Practice question · Match the pairs
Match each account of contemporary intimacy to its author.
- The pure relationship and confluent love
- The repressive hypothesis and its rejection
- Intimacy reorganised by a market in partners
- The normal chaos produced by individualisation
- Anthony Giddens
- Beck and Beck-Gernsheim
- Eva Illouz
- Michel Foucault
Hints
- Two of the four are broadly critical of the idea that contingency means emancipation.
- One of the four is writing about discourse and its categories rather than about couples.
Show the answer
- The pure relationship and confluent love → Anthony Giddens
- The repressive hypothesis and its rejection → Michel Foucault
- Intimacy reorganised by a market in partners → Eva Illouz
- The normal chaos produced by individualisation → Beck and Beck-Gernsheim
Why
Foucault is the outlier and the foundation. He is not describing couples at all, but the apparatus through which sexuality became the truth of the self, and it is that apparatus which makes the modern demand for an authentic, negotiated, self-expressive relationship intelligible as a historical product rather than as human nature finally getting its way.
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?
- Giddens argues that the pure relationship is held together by external obligation rather than by the…
- Complete the vocabulary of Giddens’s account of modern intimacy.
- 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.