Intimate Citizenship

by Plummer, Ken

• ISBN13: 9780295983318
• ISBN10: 0295983310
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-10-01
• Publisher: Univ of Washington Pr

Summary

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, online dating services, virtual sex--whether for better or 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. What impact, Plummer asks, does the public character of personal life have on our sense of ourselves and on how we view our intimate choices? To navigate our way through a world in which people's private lives are so often subject to public s

Author Biography

Ken Plummer is professor of sociology at the University of Essex in England.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments	ix
1 Intimate Troubles	3	(14)
2 Postmodern Intimacies: New Lives in a Late Modern World	17	(16)
3 Culture Wars and Contested Intimacies	33	(16)
4 The New Theories of Citizenship	49	(18)
5 Public Intimacies, Private Citizens	67	(17)
6 Dialogic Citizenship	84	(11)
7 Stories and the Grounded Moralities of Everyday Life	95	(22)
8 Globalizing Intimate Citizenship	117	(22)
9 The Intimate Citizenship Project	139	(8)
Notes	147	(16)
Bibliography	163	(16)
Index of Names	179	(4)
Subject Index	183