The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies

✍ Scribed by Anthony Giddens

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 1992
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 222
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The sexual revolution: an evocative term, but what meaning can be given to it today? How does “sexuality” come into being, and what connections does it have with the changes that have affected personal life more generally? In answering these questions, the author disputes many of the dominant interpretations of the role of sexuality in modern culture.The author suggests that the revolutionary changes in which sexuality has become cauth up are more long-term than generally conceded. He sees them as intrinsic to the development of modern societies as a whole and to the broad characteristics of that development. Sexuality as we know it today is a creation of modernity, a terrain upon which the contradictory tendencies of modern social life play themselves out in full. Emancipation and oppression, opportunity and risk—these have become a part of a heady mix that irresistably ties our individual lives to global outcomes and the transformation of intimacy.We live today in a social order in which, for the first time in histroy, women are becoming equal to men—or at least have lodged a claim to such equality as their right. The author does not attempt to analyze the gender inequalities that persist in the economic or political domains, but instead concentrates on a more hisdden personal area in which women—ordinary women, in the course of their day-to-day lives, quite apart from any political agenda—have pioneered changes of greate, and generalizable, importance. These changes essentially concern an exploration of the potentialities of the “pure relationship,” a relaitonship that presumes sexual and emotional equality, and is explosive in its connotations for pre-existing relations of power.The author analyzes the emergence of what he calls plastic sexuality—sexuality freed from its intrinsic relation to reproduction—in terms of the emotional emancipation implicit in the pure relationship, as well as women’s claim to sexual pleasure. Plastic sexuality is decentered sexuality, freed from both reproduction and subservience to a fixed object. It can be molded as a trait of personality, and thus become bound up with the reflexivity of the self. Premised on plastic sexuality, the pure relationship is not exclusively heterosexual; it is neutral in terms of sexual orientation.The author speculates that the transformaion of intimacy might be a subversive influence on modern institutions as a whole, for a social world in which the dominant ideal was to achieve intinsic rewards from the company of others might be vastly different from that which we know at the present.

✦ Table of Contents

CONTENTS......Page 6
PREFACE......Page 8
INTRODUCTION......Page 10
EVERYDAY EXPERIMENTS, RELATIONSHIPS, SEXUALITY......Page 13
Social change and sexual behaviour......Page 18
Heterosexuality, homosexuality......Page 22
NOTES......Page 26
FOUCAULT ON SEXUALITY......Page 27
Sexuality and institutional change......Page 32
Institutional reflexivity and sexuality......Page 37
The decline of perversion......Page 41
NOTES......Page 44
ROMANTIC LOVE AND OTHER ATTACHMENTS......Page 46
Marriage, sexuality and romantic love......Page 47
Gender and love......Page 50
NOTES......Page 56
LOVE, COMMITMENT AND THE PURE RELATIONSHIP......Page 58
The quest-romance......Page 59
Women, marriage, relationships......Page 62
Women, men, romantic love......Page 67
Romantic versus confluent love......Page 70
NOTES......Page 73
LOVE, SEX AND OTHER ADDICTIONS......Page 74
Sex and desire......Page 75
The nature of addiction......Page 79
Addiction, reflexivity, self-autonomy......Page 83
Implications for sexuality......Page 86
Sexuality and seduction......Page 90
NOTES......Page 94
THE SOCIOLOGICAL MEANING OF CODE
PENDENCE......Page 96
The nature of codependence......Page 97
Addiction and the question of intimacy......Page 101
Intimacy, kinship, parenthood......Page 105
Parents and children......Page 108
Toxic parents?......Page 113
NOTES......Page 118
PERSONAL TURBULENCE, SEXUAL TROUBLES......Page 120
Sexuality and psychoanalytic theory: preliminary comments......Page 121
Psychosocial development and male sexuality......Page 124
Male sexuality, compulsiveness, pornography......Page 126
Male sexual violence......Page 130
Female sexuality: the problem of complementarity......Page 133
Gender, intimacy and care......Page 138
NOTES......Page 141
CONTRADICTIONS OF THE PURE RELATIONSHIP......Page 143
The pure relationship: breaking and making......Page 145
Lesbianism and male sexuality......Page 149
Homosexuality and the episodic encounter......Page 153
Men and women: together or apart?......Page 157
The separation of the sexes......Page 161
NOTES......Page 166
Sex and repression: Reich......Page 167
Herbert Marcuse......Page 173
The possibilities of sexual radicalism......Page 177
Institutional repression and the question of sexuality......Page 182
Modernity as obsessional......Page 185
Sexual emancipation......Page 187
Conclusion......Page 190
NOTES......Page 191
The meaning of democracy......Page 193
The democratising of personal life
......Page 197
Mechanisms......Page 201
Sexuality, emancipation, life politics......Page 205
NOTES......Page 212
INDEX......Page 214