Embodying intimacy in everyday interaction: A biolinguistic study of long-term partners in the Southeastern United States

Abstract

Drawing on linguistic and biocultural anthropological perspectives on embodiment, this paper advances a “biolinguistic” approach to ethnographic research on intimacy, attending simultaneously to the co-constitutive interactive, psychophysiological, and phenomenological processes that emerge in everyday embodied interaction between long-term, cohabitating romantic partners. Through concurrent attention to natural interactions captured during video ethnography and moment-to-moment shifts in heart-rate variability, this study complements and complicates existing psychological, communication, and anthropological research on intimacy. Three case-studies of long-term couples residing in the Southeastern United States demonstrate how neither pure psychophysiology nor pure linguistic analysis fully encapsulates potential patterns of intimacy among them. Rather, this microanalytical, biolinguistic approach to the complexities of body and language interplay, in treating embodiment and interaction as bidirectional phenomena, emphasizes that meanings and enactments of intimacy might look different for each couple and can change over time in complex ways that index couples’ enduring orientations towards various cultural and relational norms.