Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change, and Social Worlds

Front Cover
Psychology Press, 1995 - Family & Relationships - 244 pages

First published in 2004. The world has become cluttered with sexual stories. From child abuse scandals to lesbian and gays coming out; from Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas to the travails of Michael Jackson; from sexual surveys to therapy groups - sexual talk has become more and more evident.
This book explores the rites of a sexual story-telling culture. Taking three major examples - rape stories, coming-out stories, recovery stories - it examines the nature of these newly emerging narratives and the socio-historical conditions which have given rise to them. It looks at the rise of the women's movement, the lesbian and gay movement and the 'recovery' movement as harbingers of significant social change that encourage the telling of new stories. In a powerful concluding section, the book turns to the wider concern of how story telling may be changing in a postmodern culture and how central it may be in the creation of a participatory democratic political culture.
Ken Plummer illustrates how 'the narrative turn' of cultural studies may be taken up within sociology. He suggests that a sociology of stories asks different questions about stories from those posed within cultural studies. Telling Sexual Stories is a major contribution to our understanding of sexuality and the cultures of intimacy.

 

Contents

Prologue The culture of sexual story telling
3
An invitation to a sociology of stories
18
Making sexual stories
32
Coming out breaking the silence and recovering Introducing some modernist tales
49
Womens culture and rape stories
62
The modernisation of gay and lesbian stories
81
Recovery tales
97
The tale and its time
113
The shifting sexual stories of late modernity
131
Intimate citizenship The politics of sexual story telling
144
Epilogue Beyond stories? The pragmatics of story telling
167
Notes
181
Bibliography
217
Index
240
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