Intimate Citizenship: Private Decisions and Public DialoguesUniversity of Washington Press, 2011 M10 1 - 192 pages Solo parenting, in vitro fertilization, surrogate mothers, gay and lesbian families, cloning and the prospect of “designer babies,” Viagra and the morning-after pill, HIV/AIDS, the global porn industry, on-line dating services, virtual sex--whether for better of worse, our intimate lives are in the throes of dramatic change. In this thought-provoking study, sociologist Ken Plummer examines the transformations taking place in the realm of intimacy and the conflicts--the “intimate troubles”--to which these changes constantly give rise. In surveying the intimate possibilities now available to us and the issues swirling around them, Plummer focuses especially on the overlap of public and private. Increasingly, our most private decisions are bound up with public institutions such as legal codes, the medical system, or the media. |
From inside the book
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... bodies” continues to flag the fact that sociologists can fruitfully study worlds of personal life that have typically been seen as the domain of the psychologist and psychiatrist. Here, human lives become matters of social actions ...
... bodies—and can show the links between intimacies and inequalities, such as class, ethnicity, gender, and age. My own concern in this book lies with the seemingly rapid changes that are taking place across the world in the personal life ...
... bodies, identities, and sexualities hitherto unknown in human history. The infertile can turn to assisted conception. Lesbians and gays can enter into registered partnerships and become parents. Younger people can be more experimental ...
... bodies, enter our bodies, replace our bodies. The body—even the fetus—is modified both internally and externally: it is a New World and language of people as “cyborgs,” people as becoming “posthuman.” Just what does this mean—and do we ...
... bodies, our emotions, our identities. We dointimacies when we get close to all these feelings and emotions. Intimacy exists in the doing of sex and love, obviously, but also in the doing of families, marriages, and friendships, in child ...
Contents
3 | |
New Lives in a Late Modern World | 17 |
3 Culture Wars and Contested Intimacies | 33 |
4 The New Theories of Citizenship | 49 |
5 Public Intimacies Private Citizens | 67 |
6 Dialogic Citizenship | 84 |
7 Stories and the Grounded Moralities of Everyday Life | 95 |
8 Globalizing Intimate Citizenship | 117 |
9 The Intimate Citizenship Project | 139 |
Notes | 147 |
Bibliography | 163 |
Index of Names | 179 |
Subject Index | 183 |