That David Foster Wallace designed his fiction to serve a therapeutic function for readers is, at this point, axiomatic. Timothy Aubry (Reading as Therapy) has effectively demonstrated how it serves this function, as well as how his fiction’s contingent relation to addiction and recovery stories enabled Wallace to reinject what he saw as a dispassionate and exhausted postmodern form with moral and affective urgency. Rob Short (Big Books) has thoroughly documented how Wallace’s own adherence to the twelve-step recovery program of Alcoholics Anonymous (1939) shapes the aesthetic practice of his novels. Wallace also frequently used the text to stage “the production and elision of intimacy between the (male) author and the (male) reader.” In conversation with this sections other chapters on gender and sexuality, this chapter explores the ways in which Wallace’s writing occupies queer spaces in its representation of the fractured contingency of the addicted self in recovery. Specifically, the chapter draws a comparison with Whitman, through his first and only novel Franklin Evans or The Inebriate: A Tale of the Times (1842), by far his largest commercial success during his lifetime despite being generally forgotten and, like Wallace, a first novel he would often disavow. For Whitman, masking his exact intention to connect with the reader in his poetry, as well as through this addiction and recovery novel, was the very mechanism by which he could construct the queer intimacies socially and politically foreclosed during his lifetime. As scholars like Michael Warner (“Whitman Drunk”) and Michael Moon (Disseminating Whitman) have documented, Whitman too attended alcohol recovery meetings in part to listen to “dirty” stories about same-sex encounters. Through this connection, I hope to accomplish two goals: first, to recontextualize the fantasy of pre-postmodern and even pre-realist novels imagined to be better suited to the aesthetic project of therapy and recovery in a post-postmodern America, and second, to bring Wallace’s aesthetic practice in closer contact with issues of sexuality that the universalizing gesture of fiction-as-therapy can too often elide. While the chapter does not argue that Wallace was a queer writer, it elucidates the disruptive potential of queer readings within the context of late postmodernist constructions of self.

It has been noted by numerous scholars that Wallace’s writing of sexual activity and identity was, to say the least, unsatisfying. Often violent and/or coercive, almost always alienating, and generally involving repulsion either within or beyond the text, sex is a site of conflict for Wallace. While juvenile sexual jokes animate the early work in particular (Frequent and Vigorous being the prime example), meaningful sexual experiences are few. Sex is problematic; phantom pregnancies and the choice of masturbation over sexual intimacy recur as images of the wasteful productivity of contemporary society and culture, while rape and sexual manipulation are common behaviors of the solipsistic (usually male) characters peopling this space. This chapter outlines some of the primary motifs of sex and sexuality in Wallace’s work, examining the ways in which he used the sexual subject to dramatize forms of social intercourse and self-expression and exploring the connections between sex, power and communication in his writing.

This chapter is a written exchange, between five women with different stakes in literary translation, that took place in 2019. It touches on translation craft, the formation of translators, who gets to translate what, questions of accessibility and privilege, the intimacies between the author and translator, the negative affect that comes with translating in a culture of rampant ‘gotcha’ criticism, translation as collaboration, among other topics. It is a conversation without consensus and clearly without end – but powered by an ongoing investment in thinking, reading and writing translations.

The formation of Bangladesh in 1971 coincided with the rape of 200,000 Bengali women perpetrated by the West Pakistani army and its local East Pakistani collaborators. In an unprecedented move, the newly formed state eulogised them as "war-heroines" and set up rehabilitation programs where they were encouraged to go through abortions, give up their children for international adoption, marry, or take up jobs. The chapter explores how, in independent Bangladesh, the construction of the survivors of sexual violence as sex workers is akin to being traitors and collaborators with the enemy forces. It shows that debates on sexuality of war are foundational to collapsing the survivors of wartime rape into "prostitutes" and in the process to their re-imaging as traitors. The chapter seeks to examine the semantic and narrative discourses related to the constitution of the "war-heroines" as "traitors" – the enemy within – in the post-conflict period in 1972 and in the 1990s in independent Bangladesh and the implications this has for comprehending victims and perpetrators. It argues that through a constitutive performativity of the "traitor" – a naturalization through stylized and exclusive repetition – is how the idea of war heroine has been "made" in order to be "found."

