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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... 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 science ...
... issues of social structure,”4 or what I prefer to see as personal sufferings and public problems. The book follows a direct line; and as it builds an argument, it is not a series of separate, disparate essays but an interconnected whole ...
... issues now figure on a global stage. My aim is simply to introduce a range of ideas about change, intimacies, and politics—many of which are not in themselves new, but which have not been placed together like this before. Although the ...
... issues culture” of public debate that was largely unimaginable just fifty years ago.2And a larger number of people in Western cultures than ever before can make the choice to live their lives in real 4 intimate troubles.
... issues forth clearly at the outset—Who would have thought at the start of the twentieth century that by its end we would be seriously discussing such matters as: “Intimate troubles” and “choices” around new forms of publicly recognized ...
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 |