Patricia Clough - Böcker

In the last decade or so, there has been a shift in the popular and academic discussion of our personal lives. Relationships – and not necessarily marriage – have gravitated to the center of our relational lives. Many of us feel entitled to seek intimacy, an emotionally depthful social bonding, rather than simply security or companionship from our relationships. Unlike in a marriage-centred culture, intimacy is today pursued in varied relationships, from familial to friends and to romances. And intimacies are being forged in multiple venues, from face-to-face to virtual, cyber contexts.A new scholarship has addressed this changing terrain of personal life – there is today a vast literature on cohabitation, parenthood without marriage, sex and love outside marriage, queer families, cyber intimacies and friendships. However, much theorizing and research has focussed either on the interior, subjective or sociocultural aspects of intimacies, not their interaction. This volume aims to break new ground: Intimacies explores the psychological terrain of intimacy in depthful ways without abandoning its sociohistorical context and the centrality of power dynamics. Drawing on a rich archive that includes the social sciences, feminism, queer studies, and psychoanalysis, the contributors examine:changing cultures of intimacyfluid and solid attachments and intimacies from hook ups, to sibling bonds, to erotic lovea politics of intimacy that may involve state enforced hierarchies, class, misrecognition, social exclusion and violenceembodied experiences of intimacy and dynamics of endings and lossa pluralization of intimacies that challenge established ethical hierarchiesThis volume aims to define the cutting edge of this emerging field of scholarship and politics. It challenges existing paradigms that assume rigid hierarchical approaches to relational life. Intimacies will be of interest for psychoanalysts and for students or scholars in sexualities, gender studies, family studies, feminism studies, queer studies, social class, cultural studies, and philosophy.

In the last decade or so, there has been a shift in the popular and academic discussion of our personal lives. Relationships – and not necessarily marriage – have gravitated to the center of our relational lives. Many of us feel entitled to seek intimacy, an emotionally depthful social bonding, rather than simply security or companionship from our relationships. Unlike in a marriage-centred culture, intimacy is today pursued in varied relationships, from familial to friends and to romances. And intimacies are being forged in multiple venues, from face-to-face to virtual, cyber contexts.A new scholarship has addressed this changing terrain of personal life – there is today a vast literature on cohabitation, parenthood without marriage, sex and love outside marriage, queer families, cyber intimacies and friendships. However, much theorizing and research has focussed either on the interior, subjective or sociocultural aspects of intimacies, not their interaction. This volume aims to break new ground: Intimacies explores the psychological terrain of intimacy in depthful ways without abandoning its sociohistorical context and the centrality of power dynamics. Drawing on a rich archive that includes the social sciences, feminism, queer studies, and psychoanalysis, the contributors examine:changing cultures of intimacyfluid and solid attachments and intimacies from hook ups, to sibling bonds, to erotic lovea politics of intimacy that may involve state enforced hierarchies, class, misrecognition, social exclusion and violenceembodied experiences of intimacy and dynamics of endings and lossa pluralization of intimacies that challenge established ethical hierarchiesThis volume aims to define the cutting edge of this emerging field of scholarship and politics. It challenges existing paradigms that assume rigid hierarchical approaches to relational life. Intimacies will be of interest for psychoanalysts and for students or scholars in sexualities, gender studies, family studies, feminism studies, queer studies, social class, cultural studies, and philosophy.

The town of Foligno in Umbria lies in the geographical centre of Italy and for generations local patriotism has it as ‘lu centru de lu munnu’, the centre of the world. But centrality has not necessarily conferred powerhouse status. On the contrary, Umbria’s centrality is more that of the hole in the middle of the whirlpool; the world swirls around it but inside there is a calm.History might have stormed through Umbria’s valleys bringing great turbulence and creativity, but the ancient ways have somehow remained. Even the modern world has failed to lever Umbria from its time warp and this slow pace of life has, in our feverish times, become an asset.Patricia Clough came to Umbria as an outsider those like her, who flip like fish out of the busy world and land in this tranquil place, think it a kind of heaven. But as she explains in this enchanting book, there is so much more to Umbria than its fertile valleys, its medieval hilltop towns and its ancient churches. The Umbria she describes may no longer be remote, but it remains a complex, enticing place.