Notes on relationship commutativity (part3: community)
I would argue that intimacy is commutative. Friendship... not so much. And the perception of intimacy... also not so much. Both, however, need to be consensual. So what does this mean for community?
Part 1 is about friendship and how it’s non-commutative (you can “be a friend” to someone who is not your “friend”). [text]
Part 2 is about intimacy and how it is commutative [text]
This part is about intimacy in a community context and “community ties”
TLDR: “Community” can mean something more substantive than how we often use the word in the context of “ace community” or even LGBTQ+ communities. Depending on a number of factors, that will affect what kind of community ties people have and the kinds of commitments that go along with participating in communities. Talking about the idea of intimacy within community, it’s useful to go back to David Jay’s (now more than a decade-old) idea of community-based intimacy. One thing that’s really helpful is the idea that people can have relationships not only with individuals but also with groups. Relationships people have with communities can be one-on-one relationships with other individual community members, where those relationships might be “community relationships” or more personal ones-- a kind of relationship that doesn’t seem to get talked about much in ace community discussions. But people can also have relationships with entire groups that extend beyond the individual relationships they have with individual people in those groups. Consent might work a little differently in the context of relationships between an individual and a group, but it’s still an important part of those relationships.
Re/considering “community”
I think people mean a lot of different things when they talk about community. We certainly talk about an “ace community” (or communities) and LGBTQ+ communities, and other such communities. But I think there’s a lot of leeway about what that means.
In describing community based intimacy (which I’ll get to shortly), David Jay defined “community” extremely broadly in terms of all connections in one’s life-- including economic connections that cross the planet [here]. I think the point of that was to open the scope of “relationships” as broadly as possible and not to deny or overlook the kinds of connections people in particular “groups” might have with each other by virtue of membership in or even loose affiliation with a particular group.
While I think there’s value in trying to recognise all relationships and connections-- even the ones that aren’t immediately visible-- I also think there’s value in distinguishing this collection of relationships from “community” in a more specific sense, because people often participate in more than one community, and do so differently for each.
To me, “community” has to share something or have something in common-- a goal, political affiliation, geographical proximity, aspect of identity or experience; a hobby or time spent together, interdependence for survival, etc. Ace community, trans community, communities of people who spin fire or take their dogs to a dogpark or play pick-up soccer or make zines or regularly show up to confront Islamophobic “western chauvinists”, etc.
Depending on how close-knit these might be, the level of casual community commitment or expectations might differ-- so: do people check in with each other? how do people help each other out? are there scaffolded group interactions? and if so how much time do people spend with each other outside of them?, etc.
Typically when I think of “community” in a substantive way (as opposed to, say, “a community” in a more symbolic way), I think about a collection of people who are “in it together” (where the “it” has very real, material consequences). Survival communities at the extreme end, but things where there are informal networks of cooperation and mutual aid, and where interactions sometimes extend into people’s homes (or other living spaces) and into various parts of their day or night. In that respect, ace community isn’t necessarily the best place for everyone to look for “community”. That’s not to say that nobody finds such things in ace community or that there isn’t a lot, in practice, to being ace offline but that, for a lot of "ace community members”, the “community” part is a barely casual, merely symbolic sort of thing.
Reconsidering “Community-Based Intimacy”
A while back-- goodness, more than 10 years ago now-- David Jay was talking about “community-based intimacy” (e.g., in his Notes from the Asexual Underground podcast episode from January 2007 “Confessions of an asexual slut Part 3 [here]-- though he’d spoken about it more casually on his podcast / blog at least as far back as 2006 [here]).
There was a small flurry of interest in Community Based Intimacy in the late 2000s, with some people being very excited and a few of the bloggers (in the *much smaller-then* ace blogosphere) writing about how that sort of things didn’t or wouldn’t work for them (e.g., [here] and [here] ). The term is still listed and vaguely defined on the AVENwiki “Relationships” page [here], but it’s not something people seem to talk about much these days. So I’ll explain a bit.
While outlining Community Based Intimacy, David Jay described being intimate with a whole community of people-- having a personal relationship with a community which might be relatively stable even if the relationships within individuals within the community fluctuated. In practice, this would include diverse relationships of various levels of significance and varied functions-- someone engaged in community based intimacy would likely have several primary and secondary relationships in addition to more casual ones. In particular, he described the structure of his community at that point in time, where two of the three primary relationships were with groups.
Notably, community-based intimacy emphasises that relationships, even primary ones, aren’t limited to being between individuals. That’s important, because in the few places I’ve seen people explicitly engaging with the term / idea of “Community-Based Intimacy”, there are 2 different meanings at play:
someone distributing their “intimacy needs” (i.e., needs for human social connection) across numerous relationships within a community, in effect “throughout” a community, though limited to individual relationships within that community
someone engaging intimately and building relationships literally *with an entire community* (or entire sections of a community) in ways that extend beyond relationships between individuals
The community-based intimacy that David Jay described was a combination of both.
At the same time, as I understand it, the purpose of describing “community based intimacy” wasn’t really to describe an “orientation” toward intimacy or a “way of doing” intimacy so much as it was a framework to help people talk about and conceptualise the the relationships in their lives. It was really more about offering a framework to help people engage more intentionally with their communities-- to help people talk about what kinds of relationships they want in their lives and how to build them. And that’s clear from a 2009 video on the topic [here].
(Engaging intentionally with one’s community should not be confused with the idea of intentional (living) communities [explanation] or other kinds of intentional communities based on similar principles. In intentional communities, the whole community is created and maintained intentionally, with explicit purpose, and with explicit commitments about participation from community members, agreements about what participation entails, etc.)
