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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic research in London and aboard an all-gay cruise ship, this paper introduces synthetic intimacy to examine how closeness is modulated through alternative temporalities and controlled returns to a perceived normalcy under late-stage capitalism.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on twelve months of fieldwork in London and aboard all-gay cruise ships touring the Mediterranean, this paper introduces the concept of synthetic intimacy to examine how closeness is modulated through alternative temporalities and controlled returns to normalcy. Focusing on practices such as chemsex (chemically enhanced sexual encounters) and all-gay cruise ships, the paper traces how these infrastructures reorganise time to generate suspended, dilated, and compressed encounters that condense affect and intensify intimacy. Despite often being framed by mainstream media and public-health research as pathological or exceptional, these practices function less as ruptures from normative life than as techniques for sustaining it. Hence, synthetic intimacy refers to forms of closeness deliberately manufactured via psychoactive substances, digital interfaces, or commercial tourism that enable emotional rewards without the temporal depth of mutual knowledge or sustained social obligation.

These practices allow participants to dwell in the ambiguity between transgression and reinvestment in the perceived normal life, navigating desire, exhaustion, moral expectations, and the demands of life under late-stage capitalism. In attending to how intimacy is lived across unstable, dilated, and compressed temporal registers, the paper contributes to anthropological debates on chronotopic fragmentation and the challenges of writing intimacy within unsettled temporal conditions.