Complete the vocabulary of Giddens’s account of modern intimacy.
Giddens calls a bond entered for its own sake and continued only while it satisfies both parties a ______ relationship. The form of attachment appropriate to it he calls ______ love, which replaces the romantic ideal of a unique and permanent bond. He treats the decoupling of sexuality from reproduction, which he calls ______ sexuality, as the precondition of the change, and reads the whole development as a ______ of personal life.
Word bank: pure · confluent · plastic · democratisation · romantic · dissolution
Hints
- The first term is the one everything else in his account hangs from.
- The last blank is the optimistic word his critics dispute.
Show the answer
Giddens calls a bond entered for its own sake and continued only while it satisfies both parties a pure relationship. The form of attachment appropriate to it he calls confluent love, which replaces the romantic ideal of a unique and permanent bond. He treats the decoupling of sexuality from reproduction, which he calls plastic sexuality, as the precondition of the change, and reads the whole development as a democratisation of personal life.
The last blank is where the argument actually happens. Giddens reads negotiated contingency as equality arriving in private life on the model of democratic politics; Illouz reads the same contingency as a market in which the parties are unequally positioned. Both are describing relationships that can be ended at will, and the disagreement is about what that implies.
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