Intimate Politics

At eight years old, Bettina Aptheker watched her family's politics play out in countless living rooms across the country when her father, historian and U.S. Communist Party leader Herbert Aptheker, testified on television in front of the House on Un-American Activities Committee in 1953. Born into one of the most influential U.S. Communist families whose friends included W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Bettina lived her parents' politics witnessing first-hand one of the most dramatic upheavals in American history. She also lived with a terrible secret: incest at the hands of her famous father and a frightening and lonely life lived inside a home wrought with family tensions. A gripping and beautifully rendered memoir, Intimate Politics is at its core the story of one woman's struggle to still the demons of her personal world while becoming a controversial public figure herself. This is the story of childhood sexual abuse, abortion, sexual violence, activism, and the triumph over one's past. It's about FBI harassment and persecution, Jewish heritage, and lesbian identity. It is, finally, about the courage to speak one's truth despite the consequences and to break the sacred silence of family secrets.

It is often remarked that politicians’ private lives are becoming a feature of political communication in many advanced industrial democracies. However, there have so far been no genuinely comparative studies examining the personalized nature of political communication. Intimate Politics provides for the first time a systematic comparative analysis of such developments in Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK and the US. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, it assesses the extent to which the private lives of politicians have become a feature of political communication in each democracy. The book provides a comprehensive account of the shifting boundaries between the public and private, and whether any developments are universal or more advanced in some democracies than others, and seeks to explain why this might be. Intimate Politics will be of great value for students and scholars of communication and media studies and political science and is required reading for anyone who wants a fuller understanding of the transformation of mediated politics in advanced industrial democracies.

No country feels China's rise more deeply than Japan. Through intricate case studies of visits by Japanese politicians to the Yasukuni Shrine, conflicts over the boundaries of economic zones in the East China Sea, concerns about food safety, and strategies of island defense, Sheila A. Smith explores the policy issues testing the Japanese government as it tries to navigate its relationship with an advancing China. Smith finds that Japan's interactions with China extend far beyond the negotiations between diplomats and include a broad array of social actors intent on influencing the Sino-Japanese relationship. Some of the tensions complicating Japan's encounters with China, such as those surrounding the Yasukuni Shrine or territorial disputes, have deep roots in the postwar era, and political advocates seeking a stronger Japanese state organize themselves around these causes. Other tensions manifest themselves during the institutional and regulatory reform of maritime boundary and food safety issues. Smith scrutinizes the role of the Japanese government in coping with contention as China's influence grows and Japanese citizens demand more protection. Underlying the government's efforts is Japan's insecurity about its own capacity for change and its waning status as the leading economy in Asia. For many, China's rise means Japan's decline, and Smith suggests how Japan can maintain its regional and global clout as confidence in its postwar diplomatic and security approach diminishes.

Debates on the end-of-life controversy are complex because they seem to highjack national and cultural traditions. Where previous books have focused on ideological grounds, The Politics of Intimacy explores dying as the site where policies are negotiated and implemented. Intimacy comprises the emotional experience of the end of life and how we acknowledge it—or not—through institutions. This process shows that end-of-life controversy relies on the conflict between the individual and these institutions, a relationship that is the cornerstone of Western liberal democracies. Through interviews with mourners, stakeholders, and medical professionals, examination of media debates in France and the Czech Republic, Durnová shows that liberal institutions, in their attempts to accommodate the emotional experience at the end of life, ultimately fail. She describes this deadlock as the “politics of intimacy,” revealing that political institutions deploy power through collective acknowledgment of individual emotions but fail to maintain this recognition because of this same experience.

This book advances debates over the relationship between care and economy through the concept of intimate labor—care, domestic, and sex work—and thus charts relations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship in the context of global economic transformations.

Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Edward Said each steered major intellectual and political schools of thought in American political discourse after World War II, yet none of them was American, which proved crucial to their ways of arguing and reasoning both in and out of the American context. In an effort to convince their audiences they were American enough, these thinkers deployed deft rhetorical strategies that made their cosmopolitanism feel acceptable, inspiring radical new approaches to longstanding problems in American politics. Speaking like natives, they also exploited their foreignness to entice listeners to embrace alternative modes of thought. Intimate Strangers unpacks this "stranger ethos," a blend of detachment and involvement that manifested in the persona of a prophet for Solzhenitsyn, an impartial observer for Arendt, a mentor for Marcuse, and a victim for Said. Yet despite its many successes, the stranger ethos did alienate many audiences, and critics continue to dismiss these thinkers not for their positions but because of their foreign point of view. This book encourages readers to reject this kind of critical xenophobia, throwing support behind a political discourse that accounts for the ideals of citizens and noncitizens alike.

Do you thrust unsolicited partisan articles upon your spouse? Are you convinced that you can change your coworker’s mind, if you could only argue forcefully enough? Have you gone from befriending to “defriending” the people once closest to you? Don’t give up hope; Dr. Jeanne Safer is here to help. Since the election of Donald J. Trump, political disagreements have been ravaging our personal relationships like never before. This already widespread phenomenon will continue to grow unless we learn to fight it. From friends to relatives to lovers, no relationship is immune to this crisis. I Love You, but I Hate Your Politics draws from interviews with every type of politically mixed couple, as well as Dr. Safer’s own experiences as a die-hard liberal happily married to a stalwart conservative. The result is a practical guide to maintaining respect and intimacy in our increasingly divided world. I Love You, but I Hate Your Politics is sure to educate and entertain anyone who has felt the strain of ideological differences in their personal life. No matter which side of the fence you're on, Dr. Safer offers frank, practical advice for salvaging and strengthening your bonds with your loved ones. This book is required reading for any politically minded friend, relative, or significant other in the Trump era.

William Desmond sees religion, art, philosophy, and politics as essential and distinctive modes of human practice, manifestations of an intimate universality that illuminates individual and social being. They are also surprisingly permeable phenomena, and by observing their relations, Desmond captures notes of a clandestine conversation that transforms ontology.