Touch between child and mother as an affective practice

This chapter explores video-recorded naturally occurring interactions between a child and her mother. It analyses how the child and her mother manage their interpersonal space moment-by-moment in a flowing continuum of haptic co-presence. The chapter identifies and analyses two different haptic affective practices, haptic offer and haptic home base, through which the child can momentarily negotiate over the bodily separation and unity with her mother and establish a specific relation to her mother’s body in the interpersonal space. The study suggests that these haptic affective practices construct a platform to (re)produce affective inequalities in intimate relationships.