1st Edition

The World We Have Won The Remaking of Erotic and Intimate Life

By Jeffrey Weeks Copyright 2007
    288 Pages
    by Routledge

    288 Pages
    by Routledge

    The World We Have Won is a major study of transformations in erotic and intimate life since 1945. We are living in a world of transition, in the midst of a long, unfinished but profound revolution that has transformed the possibilities of living out our sexual diversities.

    This book provides a balance sheet of the changes that have transformed our ways of being, from welfarism to the pill, women's and gay liberation, from globalization, consumerism and individualization to new forms of intimacy, from friends as family to same sex marriage. Some respond to these challenges with a deep cultural pessimism or moral conservatism. It rejects such views and argues that this is a world we are increasingly making for ourselves, part of the long process of democratization of everyday life. Unless we grasp this we cannot understand, not only the problems and anxieties, but the opportunities and hopes in this world we have won.

    1. A Different World  2. Cultures of Restraint  3. The Great Transition 1: Democratization and Autonomy  4. The Great Transition 2: Regulation, Risk and Resistance  5. Chaotic Pleasures: Diversity and the New Individualism  6. The Contradictions of Contemporary Sexuality  7. Moments of Intimacy: Norms, Values and Everyday Commitments  8. Sexual Wrongs and Sexual Rights

    Biography

    Jeffrey Weeks works at London South Bank University where he has been Professor of Sociology, Executive Dean of Arts and Human Sciences, and Director of SPUR: the Social Policy and Urban Regeneration Research Institute. He has an international reputation for his work on the history and social organization of sexuality and intimate life. Recent books include Making Sexual History (2000), Same Sex Intimacies (with Heaphy and Donovan, 2001) and Sexuality (second edition, 2003).

    'While weeks does not claim that everything in the garden is rosy-single parents can suffer, homophobia remains and the threat of HIV/AIDS has not gone away-his thoughtful, enlightening and comprehensive analysis is both optimistic and provocative'- Emmanuel Cooper, Tribune