Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change and Social Worlds

by Plummer,Ken

• ISBN13: 9780415102957
• ISBN10: 0415102952
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781134850952
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1994-12-21
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The world has become cluttered with sexual stories. From child abuse scandals to lesbians and gays coming out; from Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas to thetravailsof Michael Jackson; from sexual surveys to therapy groups--sexual talk has become more and more evident. Telling Sexual Storiesexplores the rites of a sexual storytelling culture. Taking three major examples--rape stories, coming-out stories, recovery stories--it examines the nature of these newly emerging narratives and the socio-historical conditions which give rise to them. It looks at the rise of the women's movement, the lesbian and gay movement and the "recovery" movement as harbingers of significant social change that encourage the telling of new stories. In a powerful concluding section the book turns out to the wider concern of how story telling may be changing in a postmodern culture and how central such storytelling may be in the creation of a participatory democratic political culture. Telling Sexual Storiesillustrates how "the narrative turn" of cultural studies may be taken up within sociology. It suggests that a sociology of stories asks different questions about stories to those posed within cultural studies. The fascination with texts--with narrative structure, genre and metaphor--is now supplemented with questions around the social and political role that stories play; with the social processes through which they are constructed and consumed; with the political changes that stories may encourage. This book is a major contribution to our understanding of sexuality and cultures of intimacy.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
I Entering the story zone
Prologue: the culture of sexual story telling	3	(15)
An invitation to a sociology of stories	18	(14)
Making sexual stories	32	(17)
II Coming out everywhere: modernist stories of desire, danger and recovery
Coming out, breaking the silence and recovering: introducing some modernist tales	49	(13)
Women's culture and rape stories	62	(19)
The modernisation of gay and lesbian stories	81	(16)
Recovery tales	97	(16)
III Sexual stories at century's end
The tale and its time	113	(18)
The shifting sexual stories of late modernity	131	(13)
Intimate citizenship: the politics of sexual story telling	144	(23)
Epilogue: beyond stories? The pragmatics of story telling	167	(14)
Notes	181	(36)
Bibliography	217	(23)
Index	240