Mediated Intimacies FREDRIKA THELANDERSSON Rutgers University, USA Tis entry reviews the ways in which “traditional” intimacy concerning sex and relationships have been transformed by communication technologies, as well as how these technologies have made a range of other connections “intimate.” It does so by discussing three diferent kinds of mediated intimacy as it is expressed in the Global North. Te frst interpretation draws on Gill’s (2009) work on the way in which discourses of sex and relationship advice are mediated in women’s magazines and looks at a recent study of sex advice in media culture. Te second defnition refers to intimacy and social media, and reviews the main points of Chambers’s (2013) Social Media and Personal Relationships: Online Intimacies and Networked Friendship, which examines this in detail. Te third kind of mediated intimacy discussed here concerns the way in which celebrities use social media to create intimate relationships with fans (Berryman & Kavka, 2017; Marwick & boyd, 2011). Sex and Relationship Advice Te frst kind of mediated intimacy is generally concerned with the more traditional understanding of intimacy as relating to one-on-one romantic relationships that involve sex and the family, and deals with “the ways in which diferent kinds of intimate relationality are constructed in diferent media sites” (Gill, 2009, p. 346). Tis involves everything from news reports about forced marriages, celebrity infdelities, “chick lit,” and how-to parenting guides. Te way intimate relationality comes to be constructed in media texts is closely related to cultural constructions of gender and sexuality, as these narratives tend to function as scripts for how to “correctly” be a man or a woman (almost always adhering to a rigid gender binary). Tis aspect of mediated intimacy has been studied extensively by Barker, Gill, and Harvey in Mediated Intimacy: Sex Advice in Media Culture (2018), and this entry next goes over the main points of their arguments. Te notion of mediated intimacy as sex and relationship advice is closely related to the body of mediated advice ofen referred to as “self-help.” Barker et al. (2018) move away from the term self-help, however, because the knowledge about sex and intimate relationships that circulate in media culture reaches beyond traditional self-help gen- res to include things like television shows, celebrity autobiographies, and social media channels. Tey argue that “we live in a world sufused and saturated with representations of intimate relationships” (Barker et al., 2018, p. 24; emphasis in original) which means that our ideas about what an intimate relationship should look like come from a wide range of diferent media sources, far beyond straightforward how-to guides. Te International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication. Karen Ross (Editor-in-Chief), Ingrid Bachmann, Valentina Cardo, Sujata Moorti, and Marco Scarcelli (Associate Editors). © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. DOI: 10.1002/9781119429128.iegmc288