Alone together: Intimacy and semi-mobility during ho chi minh city’s lockdown

Abstract

In this article, based on my ethnographic experience of Ho Chi Minh City’s lock-down, I argue that COVID-19 acted as an accelerator of intimacies, allowing people to nego-tiate alternative forms of sociality both within and outside the domestic space. On the one hand, by confining people at home it brought to light social and housing inequalities in urban Vietnam. On the other, it forced people to find imaginative ways to cope with social-distancing protocols. Since mobility during lockdown was limited, the normatively private space of the house became an incubator for social life, affording people – even those outside the circle of close friends and relatives – the opportunity to be alone together, sharing their temporary stuckness to challenge normative patterns of intimacy and sexuality.