Beyond Intimaphobia: Object lessons from Foucault and Sade ADAM JOSEPH GRETEMAN Art Education, School of the Art Institute of Chicago Abstract In this study I suggest ways of thinking through issues of intimacy that have emerged in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in the USA. I propose a state of intimaphobia in education. However, I move beyond exposing this state of intimaphobia to offer particular readings of two philosophers of intimacy: Michel Foucault and the Marquis de Sade. I argue that these two philosophers provide alternative models of thinking through the problems and potentials of and for intimacy. While Foucault has been taken up within education in any number of ways, his concept of the ‘homosexual’ is utilized to offer insights into intimacy. Sade, while the stranger philosopher to engage, offers challenges to contemporary educational practices through the lessons of the libertine. Foucault and Sade offer, to put it simply, prom- ises for pedagogical pleasures that challenge the current fears around intimacy in education. Keywords: sexuality, intimacy, queer theory, Foucault, Sade I make people happy, Love is good, not bad. (Vonnegut, 1963/1998, p. 207) Introduction In November 2011, two high-school students in Florida were suspended for hugging——a direct violation of the schools zero-tolerance policy on public displays of affection. 1 In December 2011 a nine-year-old student in North Carolina was suspended for two days for sexual harassment after calling a teacher ‘cute’. 2 Singing LMFAO’s ‘Sexy and I know it’ at a Colorado school in May 2012 led to a three-day suspension for sexual harassment of a first grade student. 3 These are just a handful of stories that point toward the continued and burgeoning use of sexual harassment and zero-tolerance policies to teach students lessons about how to relate and interact to others in the school space. My interest in these moments as lessons is not to critique such policies and their lessons, because others have made such critiques of zero tolerance and sexual harassment quite compellingly. 4 Rather, my interest in these Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2013 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2013.792724 Ó 2013 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia Downloaded by [Adam Joseph Greteman] at 07:59 30 April 2013