| Abstract |
"The Intimate State tells the story of how intimate relationships acquired unprecedented political and cultural resonance in Britain during the heady and transformative decades following WWII. Long before late-1960s feminists famously proclaimed "the personal is political," private family life was given profound political importance in a range of quarters, by many of Britain's most prominent psychiatrists, psychologists, social scientists, politicians, and social reformers. During the early decades of the Cold War, a new generation of self-styled relationship experts made the compelling case that emotional "health" was forged within the intimate space of the loving, nuclear family and was the bedrock for responsible democratic citizenship. This new priority given to emotional relationships transformed the scope of politics in Britain as the emerging welfare state assumed responsibility for protecting citizens' emotional wellbeing. An unintended consequence of this new, intimately emotional vision of modern political order was the mobilization of many groups either oppressed by or excluded from the heteronormative family-centered post-WWII intimacy ideal. Movements advocating the rights of women, queer people, and adolescents seeking a greater range of political rights focused on the serious emotional harms caused by being either excessively trapped within or excluded from the idealized nuclear family. By the 1970s, activists' efforts to claim a more inclusive model of intimacy, which provided space for transformed gender roles, non-monogamous romance, non-traditional families, and friendship-based political activism, became the basis for both socio-political reform and new models of healthy emotional life. This book traces, on the one hand, the emergence of a new vision of emotion-centered-social modernity in Britain after 1945, and on the other, the exclusions and resistance that repeatedly threatened to upend it"-- Provided by publisher. |
