Intimate Commerce

Intimate Commerce PDF Author: Victoria Wohl
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292774052
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Exchanges of women between men occur regularly in Greek tragedy—and almost always with catastrophic results. Instead of cementing bonds between men, such exchanges rend them. They allow women, who should be silent objects, to become monstrous subjects, while men often end up as lifeless corpses. But why do the tragedies always represent the transferal of women as disastrous? Victoria Wohl offers an illuminating analysis of the exchange of women in Sophocles' Trachiniae, Aeschylus' Agamemnon, and Euripides' Alcestis. She shows how the attempts of women in these plays to become active subjects rather than passive objects of exchange inevitably fail. While these failures seem to validate male hegemony, the women's actions, however futile, blur the distinction between male subject and female object, calling into question the very nature of the tragic self. What the tragedies thus present, Wohl asserts, is not only an affirmation of Athens' reigning ideologies (including its gender hierarchy) but also the possibility of resistance to them and the imagination of alternatives.

Intimate Commerce

Intimate Commerce PDF Author: Victoria Wohl
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292774052
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Exchanges of women between men occur regularly in Greek tragedy—and almost always with catastrophic results. Instead of cementing bonds between men, such exchanges rend them. They allow women, who should be silent objects, to become monstrous subjects, while men often end up as lifeless corpses. But why do the tragedies always represent the transferal of women as disastrous? Victoria Wohl offers an illuminating analysis of the exchange of women in Sophocles' Trachiniae, Aeschylus' Agamemnon, and Euripides' Alcestis. She shows how the attempts of women in these plays to become active subjects rather than passive objects of exchange inevitably fail. While these failures seem to validate male hegemony, the women's actions, however futile, blur the distinction between male subject and female object, calling into question the very nature of the tragic self. What the tragedies thus present, Wohl asserts, is not only an affirmation of Athens' reigning ideologies (including its gender hierarchy) but also the possibility of resistance to them and the imagination of alternatives.

Too Intimate Commerce

Too Intimate Commerce PDF Author: Victoria Josselyn Wohl
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 772

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Book Description


Temporarily Yours

Temporarily Yours PDF Author: Elizabeth Bernstein
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226044629
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Generations of social thinkers have assumed that access to legitimate paid employment and a decline in the ‘double standard’ would eliminate the reasons behind women’s participation in prostitution. Yet in both the developing world and in postindustrial cities of the West, sexual commerce has continued to flourish, diversifying along technological, spatial, and social lines. In this deeply engaging and theoretically provocative study, Elizabeth Bernstein examines the social features that undergird the expansion and diversification of commercialized sex, demonstrating the ways that postindustrial economic and cultural formations have spawned rapid and unforeseen changes in the forms, meanings, and spatial organization of sexual labor. Drawing upon dynamic and innovative research with sex workers, their clients, and state actors, Bernstein argues that in cities such as San Francisco, Stockholm, and Amstersdam, the nature of what is purchased in commercial sexual encounters is also new. Rather than the expedient exchange of cash for sexual relations, what sex workers are increasingly paid to offer their clients is an erotic experience premised upon the performance of authentic interpersonal connection. As such, contemporary sex markets are emblematic of a cultural moment in which the boundaries between intimacy and commerce—and between public life and private—have been radically redrawn. Not simply a compelling exploration of the changing landscape of sex-work, Temporarily Yours ultimately lays bare the intimate intersections of political economy, desire, and culture.

Intimate States

Intimate States PDF Author: Margot Canaday
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022679489X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description
Fourteen essays examine the unexpected relationships between government power and intimate life in the last 150 years of United States history. The last few decades have seen a surge of historical scholarship that analyzes state power and expands our understanding of governmental authority and the ways we experience it. At the same time, studies of the history of intimate life—marriage, sexuality, child-rearing, and family—also have blossomed. Yet these two literatures have not been considered together in a sustained way. This book, edited and introduced by three preeminent American historians, aims to close this gap, offering powerful analyses of the relationship between state power and intimate experience in the United States from the Civil War to the present. The fourteen essays that make up Intimate States argue that “intimate governance”—the binding of private daily experience to the apparatus of the state—should be central to our understanding of modern American history. Our personal experiences have been controlled and arranged by the state in ways we often don’t even see, the authors and editors argue; correspondingly, contemporary government has been profoundly shaped by its approaches and responses to the contours of intimate life, and its power has become so deeply embedded into daily social life that it is largely indistinguishable from society itself. Intimate States makes a persuasive case that the state is always with us, even in our most seemingly private moments.

The Business Romantic

The Business Romantic PDF Author: Tim Leberecht
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062302523
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
In this smart, playful, and provocative book, one of today’s most original business thinkers argues that we underestimate the importance of romance in our lives and that we can find it in and through business—by designing products, services, and experiences that connect us with something greater than ourselves. Against the backdrop of eroding trust in capitalism, pervasive technology, big data, and the desire to quantify all of our behaviors, The Business Romantic makes a compelling case that we must meld the pursuit of success and achievement with romance if we want to create an economy that serves our entire selves. A rising star in data analytics who is in love with the intrinsic beauty of spreadsheets; the mastermind behind a brand built on absence; an Argentinian couple who revolutionize shoelaces; the founder of a foodie-oriented start-up that creates intimate conversation spaces; a performance artist who offers fake corporate seminars for real professionals—these are some of the innovators readers will meet in this witty, deeply personal, and rousing ramble through the world of Business Romanticism. The Business Romantic not only provides surprising insights into the emotional and social aspects of business but also presents “Rules of Enchantment” that will help both individuals and organizations construct more meaningful experiences for themselves and others. The Business Romantic offers a radically different view of the good life and outlines how to better meet one’s own desires as well as those of customers, employees, and society. It encourages readers to expect more from companies, to give more of themselves, and to fall back in love with their work and their lives.

