Sort each claim by whether it belongs to Giddens’s optimistic reading of contingency or to Illouz’s critical one.
Groups: Giddens’s reading · Illouz’s reading
- Relationships that continue only while both wish it are a gain in autonomy
- Personal life is becoming democratic on the model of public life
- The vocabulary of choice and self-optimisation reshapes emotional life unequally
- Insecurity generated by that market is experienced as a personal shortcoming
Hints
- Both agree that external constraints have weakened; they disagree about what fills the space.
- Ask which column treats the absence of obligation as a gain and which as an exposure.
Show the answer
Giddens’s reading: Personal life is becoming democratic on the model of public life, Relationships that continue only while both wish it are a gain in autonomy
Illouz’s reading: Insecurity generated by that market is experienced as a personal shortcoming, The vocabulary of choice and self-optimisation reshapes emotional life unequally
The disagreement is not about the facts of contemporary coupling, which both accept. It is about what a contingent bond does to people differently positioned to bear the contingency, and Illouz’s strongest evidence is that the resulting distress is systematically patterned by gender, age and class while being experienced by those affected as an individual failure.
Practise Intimacy, Gender and Sexuality
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