Precarious Intimacies: The Politics of Touch in Contemporary Western European Cinema by Maria Stehle and Beverly Weber (review)

The central task of Precarious Intimacies is, in Maria Stehle and Beverly Weber’s words, “to recognize, affirm, and value intimacies, love, touch, and care while at the same time challenging the racialized and gendered politics in which they are embedded” (5). Within the analytic frameworks of feminist and critical race studies, they propose a theoretical construct and perform readings that deploy it as a diagnostic lens. Although they use this lens to access and explore important, contradictory elements of a contemporary Western European cinematic practice that centers questions of otherness and belonging, it is a lens that, if applied to any imaginative text, will yield multidimensional understandings. Reading for precarious intimacies emphasizes moments of connection, care, and solidarity while not ignoring the structural violence that often still informs them: the European Union’s regimes of exclusion, imbricated as they are in discourses of racialization and othering, for example. A significant advantage of the concept is its insistence on the persistence of ambivalences and ambiguities in uplifting and distressing narratives.

In chapter 1 the authors analyze four filmic stories of non-arrival that highlight how Europe functions as a “happy place,” a draw, while simultaneously underscoring the unhappy effects its border policing has on immigrants and refugees. Chapter 2 explores literal moments of touch in four films, showing how touch across difference disrupts conventional narratives of belonging and points to Europe’s continued dependence on normative structures despite its self-understanding as a place of enlightened inclusion. Chapter 3 focuses on how Karin Albou’s films depict women who rely on conceptualizations from their faith to build bridges, making non-Christian religions part of rather than the antithesis to an inclusive Europe. Chapter 4 deals with commodified intimacies between white European men and Black or Brown non-European women and offers an insightful investigation of how choice functions in systems that limit control and bind people to problematic power dynamics. The films “show moments where, in spite of these economies, intimacies develop that run counter to determined paths” (120). The commodified intimacies examined in chapter 5 are between white, European women and Black, non-European men. Here, the authors argue, solidarity remains unattainable, and the films invite empathy for the plight of white women, minimizing the precarity and plight of Black male characters and practically erasing Black female characters. Stehle and Weber demonstrate how these latter depictions reveal limits to the analytic tool they call precarious intimacies. Concluding that reading for care and connection cannot become too positive, they nonetheless underscore that “in the face of all that is and can go wrong, we can and must envision different outcomes that imagine intimacy as sustenance, solidarity, and collaboration” (153).

Precarious Intimacies opens up new and complex avenues for considering the representation of immigration in imaginative texts of any kind and from any context and reminds readers to remain alert for unconscious bias, racializing discourses, and exclusionary othering. The analyses and readings are convincing and important. Because Stehle and Weber have so effectively created a critical space that generates questions, I am left with some. I wonder, for example, if the empathy generated for white women in the films analyzed in the final chapter is not also elicited for white men in films analyzed earlier, in Welcome (Lioret, 2007), for example. Chapter 1 left me asking what a more direct analysis of masculinity might contribute to comprehending the experience of those who never even make it to the border. For me, Michael Winterbottom’s decision to pass over the experience of young girls in In This World (2002) and to make that of boys representative begs for attention. Is it relevant that solidarities and community seemed impossible in a very particular instance—white women and Black men from outside Europe? In short, could gender be further deployed as a category of analysis to emphasize the intersectionality the authors address throughout...