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
Results 1-5 of 27
... freedom of choice the option to escape individualization and to refuse to participate in the individualizing process is emphatically not on the agenda. Zygmunt Bauman, The Individualized Society We live in an age in which the social ...
... freedom: human relations become individuated in a world of choices. There is a general democratization and informalization of everyday life, even as technological growth speeds up. On the other hand, intimate relations become forms of ...
... freedom of the Web lining up against those who argue that the Web is destroying society. The Web can certainly foster talk, in chat rooms and the like, but it can under certain circumstances also work its way into private zones such as ...
... freedom, justice, equality, care, recognition, minimal harm”? Part of the answer may lie in attending to the situatedness of moral debate, and this is best accomplished by listening to “stories” of all kinds rather than through abstract ...
... freedom remarked: I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be the instrument of my own, not of other men's acts of will. I wish to be a subject, not an object; to be moved by ...
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 |