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Introduction: New Forms of Intimacy

During the last thirty years there have been significant changes in understandings and practices of gender, sexuality, and intimacy. In heterosexual relationships, there has been a transition from the male breadwinner/female home-maker model of the household to a dual income model of partnership. Serial monogamy, new practices of gender and sexualities, and multiple forms of family have replaced the traditional nuclear family system, while friendship has gained in importance as a key relation of intimacy. At the same time, increasing transnational migration has added to the complexities of the organization and understandings of intimacy, sexuality, and gender. New cultural discourses and forms of media representations also suggest that radical shifts are underway in the interface between the private and public spheres. Sexuality and queer studies and studies of masculinities are simultaneously a part of and an attempt at describing and analysing the more complex and differentiated practices of gender, sexuality, and intimacy developed during these thirty years. Feminist/pro-feminist studies of masculinities have questioned the position of men as a hegemonic gender. Sexuality and queer studies have brought the subject of sexuality into the foreground of contemporary research and theory, highlighting and questioning heteronormativity in the academia and in the wider society. This special issue draws on theories and perspectives from these research areas, and on new approaches in feminist studies, to develop tools for the analysis of the new social and cultural practices of intimacy and sexuality, as well as new mechanisms of inclusion/exclusion. It has taken up the particular challenge to analyse these changes, with sensitivity to the specificities of cultural and national contexts. The issue is the result of two international conferences held at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Research at the University of Oslo: Heterosexual Desire in Gender Equality Discourse: A Point of Trouble?, 15–17 June 2006, and New Forms of Intimacy: An International Conference on Intimacies and Sexualities at the Changing Interfaces between Private and Public, 12–13 October 2006. The conferences focused