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 65
... suggest that something powerful is going on in our personal lives and that future generations may well come to live in a very different world. Indeed, just as my great-grandparents would find the world I now live in to be one of truly ...
... suggest some of the major controversies surrounding the use of such a term and go on to claim that a newish form of doing citizenship is in the making. Four themes provide the framework for the rest of the book, chapters 5 through 8. I ...
... suggest simultaneously the hollowness of contemporary Western life and the violence, aggression, degradation, and sexual obsession that lurk not far from its surface. We live in an increasingly insecure world, characterized by global ...
... suggested in One Nation, Two Cultures that much of the history of civilized societies “can be written as a ... suggests that direct parallels exist between fin-de-siècle crises and those of today.7 From concerns over sexual disease, the ...
... suggests. Indeed, such disjunctions are my primary focus in the pages that follow. Entering. Cyberspace. To expand on just one example: the world of cyberspace and erotica / pornography. Here we find a world of new problems that we have ...
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 |