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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... discuss issues dealing with the Bill of Rights, philosophy of law, philosophy of politics, privacy in an urban society, the concept of community, the purpose of government, and epistemology. The lectureship rotates among seven social ...
... discuss the proposition that “sociology is not interested in people.” I wrote my answer, attacking the claim, and soon learned that this was not what my tutors wanted to hear. Sociology, I was told, was concerned with social structures ...
... discussing such matters as: “Intimate troubles” and “choices” around new forms of publicly recognized “family life.” These include the value of single parenting; the legitimacy—moral and legal—of lesbian and gay partnerships, marriages ...
... discussions of intimacy move us away from love and sexuality and into other areas. Elizabeth Stanko's work on women's experiences of male violence, for example, is called Intimate Intrusions(1985) and takes us into a very different ...
... discussion is the suggestion that we are on the brink of a new world order—either a dystopian one of fundamentalism, ravaging conflicts, and exploitation or a utopian one in which human-rights regimes will foster a wider order of world ...
Contents
3 | |
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 |