Why do many inequalities concerning gender and
sexuality prevail, even in countries that rank highly in equality
measurements and where demands for equality are widely supported? This
book stems from the assumptions that intimate relationships are crucial
sites for producing and experiencing inequality and that inequalities
are shaped in everyday affective encounters. The introduction
foregrounds the idea that exploring affect in intimate relationships
sheds light on such subtle power dynamics, which may easily go
unnoticed. By pinning down the challenges that theoretically advanced
affect studies pose to the empirical study of intimate relationships, it
advances a relational understanding of affect, one that sees how
affecting and becoming affected emerge in and through open-ended
encounters between bodies and things. Since affects may sediment power
imbalances and asymmetries in intimate relationships, the collection
seeks, with the help of the concept of affective inequality, to capture
empirically such phenomena in particular. The introduction concludes by
outlining the sections and chapters of the book and suggesting some
possible reading trajectories for it.

This introduction presents an overview of the key
concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book
stems from the assumptions intimating that relationships are crucial
sites for producing and experiencing inequality and those inequalities
are shaped in everyday affective encounters. It seeks to employ and
develop empirically recent conceptualizations, such as affective
resonance, affective intensity, affective orientation or affective
practice. The book offers novel insights by focusing on listening and
touching, or on telepathy and haunting memories. It widens the
discussion of intimacy to cover intimate relations that take place
without the material immanence of embodied encounters. The book outlines
that intimate conflicts between partners also have a potential to
disrupt the very gender binaries that may be causing them, especially if
the conflicts are used as a point of departure for acknowledging the
affective exchange that takes place in a relationship.