflügelte.
„Ja also, folgendes. Aber — dein Wort darauf, es bleibt unter uns
zweien — dein Wort?“ ...
„Gewiß ... gern ... mein Wort.“
Karla mußte jetzt lächeln über das ehrenwörtlich gehütete
Geheimnis zwischen sich und Adele ... Aber als Adele ihre Bitte
nannte, kurz fordernd, da verfärbte sich Karla. Es war wirklich eine
Zumutung! Sie sollte Gaudlitz — „du kennst ihn doch so gut“ —
sollte ihm Bodo Völkel als „selbständigen Baumeister“ empfehlen.
Gaudlitz hatte ein Grundstück gekauft in den westlichen Ausläufen
Berlins; ob ein Haus da erstehen sollte, ob ein Sportplatz — das
wußte noch niemand, aber die Gelegenheit war gegeben, und Karla
durfte nicht zögern.
„Du kannst dir denken ... da warten alle möglichen Leute darauf
... Bodos Chef glaubt natürlich, es kann ihm nicht entgehen. Aber er
ist ein widerlicher Ausbeuter ... wenn Graf Gaudlitz den mit den
Plänen beauftragt ... Herrgott, Karla, so mach’ doch kein Gesicht, als
wenn du vom Mond herunterfielest! ... Bei euch ist es doch gerade
so — einer empfiehlt den anderen. Du säßest doch auch nicht hier
an der Königlichen, wenn ...“
Adelens Stimme wurde weinerlich. Das war etwas Neues an ihr.
Da spielten ihr die Nerven mit, oder es hing wirklich ihre letzte
Hoffnung daran. Adele sprach von ihrem Alter, von Alwins
Gesundheit.
... Da hatte sie gehofft, ein bißchen ausruhen zu können — und
nun prasselten wieder neue Sorge, neue Arbeit auf sie herab! Karla
hatte es gut gehabt, hatte Isoldchen zu ihnen gegeben und war dann
frei gewesen wie ein Vogel in der Luft, hatte ganz sich selbst leben,
hatte tun können, was ihr gefiel .. Alwin und sie aber — sie
schleppten an der Karre jahraus, jahrein ... Fritz ... ja, gewiß ... es
war damals sehr gut und lieb gewesen vom Bruder und ihr. Aber
wenn sie nicht gewesen wären, dann hätte der Junge sich eben
doch bescheiden müssen und wäre nicht daran gestorben! Mit Vicki
aber war es etwas anderes! Da handelte es sich um Schicksal! Sie
beneidete das arme Kind nicht, wenn ihr Mann nicht vorwärtskam!
Ihr würde er alle Schuld aufbürden, sie als eine „Kugel an seinem
Bein“ betrachten! Und wenn sie es nicht mehr tragen konnte — was
dann? ... Dann flüchtete sie zurück ins Elternhaus, mit einem Kind
oder zweien! Und dann waren die Sorgen wieder da — größer,
schrecklicher denn je! ... War es denn gar so schwer, einen Freund
um etwas zu bitten, wenn davon das Schicksal der nächsten
Angehörigen abhing?
„Du brauchst ihm doch nur einen Brief zu schreiben, Karla, ich
begreife dich nicht ...“
Karla blickte geradeaus, und ihr Herz schlug plötzlich wieder in
kleinen, trockenen Schlägen.
 „Was Ernst ... was Luise dazu sagen werden ...“
Adele hakte sich ein, hielt Karlas raschen, gleichsam fliehenden
Gang zurück. Sie sprach leise und vertraulich.
„Ich sagte doch schon, Karla ... das bleibt unter uns zweien.
Denk, wie peinlich wäre es für Bodo, wenn alle darum wüßten! Er
hat so entsetzlich viel Ehrgeiz und Eigenliebe — er ist ein so
schwieriger Charakter!“
Schwer hing Adele an Karlas Arm. Wie ein Sinnbild war es.
Kraftwagen sausten an ihnen vorüber, Menschen stießen und
schoben sich an ihnen vorbei. Die Bäume knospten hell unter dem
blaßblauen Himmel, zwischen den hellen Häusern. Karla blieb
stehen und atmete die kühle, leicht durchsonnte Luft ein, wie einen
Labetrunk.
Wie hatte sie sich dort drüben nach dem ersten deutschen
Frühling gesehnt — eintrinken hatte sie ihn wollen, in jauchzender
Freude, wie die gesegneten Jung’ Frauen ihn eintranken in
fröhlichem Reigen auf dem Bilde des Botticelli ...
„So denk doch ein bißchen an uns, Karla ... haben wir es nicht
um dich verdient?“
„Doch, ja ... ich ... werde schreiben ... ich verspreche dir’s.“
Es kam ausdruckslos, matt von Karlas Lippen.
Sie standen vor einem großen Café, dessen breite
Fensterscheiben schon sommermäßig herabgelassen waren. Adele
drängte Karla in den Eingang, an einen der runden weißen Tische.
„Am besten, du schreibst jetzt gleich ... dann ist es abgemacht,
und niemand weiß etwas außer dir und mir.“
Sie bestellte etwas zu trinken, eine Mappe und Schreibzeug.
„Auf dem Briefbogen? ... Das geht doch nicht ...“
Es war ein letzter schwacher Einwand. Adele nahm aus ihrem
Täschchen einen bereits gefalteten Briefbogen im Umschlag. Sie
hatte an alles gedacht! Karla schrieb, zögernd, förmlich und kindlich
in ihren unausgeschriebenen, naiven Schriftzügen.
