Precarious Intimacies

Precarious Intimacies is an astute and important book for this age when moments of touch, solidarity, care, and affection between people are never unburdened of the political, and are rarely free from compromise and ambivalence. Critically imbuing over fifty films with the wisdom of intersectional feminist vision, this collaboratively written book practices the beauty and risk its authors so deftly honor in the intimate worlds of contemporary European cinema." —David Gramling, author of The Invention of Monolingualism

"Maria Stehle and Beverly Weber forcefully demonstrate that we do not have to choose between radical critique and more affirmative orientations at joy, hope, and solidarity. Drawing on a broad range of contemporary feminist and decolonial affect theories, their readings exemplarily develop a layered methodology for unfolding twenty-first century European cinema’s rich contributions to the dual political imperative at hand: attending to the realities of violence and the possibilities of touch." —Claudia Breger, author of Making Worlds: Affect and Collectivity in Contemporary European Cinema

"This book makes a significant contribution to rethinking paradigms in European cinema studies by reading for intimacy as a critical and generative trope in contemporary films. The authors’ groundbreaking attention to intimacy as a site of both precarity and resistance to the violence of the present opens up new ways of understanding the politics and aesthetics of audiovisual images in the neoliberal age, considering how film can help us envision more just and sustainable futures." —Hester Baer, author of Dismantling the Dream Factory: Gender, German Cinema, and the Postwar Quest for a New Film Language