The Politics of Intimacy: An Intersectional Analysis of Social Hierarchy in Geeli Puchhi and The Mirror

Abstract

This paper examines the politics of intimacy and how intimate relationships operate through social hierarchies of caste, class, gender, and sexuality in Neeraj Ghaywan’s Geeli Pucchi (2021) and Konkana Sen Sharma’s The Mirror (2023). Intimacy is often understood as a private discourse, insulated from political and social structures. Feminist scholarship has challenged this public/private dichotomy, arguing that the personal is always political. This paper examines how intimacy functions for characters who occupy the intersections of caste, class, gender, and sexuality and how those intersectional hierarchies control and regulate the terms and conditions of their intimacies. Drawing on Kimberle Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, Sharmila Rege’s framework of caste and gender as co-constitutive in the Indian context, and Sara Ahmed’s theory of the cultural politics of emotion, the paper argues that intimacy in both films is not a space outside social hierarchy but one of its primary sites of operation, where the reproduction of inequality is always structural.