Scripted Intimacy: How Institutions Make Intimacy Governable

What does it mean for an institution to govern through intimacy rather than alongside it? This article examines a residential boarding school for "at-risk" youth, where care is organized through family-like "cottages," married house-parent couples, and daily routines designed to approximate home life. Drawing on multi-year ethnographic fieldwork, the article introduces scripted intimacy to describe how the school choreographs emotional closeness through rules, incentive systems, and risk management, producing real bonds between caregivers and children while constraining how those bonds are formed and expressed. The analysis speaks to debates in political theory and public law about the state's role in shaping childhood and family, showing how governance of "at-risk" populations increasingly operates through the management of affect rather than formal sanction alone. Scripted intimacy reveals a broader tension in institutions that scaffold rather than replace family life: care is reorganized, not absent, on terms set by liability and administrative accountability.