Disclaimer: This article discusses friendship as the technology of intimacy. Its short length cannot do justice to the importance, complexity, and vastness of the topic. I also don’t intend this piece for general readers but use it as an index for future references. Feel free to email me for further dialogue at [kitty(at)tutu.house].
What I mean when I say friendship.
From past articles, we know that intimacy can be a site of danger or safety, depending on a person’s ontology—and that ontology is woven from systemic threads. When I say friend, I carry with it my own historicity, imagined futures, commitments, expectations, and associations— often shaped by dominant narratives such as the economy and capitalism. Yet I try to unlearn, to investigate patterns outside such hierarchies. Friendship, then, appears multifaceted and complex, rhizomatic and easy: it shows up everywhere, in almost everything, it can happen right now, all the time.
Friendship is not taken seriously and this benefits the status quo.
Dominant Narrative 1: Your friends are less important than your family and spouse.
The nuclear family is not a natural form of kinship but a carefully engineered invention of the colonial-capitalist state. Many scholars such as Silvia Federici and Angela Davis have argued, this configuration functions to privatise care by displacing responsibility for reproduction, intimacy, and survival onto the individual household. In doing so, it isolates families within surveilled domestic units, dismantles collective forms of support, and legitimizes control through intersecting systems of racism, sexism, classism, and ableism. This reorganization is further reinforced by the extension of work hours, the erosion of welfare systems, and the dismantling of public infrastructures of care, all of which channel people into industrial and corporate labor regimes.
Friends and family are often positioned as opposites: once family begins, friends fade into the background. "Blood is thicker than water." Classic colonial anthropology studied kinship through such binaries, reinforcing biases rooted in racist notions of hierarchy and lineage (Schneider, 1984).
As Forster and White further argue, "the historical advent of the white bourgeois family was concurrent with the violent erasure of other forms of kinship" (2023, 33). This erasure displaced communal living arrangements, queer and non-heteronormative bonds, indigenous kinship systems, and mutual aid practices—forms of intimacy and care that fall outside the heteropatriarchal nuclear family model. To take friendship seriously, then, is to reimagine intimacy beyond the whitewashed image of family and to confront the manufactured scarcity of care under capitalism.
Dominant Narrative 2: Friendship, intimacy, and love are not a serious topic for the social and political sciences.
The (past but still mainstream) assumption that friendship, intimacy, and love are not serious topics for the social and political sciences—is itself a reflection of hierarchies. By relegating affective life to the "private" domain which belongs to "women", social theory has reproduced the colonial-capitalist separation of public and private, producing an internalised helplessness in the so-called "everyday person". Scholars such as Lauren Berlant (1998), Ann Laura Stoler (2006), and Silvia Federici (2004) have since demonstrated that intimacy is not peripheral but profoundly constitutive. Many scholars have since debated the profoundness of intimacy (Berlant 1998; Stoler 2006; Federici 2004).
Judith Butler writes: "What grief displays… is the thrall in which our relations with others hold us… in ways that challenge the very notion of ourselves as autonomous and in control" (2006, 23). Feminist and queer theorists have long argued that chosen families, affective bonds, and practices of care constitute critical sites of resistance to heteronormativity and racial capitalism (Weston 1991; Lorde 1984; TallBear 2018).
TL;DR: The image of nuclear family as closest kins is not natural, but rather the result of erasure and control. There are multitudes of being kins.
Friending as a Technology of Entanglement
I love what Nho said in a podcast about true friendship:
"I come full, I come undefended, I come raw. And that’s what I mean by freedom. I don’t have to protect who I am, I don’t have to perform anything anymore, I get to be in the presence of my friend and my friend will tell me everything exactly as it is." (Nho, Spiritual Friendships)
Friendship is not about seeking exclusive happiness or echo chambers of sameness—whether through blood, shared backgrounds, or even species. It is about becoming more porous, complex, and capable together. By attending to the geographies of connection, we trace lines of flight that open forms of life not fully captured by domination. In this way, friendship becomes a practice of resistance—an act that transforms life within and through us.
In Friends In Common, Laura C. Forster and Joel White wrote, friendship as both a political act in itself - a commitment to forming intimacies despite the individualising and apathy-inducing capitalist machine - and as a key sustaining force within political struggles of various kinds.
Across The Architecture of Intimacy series, I’ve argued that intimacy is not about being close to a person (as if there is a non-changing, singular person—which I named the interpersonal model of relationship). Intimacy is better understood as an experience (phenomenon) that grows the seed of entanglement within and through us.
Dense bonds—what my Buddhist tradition calls spiritual friendships or sangha—function as a technology that enables us to experience such entanglement repeatedly, at the frequencies and durations necessary to sustain and ever-widen realities of care, interdependence, freedom rather than fear, isolation, and confinement.