The Intimate Economies of Bangkok

The Intimate Economies of Bangkok PDF Author: Ara Wilson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520239687
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
"Wilson shows us how global dreams come to life in the cacophony of Bangkok's markets. Business tycoons, sex workers, mall strollers, and penny capitalists: Each forms an exemplary figure, a source of reflection and emulation. In this engrossing work, the women and men of Bangkok produce themselves--and the global economy. I have seen no better ethnography of globalization."—Anna Tsing, author of In the Realm of the Diamond Queen "This fascinating book draws together the strands that weave intimate and kinship worlds into the fabric of the modern Thai economy. From floating markets to department stores and go-go bars, Wilson's inquiry reveals the gendered practices that sustain economic domains, and how these commercial venues in turn recast the intimate life. Upending stereotypical notions about Thai gender, Intimate Economies casts a complex, feminist perspective on the new styles of being emerging in the spaces of global capitalism."—Aihwa Ong, author of Buddha Is Hiding "Wilson brilliantly deciphers the ways intimate lives--personas, subjectivities, relations--are involved in the formation of modern and transnational capitalist markets. To do this she carefully unpacks the social infrastructure of five different globalized markets in Bangkok."—Saskia Sassen, author of Guests and Aliens "Offers something rare and valuable in studies of globalization--a fine-grained ethnography at the intersection of capitalist and non-capitalist economies. In Ara Wilson's fascinating study of urban Thailand, the sex trade is intertwined with the gift economy, the department store with the kin economy. Navigating this often surprising terrain with unusual agility, Wilson has produced a masterful record of new worlds and new subjects in the making."—Julie Graham, co-author of The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy

The Intimate Economies of Bangkok

The Intimate Economies of Bangkok PDF Author: Ara Wilson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520937430
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Bangkok has been at the frontier of capitalism's drive into the global south for three decades. Rapid development has profoundly altered public and private life in Thailand. In her provocative study of contemporary commerce in Bangkok, Ara Wilson captures the intimate effects of the global economy in this vibrant city. The Intimate Economies of Bangkok is a multifaceted portrait of the intertwining of identities, relationships, and economics during Bangkok's boom years. Using innovative case studies of women's and men's participation in a range of modern markets—department stores, go-go bars, a popular downtown mall, a telecommunications company, and the direct sales corporations Amway and Avon—Wilson chronicles the powerful expansion of capitalist exchange into further reaches of Thai society. She shows how global economies have interacted with local systems to create new kinds of lifestyles, ranging from "tomboys" to corporate tycoons to sex workers. Combining feminist theory with classic anthropological understandings of exchange, this historically grounded ethnography maps the reverberations of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity at the hub of Bangkok's modern economy.

The Global and the Intimate

The Global and the Intimate PDF Author: Geraldine Pratt
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231154496
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
By placing the global and the intimate in near relation, sixteen essays by prominent feminist scholars and authors forge a distinctively feminist approach to questions of transnational relations, economic development, and intercultural exchange. This pairing enables personal modes of writing and engagement with globalization debates and forges a definition of justice keyed to the specificity of time, place, and feeling. Writing from multiple disciplinary and geographical perspectives, the contributors participate in a long-standing feminist tradition of upending spatial hierarchies and making theory out of the practices of everyday life.

Intimate City

Intimate City PDF Author: Manjima Bhattacharjya
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789390514311
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
A profile of the history of sex work and the sexual economy in Mumbai, India's cultural and financial capital. In Intimate City, Manjima Bhattacharjya examines how globalization and technology have changed where and how sexual commerce is transacted. She maps offline and online geographies of sex work and unearths new perspectives: from changing red-light areas to the world of escort services; from the experiences of massage boys to men in search of casual encounters cruising the internet highways. Through these fascinating narratives, Bhattacharjya analyzes how the internet has reconfigured intimacies in the digital age. In doing so, she offers a new lens to look at long-held feminist understandings of sex work, choice, consent, and agency against the backdrop of the "maximum city" of Mumbai.

Intimate Economies of Development

Intimate Economies of Development PDF Author: Chris Lyttleton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136663495
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Aspirations, desires, opportunism and exploitation are seldom considered as fundamental elements of donor-driven development as it impacts on the lives of people in poor countries. Yet, alongside structural interventions, emotional or affective engagements are central to processes of social change and the making of selves for those caught up in development’s slipstream. Intimate Economies of Development lays bare the ways that culture, sexuality and health are inevitably and inseparably linked to material economies within trajectories of modernization in the Greater Mekong Sub-region. As migration expands and opportunities proliferate throughout Asia, different cultural groups increasingly interact as a result of targeted interventions and globalising economic formations; but they do so with different capabilities and expectations. This book uniquely grounds its arguments in interlocking details of people's everyday lives and aspirations in developing Asia, while also engaging with changing social values and moral frameworks. Part and parcel of a widening landscape of mobility and contingent intimacy is the ever-present threats of infectious disease, most prominently HIV/AIDS, and human trafficking. Thus, impact assessment and targeted interventions aim to address negative consequences that frequently accompany infrastructure development and market expansion. This path-breaking book, drawn on more than 20 years of ethnographic research in the Mekong region, shows how current models of mitigation cannot adequately cope with health risks generated by wide-ranging entrepreneurialism and enduring structural violence as dreams of ‘the good life’ are relentlessly enmeshed in strategies of livelihood improvement.