Cosmopolitan Sexualities by Ken Plummer

Author:Ken Plummer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780745692319
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2015-07-06T00:00:00+00:00

Local cultures and micro sexualities

Understanding sexualities, then, requires a broad mapping of dominant (meta) cultures and their resistance. But the core of any cultural analysis must concern itself ultimately with how people live unique everyday lives alongside other people. It requires a close familiarity with the complexity of people’s actions in local situations. This focus on micro sexualities asks how people create different sexualities and genders: how they develop and move with different bodies; embody different emotions; perform contrasting identities and roles; confront different choices and constraints; assemble different sexual meanings; enact different sexual scripts and practices; use different languages; tell different sexual stories; experience different sentimental structures and subjectivities; evaluate their lives and worth differently; become attached to different beliefs, cosmologies and religions; and dwell in different material and power-based worlds. It starts with the person and is concerned with the doings, accommodations, negotiations and resistances of everyday sexual life.

All this has been a crucial arena for much contemporary ‘ethnography of sexualities’. Over the past few decades, there have been hundreds of small research projects taking place in many parts of the world that give little glimpses of this complexity. Box 4.2 suggests some of this. Starting with individuals with everyday troubles and local situations, we hear their voices, confront their problems, face their personal sufferings and joys. In making sense of cosmopolitan sexualities, this is what has to be grasped: that it is necessary to listen carefully to what individuals have to say and to dig deep down to seek out micro sexual cultures. From this we can start to isolate the power in everyday lives of languages, relationships, symbols, scripts, meanings, bodies, emotions, identities, rules, interaction rituals, social worlds and, ultimately, politics. And in doing this, over and over again we find that values are contradictory, languages are ambiguous, embodiments are plural, choices are constrained, identities are multiple and fluid, subjectivities are in tension, and emotions are ambivalent. We are living with sexual complexity.47

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.