The Power in the Intimate

The Power in the Intimate draws on feminist political economy, development studies, and qualitative policy research to examine how intimacy, autonomy, and bodily agency are connected to wider structures of power and inequality.

Based on original qualitative fieldwork in Peru, including interviews with women, development practitioners, and healthcare professionals, the book examines how intimate experiences are shaped by colonial legacies, gender norms, economic inequalities, and social institutions. It demonstrates how empowerment is experienced not only through access to resources and opportunities, but also through the ways individuals navigate autonomy, relationships, consent, and control over their own bodies. The book develops a new framework for analysing power and inequality in intimate experiences, and advances an alternative approach to intimacy and consent that moves beyond narrow consent-based models to foreground agency, mutuality, and relational accountability.

This book is ideal for students and researchers in development studies, sociology, gender studies and public policy, and practitioners concerned with empowerment, inequality, wellbeing, and social change.