The book’s conclusion considers its implications for histories of the Americas more broadly. The persistence of both intrapersonal and institutional racial discrimination in nations historically considered racial democracies has long been of interest to historians of the region. Hierarchies at Home contributes to a field of literature that uses the domestic sphere as a starting point to understand how racialized attitudes persist in and shape supposed “racial democracies.” It builds on that body of work by simultaneously considering how racial politics embedded in domestic service affects the archive and the documents to which historians have access, and by pointing out strategies to counteract the archival dearth. The conclusion also suggests directions for scholarship that builds on the book and briefly explores the complex situation of domestic service in Cuba in the twenty-first century.

The introduction to Hierarchies at Home presents the central argument: Although women of African descent only briefly made up the majority of domestic servants in Cuba before 1959, for the entirety of the twentieth century the archetypal figure of a domestic servant in Cuba was an African-descended woman. The centrality of the black Cuban woman to the image of domestic service mattered because the work was a primary way that racialized hierarchies reproduced in Cuba throughout the twentieth century. Cuba’s public-facing image after its war for independence was a country founded on anti-racist ideals. But the steady association between blackness and domestic service sustained and revealed a stratification that placed African-descended Cubans in positions of subservience to white Cubans and ran counter to the public image. The introduction briefly reviews literature on domestic service in the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America, and outlines the chapters.

In this chapter we explore how sociocultural identities are formed and enacted in narrative practices – specifically, in joke-telling about migrants that takes place in multilingual communities in Veneto, Italy. Multilingual speech participants often communicate and reconfigure their fluid and heterogeneous sociocultural identities through joke-telling practices. By taking a particular stance while telling a joke, for example, speakers can inhabit identities in which ‘exclusionary intimacies’ vis-à-vis migrant groups might emerge – identities which reinforce intimate connections between joke-tellers and audience members who share the same history and traditions, while excluding migrants. In order to describe how joke-telling in northern Italy positions longstanding residents and migrants, we explore how identity performances can be fluid, as speakers shift in and out of heterogeneous memberships in multilingual communities, but nonetheless often end up excluding migrants.

Sexuality is an important part of health and quality of life at all ages and thus is an important area for health-care providers to address. The number of years of potential sexual activity in later life is increasing. There are both physical and emotional aspects to sexuality, and the desire for intimacy continues throughout life. Studies have shown that most older adults desire more activity than what they have. Lack of partners and lack of privacy are significant obstacles for sexual expression. The physiological changes with age alone are insufficient cause to cease sexual activity, and for some these changes are felt to enhance their sexual activity. A number of medical conditions contribute to sexual dysfunction and raise patient concerns regarding health consequences of sexual activity. For older adults, negotiating safer sex may be unfamiliar and challenging, they lack knowledge to identify HIV/AIDS risk factors, and they are less likely to use condoms. Health-care providers lack awareness of seniors’ sexuality, fail to engage in conversations about risks, and are less likely to test for the virus. As with many potentially sensitive issues, it appears that patients are waiting for their health-care providers to raise the topic.

Couples confronted with a diagnosis of dementia face many relational changes, including changes in their intimate and sexual lives. Dementia often requires a renegotiation of the roles between partners and creativity to find new ways to keep their sexuality alive. Although family members and healthcare providers are often concerned about (inappropriate and risky) sexual behaviour of persons with dementia, patients (and partners) may experience sexuality as a human need rather than a problem. This chapter covers the impact of dementia on partner relationships from a patient’s and partner’s perspective and describes different stages of change in their sexual relation during both the phase of home care as well as after admission to a residential care facility. After focussing on (the management of) inappropriate sexual behaviour from the perspective of the family and healthcare system, the chapter elaborates on ethical issues including sexual consent, capacity, privacy and sexual rights. The chapter ends with a plea for a better understanding of the relational and sexual consequences of dementia that enables to provide tailored care to persons with dementia, their partners and their broader network.

“Dear John” letters have loomed large in American war-lore ever since GIs first coined the phrase in World War II. Receiving a break-up note from a wife, fiancée, or girlfriend has come to appear a rite of passage for men in uniform. The motif of female treachery and male tragedy circulates both in the stories servicemen and veterans tell one another and in US culture more broadly – in pop music, movies, and novels. Yet no prior author has devoted a book to the “Dear John” phenomenon. That virtually no bona fide specimens exist in archival collections helps explain this lacuna. But the fact that so many “Dear Johns” were physically destroyed soon after receipt doesn‘t make these letters impossible to study. Instead of regarding Dear Johns as a female-authored epistolary genre, we should conceive these letters as the product of a male vernacular tradition. Men have told us most of what we know about how and why women composed these letters, and the effects they‘ve had on recipients. This book explores the interplay between letter-writing and story-telling, inviting readers to contemplate why love is so hard to sustain in wartime.

