Drawing from Claire Mortimer’s historical framing of the romantic comedy, I argue that Hollywood cinema since the 1930s has been developing a genre with plots limited to heteronormative conceptions of love, intimacy, success and sex. My research project Intimate Spaces is a limited series of six episodes with characters created to interrogate the stereotypical nature and predictable flow of intimacies depicted in the mainstream genre. My aim is to destabilize the dominant form by taking up what Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner theorize as ‘normal intimacy’. The script of Intimate Spaces is a reflection on the idea that normative relationships require constant work, what Laura Kipnis notes as a capitalistic reality. Pulling from my personal archive of writing as a queer, BIPOC, first-generation Canadian woman, I alter the romantic comedy genre, making it a site for mutual interpersonal understanding. I present these stories episodically, as a way to center non-conjugal intimate relationships alongside romantic ones, focusing individually on diverse examples of intimate scenes – parent and child, grandparent and grandchild, friends and roommates. These imagined stories were developed and are set in the context of the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in Toronto. They depict how being jolted into this time of isolation has altered ordinary life differently for each of us, placing new emphasis on our intimate experiences.

Keywords: intimacy, time-based media, episodic, short series, queer intimacy, queer space, intimate space, autoethnography, collaborative character formation, romantic comedy, anti-heteronormativity

Website: https://nchuck.wixsite.com/nataliechuck