Practice question · True or false
Giddens argues that the pure relationship is held together by external obligation rather than by the continuing satisfaction of both partners.
Hints
- Recall what Giddens says keeps such a relationship in existence.
- The whole point of the term is that nothing external holds it.
Show the answer
False
Why
False, and it inverts the definition. A pure relationship is entered for its own sake and continues only while both parties find it rewarding; the absence of external anchors — property, kin obligation, religious permanence — is precisely what makes it pure in his sense, and precisely what his critics find worrying.
Practise Intimacy, Gender and Sexuality
The app has 3 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Sociology I is free to start.
More questions on Intimacy, Gender and Sexuality
- Kinsey’s reports were based on careful interviewing but on volunteers, prisoners and other non-random groups.…
- Which claims does Foucault make against the repressive hypothesis?
- Complete the vocabulary of Giddens’s account of modern intimacy.
- Match each account of contemporary intimacy to its author.
- Arrange these works on sexuality and intimacy, earliest first.
- Estimate the percentage of marriages in Spain in recent years that were between same-sex couples.
- Sort each claim by whether it belongs to Giddens’s optimistic reading of contingency or to Illouz’s critical…
- Rich argued in 1980 that heterosexuality should be analysed as an institution rather than as a preference.…
- Hochschild’s concept of emotional labour was introduced to describe a paid job requirement rather than the…
- Beck and Beck-Gernsheim describe modern love as individualised rather than liberated. What follows from this…
- Arrange the steps of Giddens’s argument from external constraint to the pure relationship.