At any rate, while rarely foregrounded, community-based intimacy is an idea that often lingers in the back of my mind because community generally is something I think about a lot. (Community is hard for me, as a weird, socially awkward introvert, so negotiating and navigating communities is an ongoing struggle for me.) But I think questioning what “intimacy” means in this context is useful.
Intimacy within a community-- individual to individual
Within a community, intimacy between individual community members works pretty much the same as anywhere else-- a consensual, mutual closeness or connection.
People can have separate personal relationships with particular members of a community. For example, an ace having a few ace friends met through ace community. There are advantages to having many different individual relationships. When there are many relationships, people can seek different things they want in their relationships from different people. Expectations placed on relationships are generally more manageable in the sense that people are less likely to find themselves in situations of asking too much from one or two people (or being asked for too much). That tends to avoid situations where people feel obligated to assume particular commitments or roles in other people’s lives. It removes some of the pressures that can compromise the consensual nature of closeness.
Additionally, it’s possible that the closeness is a “close community relationship” and not a “close personal relationship”. It’s just that the nature of these connections isn’t necessarily personal the way it is for individual relationships apart from any community context. In other words, people can connect with people along community-specific dimensions.
For example, I might connect with people in my local ace community around ace-related stuff (which might at times get quite personal), even if we don’t share personal relationships or even interact outside of those spaces. I might connect with local trans community members around issues that affect us all either personally or as a group or that might affect other group members. Or I might develop a “friendly rapport” with people I regularly organise things with. And with that comes an element of knowledge-sharing and sometimes practical support, even in the absence of personal relationships. [People routinely have those kinds of not-really-personal peer relationships in a “work” context or with (especially post-secondary) classmates, etc.]
Community ties as relationships that exist first and foremost because-- and are sustained by-- shared participation in a community. But they’re still individual ties between individuals within the community.
Intimacy with(in) a community-- individual to group
When it comes to relationships between an individual and a group, things can get a little tricky. There are groups of friends where people have a connection to the friend-group that extends beyond the individual relationships with the individual people in the group. (There’s some discussion of that in the context of relationship triads, but not much among larger groups.) And people can be close with or connected to larger groups of people too, as groups.
For example, back when I lived out west on the prairies, I was tangential to several communities. None of them were really *my* communities and I wasn’t really *part* of them, but people knew me and we were on good terms. I guess I was liminally part of those communities.
First, is this intimacy between a person and a community, or is this only the feeling of intimacy? It might be tempting to dismiss this as merely metaphorical, since communities aren’t sentient and don’t have agency in the same way that individuals do. But i think that misses some of what’s going on.
For instance, there’s this one collective house that I had a vague community relationship with (in addition to individual relationships with a couple of the people who lived there). I certainly didn’t have individual relationships with everyone there-- it was actually a bit of a running joke that I literally couldn’t tell most of the guys who lived there apart (this was just an issue with the men and not with anybody else who lived there). As far as it mattered to me, they might have been the same person several times over-- in terms of how they looked, dressed, spoke and acted (from the little I saw them at least).
But if, say, I had a bunch of latkes or cookies left over the queer youth group I was involved in at the time, I could bring them to the house and it didn’t matter who answered the door. Even if it was one of the guys I couldn’t tell apart from the rest and who probably couldn’t name me either, I would still be welcome because of the community familiarity (and it wouldn’t be “weird” for me to be there). There was a level of “community-type intimacy” between me and that group of people that went beyond my relationships with individuals there.
“Consensual” participation in communities
The nature of a community is such that people who compose them and/or participate in them don’t and can’t have knowledge of or control over every aspect of that community. And I think that people participate in communities understanding that. So consent to participate in those communities is a much more broadly distributed sense of “consent”. And because of that, sometimes things happen within communities that people are not okay with to the point where communities fracture and/or individuals leave / drop out of those communities.
What people have control over, and what people ideally should be consenting to, is their own participation in those communities-- how and how often the interface with those groups, and which parts of those communities or community spaces they interface with. As (figuratively) “living organisms” communities change over time as people come and go, form and shift group norms, go through experiences, etc. They are also shaped by the landscape of some of the personal relationships and conflicts among community members, particularly when there are critical events or instances of internal community violence.
At the same time, changes within those communities don’t happen overnight. Ultimately, community members bear some responsibility for the communities they are part of while also not bearing full responsibility for all of what happens within them. These communities have a “life of their own” beyond the individuals involved in them. And participating consensually in these communities means getting a feel for those communities (so as to be informed), and then making decisions about participation, and acting on them-- ideally in the absence of individual or situational factors coercing people toward staying or leaving, etc. And since this is an ongoing process, people are constantly cycling through those stages.
Being close with a community means being integrated into it, spending a lot of time in its spaces, having it be significantly involved in your life, hving commitments to the community, etc. That’s presumably going to mean substantive interaction(s) with other community members, but not necessarily the same ones, and the “closeness with the community” isn’t necessarily based on or related to “closeness with individual community members”.
And people can have particular feelings about that closeness, but there’s still a distinction to be made between the way that communities are integrated into people’s lives and the meaning of that integration, the feelings they have about it, etc.
Basically intimacy between a person and a community is the connection between the individual and the community, where community members are (as freely and consensually as possible) participating in those communities.
I feel like I conceptualise community differently than many others I encounter in ace “communities”, in terms of what kinds of experiences I have with “community” generally, what I’m looking for from communities I participate in, and what participating in them means to me. Part of that is an ethical orientation toward communities and the voluntary commitments I believe are important within communities, to sustain communities. But that gets back to much larger issues that I’ve written about before, namely how aces are my people, but also not my people (e.g., in the intro to the first issue of “f-ace-ing silence” [here]).
I think there’s a lot of uncharted conceptual space to cover when ti comes to the idea of intimacy between a person and a group, and to the ties people have generally to their communities.
