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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... relationships, doing 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 ...
... relationships. To set some of the 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 ...
... of the past were also governed by complex and varied relationships. And the panics and debates about moral and personal life have surely been recurrent themes at least of the modern world.6Indeed, intimate troubles 7.
... relationships, in patterns of exploitation, framed by choices generated by mass consumption and worldwide market structures. Intimacies in the modern world are thus subject to contradictory tendencies. Late modern (or postmodern) ...
... relationships Uncertainty, risk, chaos, a world out of control The chance for a new world order and for global human rights figure 1. Utopian and Dystopian Worlds real idea how to handle but that have generated much talk over the past ...
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 |