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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... sexual obsession that lurk not far from its surface. We live in an increasingly insecure world, characterized by global uncertainty and risk, along with tribal warfare and brutal exploitation, terrorism and the fear of terrorism ...
... sexuality. Not only have matters of so-called sexual orientation and sexual preference been placed firmly on the agenda by the lesbian and gay movement; so, too, have a string of concerns around non-procreative, non-penetrative, non ...
... sexual harassment to anxieties about serial sex murders to enormous fears surrounding the sexual abuse of children, together with concerns over sadomasochistic practices and calls for the registration of pedophiles. “Intimate troubles ...
... Sexual Anarchy, the more radical literary critic Elaine Showalter suggests that direct parallels exist between fin-de-siècle crises and those of today.7 From concerns over sexual disease, the age of consent, and the arrival of “new ...
... sexual violence, we become saturated with moral problems. New intimate troubles bring new ethical conflicts. Doing. Intimacies. What all these problems have in common is that they reside in what I will call the intimate sphere. This book ...
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 |