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
... country or nation but are engaged in on a wider scale and have much broader social ramifications. We may be starting to see the arrival of something like “global citizens,” who raise issues of global intimacies through their many and ...
... countries, the use of condoms as a preventive device against AIDS, the pill, and the morning-after pill—all these shift the pattern of our intimacies. But perhaps most striking here has been the arrival, over the past thirty years or so ...
... country, let alone under the same roof. Colleagues of mine move around the world, stopping off in major cities, where they pick up their lives from when they were last there. I have many friends and acquaintances who live apart, at ...
... countries in the world today, where arranged marriages and religious orthodoxies work to restrict choice. Indeed, in most societies throughout history and still across the world today, such choices would seem odd. But they are here with ...
... countries dies in childbirth.32 According to one report on Rwanda, for example, 1 in 9 women dies in childbirth, and 1 in 10 children does not live a week.33 Nor do these problems exist only on a local scale. To offer one illustration ...
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 |