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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... 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 (from test tube babies and cybersex to lesbian and ...
... inequalities, and the decline of civility. Demon sex stalks the streets. We are experiencing a war of men against women and the breakdown of family life; child abuse and violence toward women and the elderly are rampant everywhere ...
... inequalities) but also to the spread of new media technologies, the homogenization of culture, and the weakening of the autonomous nation state. Intimacies are part of all this. For there are growing numbers of people who now conduct ...
... inequality, such as the caste system and slavery. But support for the hierarchical distribution of power starts to crumble under the class conditions of late modernity. According to Bauman, another feature of the postmodern world—or at ...
... inequalities—that also play major roles in the shaping of intimacies, and these, too, have been around for a long time. The world over, people continue to confront inequalities that shape their most intimate lives: pronounced economic ...
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 |