Intimate Citizenship

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. What impact does the increasingly public character of personal life have on our sense of ourselves and on how we view our own intimate choices? To navigate our way through a world in which people�s private lives are so often subject to public scrutiny and debate, and in which the public sphere is increasingly pluralized and contested, we must broaden our understanding of what it means to be a citizen. Through the idea of "intimate citizenship," Plummer sets an important agenda for the years to come.

The Tenacity of the Couple-Norm explores the ongoing strength and insidious grip of couple-normativity across changing landscapes of law, policy and everyday life in four contrasting national contexts: the UK, Bulgaria, Norway and Portugal. By investigating how the couple-norm is lived and experienced, how it has changed over time, and how it varies between places and social groups, this book provides a detailed analysis of changing intimate citizenship regimes in Europe, and makes a major intervention in understandings of the contemporary condition of personal life. The authors develop the feminist concept of ‘intimate citizenship’ and propose the new concept of ‘intimate citizenship regime’, offering a study of intimate citizenship regimes as normative systems that have been undergoing profound change in recent decades. Against the backdrop of processes of de-patriarchalization, liberalization, pluralization and homonormalization, the ongoing potency of the couple-norm becomes ever clearer.

This edited collection presents the concept of lived citizenship as a fruitful avenue for exploring the role played by social work practices in the lives of people in vulnerable positions. The book centres on the everyday experiences through which people practice, negotiate, understand and feel their citizenship. The authors offer both empirical analyses of how social work influences the rights, obligations, identities and belongings of children, homeless people, migrants, ethnic minorities, and young people with mental disabilities; and a theoretical framework for analysing the complexities of social work. Drawing on the notion of intimate citizenship and an understanding of citizenship as socio-spatial, the theoretical framework addresses the challenges of enhancing the agency of social work clients and of promoting inclusive citizenship, and how these challenges are shaped by emotions, affect, rationality, materiality, power relations, policies and managerial strategies. Lived Citizenship on the Edge of Society will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including social policy and social work.

Despite over thirty years of disability activism and scholarship, disabled people’s sexual identities remain the sum of the paradoxical social categories of 'asexual innocents', or 'perverts’. This timely book explores their experiences of sexual and intimate life within the context of both these constructed sexualities and the wider contemporary ableist cultures which both produce and promulgate them. Foregrounding disabled people’s own sexual stories collected through a participatory and multi-method empirical study, this book provides a richly detailed account of the complex and variegated relationships between sexuality, disability, gender and impairment. The ground-breaking findings to emerge from this study, which take centre stage in this book, not only shine a light on the oppressive darkness in which contemporary disabled sexualities are plunged, but equally both trouble and challenge our current understanding of sexual life as we know it.

This volume responds to the need to extend the theory of citizenship, in order to bridge the gap between the public and the private sphere. Through the application of intersectional methodology, the authors document how people’s most private decisions and practices are intertwined with public institutions and state policies. The stories of intimate citizenship included in this volume make the theoretical discussion more palpable. Situated perspectives, as well as application of theoretical concepts to lived experience, extend citizenship’s territory beyond the conventional public sphere and locate it at the intersection of many axes of social, political, and cultural stratification.

In this groundbreaking book, Nira Yuval-Davis provides a cutting-edge investigation of the challenging debates around belonging and the politics of belonging. Alongside the hegemonic forms of citizenship and nationalism which have tended to dominate our recent political and social history, the author examines alternative contemporary political projects of belonging constructed around the notions of religion, cosmopolitanism, and the feminist ‘ethics of care’. The book also explores the effects of globalization, mass migration, the rise of both fundamentalist and human rights movements on such politics of belonging, as well as some of its racialized and gendered dimensions. A special space is given to the various feminist political movements that have been engaged as part of or in resistance to the political projects of belonging.

Privileging Indigenous voices and experiences, Intimate Integration documents the rise and fall of North American transracial adoption projects, including the Adopt Indian and Métis Project and the Indian Adoption Project. Allyson D. Stevenson argues that the integration of adopted Indian and Métis children mirrored the new direction in post-war Indian policy and welfare services. She illustrates how the removal of Indigenous children from their families and communities took on increasing political and social urgency, contributing to what we now call the "Sixties Scoop." Making profound contributions to the history of settler colonialism in Canada, Intimate Integration sheds light on the complex reasons behind persistent social inequalities in child welfare.

The new sociology of sexuality has a two-fold aim: to demonstrate how the social shapes the sexual; and to analyse how the sexual in turn becomes a focal point for personal identity, cultural anxiety value debates and political action. Drawing on papers from the 1994 British Sociological Association annual conference on 'Sexualities in Social Context', this volume brings together key contributors to this stimulating new approach. Topics covered include theoretical developments, the relationship between history and contemporary controversies, community and identity, especially in the context of AIDS, value conflicts and changes in the meanings of intimacy. The book as a whole offers a significant intervention into debates on sexuality, and a thoughtful contribution to the broadening of the sociological agenda.