Die Nachschrift fehlte nicht, die den ganzen Brief umwarf, in dem
sie Bodo Völkel als einen der talentvollsten jungen Baumeister
empfahl, für dessen Empfehlung er ihr noch dankbar sein würde: „...
ach bitte, lieber Graf Gaudlitz — lassen Sie ihn kommen und geben
Sie ihm etwas zu tun, er heiratet meine Nichte, und sie sind beide
ganz arm. Wo die Krippe leer ist, da beißen sich die Pferde ... Ich
habe große Sorge um meine kleine Nichte ... wissen Sie noch, das
hübsche blonde Mädchen, das in der Philharmonie ohnmächtig
geworden ist? ...“
Karla las von ihr Geschriebenes nie nochmals durch. Hastig
schob sie den Bogen in den Umschlag ...
„Ja ... aber die Adresse ...“
Adele wußte sie auswendig. — — —
— — — An Vickis Hochzeitstafel in einem bescheidenen
Weinlokal der Potsdamer Straße wurde auf das Wohl des Grafen
Gaudlitz getrunken, der Bodo Völkel mit den Plänen für ein
stilisiertes kleines Bauernhaus betraut hatte. Der Onkel des
Bräutigams brachte das Hoch aus. Und er sagte:
„Am Talent meines Neffen habe ich nie gezweifelt — es mußte
sich nur mal durchsetzen!“
Die neue Nichte gefiel ihm gut. Es kostete ihn nichts. Aber er
fühlte sich als der Begründer eines jungen Glückes — denn er hatte
auf Altmanns Veranlassung seinem Neffen geschrieben, daß er ihn
enterben würde, falls er nicht augenblicklich und in aller Form um
Fräulein Viktoria Maurer anhielte. „Nicht acht und nicht drei Tage
Bedenkzeit — nur vierundzwanzig Stunden.“
Das hatte gewirkt. Dafür konnte er sich schon das Vergnügen
leisten, Vicki, sooft es anging, zu tätscheln und unters Kinn zu
fassen. Das kostete auch nichts.
Vicki hatte Karlas prachtvolle weiße Konzerttoilette als Brautkleid
bekommen. Der Goldbesatz war entfernt, und es schmiegte sich in
keuschen Falten an Vickis füllige Formen.
Karla mochte es nicht mehr tragen. Zu lieblos waren die Blicke
der Schwägerinnen darauf gefallen an jenem Abend, zu entsetzt war
sie über die Ferne gewesen, die sie an jenem Abend zwischen sich
und ihrem Manne gefühlt hatte, zu heiß hatte auch ihr Herz
geschlagen, als Gaudlitz in flüchtig zarter Liebkosung mit den
Fingern über den gleißenden Stoff gestrichen.
Vickis Augen leuchteten wie blaue Feldblumen nach einem
Gußregen. Bodo Völkel sah gut aus in Frack und weißer Binde. Er
sprach wenig und trank fast gar nicht. Aber wenn er lächelte, dann
galt es Vicki.
Und das war doch etwas.
 arlas Bitten, ihr doch Schmerzchen an die See mitzugeben,
hatten nichts gefruchtet.
„Du sollst dich erholen,“ sagte Altmann, „und es darf auch
nicht viel kosten. Wenn ich dir das Kind mitgebe, erholst du dich
nicht, und wenn Luise mitfährt, wird es zu teuer.“
Karla schlich bald um Schmerzchen herum wie eine Missetäterin,
bald wich sie ihm aus, weil ihr das Herz zu wehe tat, wenn sie an die
Trennung dachte und daran, daß sie dem Kinde nicht einmal ein
bißchen Seeluft geben konnte. Nun, nächstes Jahr verdiente sie
mehr ... Vicki brauchte sie dann vielleicht auch nicht ... Gastspiele
waren in Aussicht ... vielleicht — Wien ...
Sie hob das Kind zu sich herauf:
„Mein Herzschmerz, du ...“
Luise liebte Karlas leidenschaftliche Ausbrüche nicht. Ein Kind
mußte mit ruhiger Strenge und gleichbleibender Freundlichkeit
behandelt werden — zumal ein so nervöses Kind wie Isolde.
Eines Morgens, zwei Tage vor ihrer Abreise, wurde für Frau Karla
König ein großer, kunstlos gebundener Blumenstrauß abgegeben,
mit einem Briefe. Der Brief war unterzeichnet: „Ihre Sie
hochschätzende Alice Fürstin Reichenberg“. Karla wurden die
Wangen rot und heiß. Es war doch schrecklich, daß sie sich nicht
mal für die Dauer weniger Minuten abschließen konnte. In fliegender
Eile las sie:
„Verehrteste Frau! Verzeihen Sie meine unbescheidene,
nicht ganz übliche Bitte — aber eine kleine Verstauchung, die
ich mir beim Aussteigen aus dem Zuge geholt habe, fesselt
mich an das Haus. Ich hatte mich so sehr darauf gefreut, Ihre
Bekanntschaft zu machen, und Ihnen meinen Besuch
zugedacht. Würden Sie nun über äußere Förmlichkeit hinweg
einer armen Kranken ein halbes Stündchen Gesellschaft
leisten? Ich habe so viel Schönes von Ihrer lieben, herrlichen
Stimme gehört und glaube, daß Sie auch ein lieber, einfacher
Mensch sind, der eine erzwungene Formlosigkeit nicht
übelnimmt. Wenn Sie kommen, dann nennen Sie dem