Postdigital Intimacies: Gendered Perspectives on the Blurred Boundaries of Private and Public in the Digital Age

In the context of an era increasingly being (re)defined by our relationships with and through technology, intimacy has emerged as a figure, a concept, and a practice in need of constant reassessment and feminist interrogation.Indeed, the last decade has seen increasing work on gender, the (post)digital, and forms of relationality and intimacy opened up and foreclosed by technology -a phenomenon which we now perhaps take for granted as being simultaneously embedded in both the public and private spheres.To be sure, intimacy has always been somewhat technological, but it now seems to be everywhere, and all at once, and there is something unique to this 'post' moment -'an era of social networking, virtual domestic assistants and smart homes, artificial intelligence and consciousness, the body-machine assemblage, and our obsession (stronger than ever) with viruses and immunity, on and off our screens' (Balfour 2023).In short, intimacy is thoroughly enmeshed in the (post)digital, and was coextensive with the emergence of the digital over time, but it is also singularly historical in its need for attention at this moment.In positioning this issue, we are building on the notable contributions of others in the field, including explorations of the relationship between platforms, intimacy, and labour (Hurley, Evans, forthcoming 2026), the concept of intimate strangers or forms of strange(r)ness (Balfour et.al. 2025), digital intimate publics (Dobson 2018), 'virtual' intimacies (McGlotten 2018), the 'networked public-private' (Evans, Ringrose