Patriotic war culture has routinely touted the symbiosis between mail and morale. Disciplinarians of wartime feeling have issued reams of advice about how to “write right!” in order to sustain men’s esprit and keep love alive despite distance and danger. Above all, military and civilian opinion-leaders alike have strenuously and repeatedly warned women against dispatching Dear Johns to men serving overseas. These prompts have taken many forms: explicit guidance from newspaper and magazine columnists, marriage counselors, government bodies, and voluntary agencies (like the YMCA and Red Cross) as well as pointed cues about emotional etiquette supplied by popular music, radio and television shows, and Hollywood movies. This chapter probes the challenges of sustaining long-distance love at war – difficulties often minimized by wartime advice-givers, but unmistakable to men and women who have tried, and sometimes failed, to keep intimate relationships intact. It also considers how far prescriptions issued to “waiting women” have changed since the 1940s, proposing that there’s been considerable continuity, despite radical shifts in dating behavior and marital norms in US society.

Chapter Six, ‘On the Wards’, shifts to hospitals. Hospitals were sites of colonial entanglement in the ‘in-between’ zones bestriding active combat and civilian life. Despite the apparent limitations of the space, where men were rendered immobile by the injury or illness, hospitals facilitated encounters, particularly between patients and nurses. For nurses in these spaces, new responsibilities were expected, as chaperones of racial, national and sexual boundaries. Using not only the men’s letters and diaries but those of the women who nursed them – from Britain and the dominions – the politics of caring for colonial troops, white and of colour, are examined. Complex responses to nursing by both the men and the women surpassed existing maternal motifs of caregiving. The threat of racial mixing placed new limits on ‘care’ but there were complicated individual reactions to the new and intimate contact between white women and men of colour: neglect, anxiety, apathy, curiosity and even desire.

Establishing a framework for this book, the introduction examines the themes of encounters, space and contact zones during the First World War. Arguing that colonial experience cannot be understood without attention to spaces beyond the battlefield, I introduce the reader to the contact zones expored in the chapters. I reflect on the conceptsand methodology adopted, including the importance of intimacy.

Chapter Three, ‘At Camp’, explores how military camps produced new tensions as the men began to observe and interact with troops from other part of the empire and among the Allied forces. Colourful descriptions of the ‘Empire united in arms’ elided the asymmetries of power and inter-colonial competition at stake in the militarised setting.  The struggle to achieve status within an envisioned hierarchy of colonial races manifested in how the men wrote about those they met and how they represented themselves – in their uniform, fitness and soldierly bearing – in these spaces. Military sports days and leisure activities afforded new opportunities away from the battlefield to prove martial manliness, creating physical spectacles captured in official photography of the pageantry of the British Empire at war. The chapter thinks, too, about how these camp spaces encouraged curiosity about the new people the men were meeting and how they recounted moments of intimate and human connection that ran parallel to more antagonistic constructions of identity.

Trump did not have an “inner circle” as this term is conventionally understood. That is, he was a lifelong loner, so did not have personal, professional, or political intimates. He did, however, of course, have some people around him to whom he was, relatively, close, most of whom stayed for the duration of his administration. Trump’s inner circle is divided into three groups: 1) outer ring: 2) middle ring; and 3) inner ring. In the outer ring were people such as longtime immigration maven Stephen Miller, as well as Hope Hicks and Kellyanne Conway. In the middle ring are key players such as Vice President Mike Pence and Don Jr. And in the inner ring are Trump’s well-loved daughter, Ivanka, and her indispensable advisor-husband, Jared Kushner. The First Lady, Melania Trump, is separately discussed.

This chapter explores the notion of a private language as a way to achieve perfect communication and defeat skepticism. Borrowing from Wittgenstein's idea of private language as interpreted by Stanley Cavell, the chapter argues that Shakespeare and Donne experiment with an elusive tongue so as to investigate the possibility of Edenic intimacy in marriage. Each imagines a sublime and transparent marital union as overcoming the problem of other minds, but each represents this in opposed ways. In “The Phoenix and Turtle” Shakespeare creates the semblance of a private language by a virtuoso tour of poetic genres. His lyric thus entertains a Wittgensteinian puzzle: namely, that genre, the most consensual of linguistic conventions, can resist signification and become an abstruse language game. In “The Ecstasy,” by contrast, Donne invents an arcane dialect for his true lovers, showing private language in action, until he turns to the body for more complete erotic communication. Shakespeare’s and Donne’s contested engagements with skepticism and with deferred or partial knowledge inform the way these two poems parry the temptations of a private language.