Material Intimacies

Abstract

Due to a genetic hearing disorder, I have worn and had a very intimate relationship with hearing aids since I was a child. “Material Intimacies” is meant to map out the perhaps unseen connection and intimacies fostered through material items, specifically hearing aids, whilst reflecting possibilities for ways of relating to each other and our environments that challenge patriarchal, colonial ideologies. Throughout the poem, I strive to highlight the ways that we are physically intimate with material items, the way material items allow for intimacy with our environment and nature, and the ways that material items may foster intimacy between individual people and broader global matters of inequality. We are so often consumed with taken for granted “objective” knowledges about our relations to each other and the world that are actually rooted in very discriminatory and hierarchical ideologies. How may we re-imagine our connections to one another, to understand how certain issues that may seem so far from one's daily life are in reality intimately weaved into the very ways that we know and experience the world?