Bodies in Proximity: Youth, Intimacy and the Production of Space in Lagos

Abstract

Against the backdrop of the thickening spatial and economic inequalities that beset Nigeria’s most populous city, this dissertation examines the relationship between space, body, and generations. It asks how bodily, spatial, and intimate practices, are producing, on the one hand, new affordances for young residents to belong against the precarious housing conditions in Lagos, and on the other hand, new imperatives for governing youth as a category of the state. Bodies in Proximity: Youth, Intimacy and the Production of Space in Lagos, my dissertation is a multi-sited ethnography of spaces of shared living (proximity) and public sociality, from street corners to hostels to churches to virtual spaces, that young Lagosians inhabit as alternatives (or sometimes appendages) to compounds and nuclear family homes. Taking intimacy as a central conceptual frame, the project argues that these spaces become sites through which the actors can elaborate new possibilities of intimacy. Further, it asks what is at stake in the publicness of these intimacies, why their visibility elicits moral anxieties, what forms of recognition they confer on the body of youth, and how institutions respond to them. Departing from the prevailing temporalities approach in youth studies which takes the trajectory of life course as its starting point, this dissertation considers how spatial and bodily practices are themselves structuring the time of youth. It contends that these emergent practices of producing space – on a material and affective level – at once ensure new pathways to intimacy and become sites to discipline youth into proper citizens on the very basis of these intimacies.