Public Proximities: Fraternal Contact, Masonic Contracts, and the Intimate Public Sphere

“I haven’t hugged my best friends in six months,” tweeted pop star Billie Eilish in September 2020. As the pandemic reaches 22 months, for many it will be more than a year without contact outside the privacy of their home. Health professionals have raised alarms about what they call a crisis in touch, as touch deprivation has had devastating physiological effects, leading to higher rates of stress, depression, and suicide. But how are feminist political theorists to make sense of this sudden and prolonged loss of bodily contact with others? In what sense does this generalized absence of bodily proximity between strangers undermine democratic relations between citizens? Held captive by a discursive image of the public sphere, this paper argues that many contemporary theories of democracy are unable to make political sense of the absence of material bodies in public. As such, this paper charts out an alternative understanding of the public sphere that is formed in and through bodily relations of equality. To do so, this paper returns to the 18th century bourgeois public sphere. Feminist critics of Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere argued that women’s exclusion from the public sphere was not accidental to but rather constitutive of new gendered relations of equality by regulating not only which bodies could appear in public but how they should speak in order to participate in the public voice of reason. Building on this feminist scholarship, this paper argues that new corporeal practices of homosociality premised on but not reducible to women’s exclusion enabled bourgeois men to subvert hierarchies of status and form new relations of equality. Through a queer-feminist rereading of the bourgeois public sphere, this paper contends that historical transformations in men’s bodily relations constituted new gendered relations of equality, and thus made possible the deliberative exchange taken to be characteristic of the bourgeois public sphere. In order to showcase the political role played by the historical reorganization of men’s bodily relations, this paper investigates the largest fraternal organization of 18th century Western Europe, Freemasonry. Unlike the coffeeshop or salon, the masonic lodge served as a unique infrastructural node in what historians have described as a mass movement among the gentry and professional classes. Entry into the masonic lodge required its members to undergo a ritual of initiation through which men contracted with the society. Mobilizing the logic of fraternity, these rituals sought to produce new relations of equality in and through a traffic in men’s bodies. As an exemplary site of the bourgeois public, the masonic lodge showcases the historical role of men’s bodily relations of intimacy in constituting new political relations based not on hierarchy but equality. Given freemasonry's emphasis on bodily intimacy, critics often accused the men of being sodomites. The paper thus concludes by showing how rumours of sodomy served as political weapons in and against the class struggles of the bourgeoisie and their project of constituting new gendered relations of equality through the male body.