Content area
Full Text
Sexuality and Social Change: Sexual Relations in a Capitalist System
The Politics of Passion: Women's Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora. Gloria Wekker. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. 313 pp.
Wayward Women: Sexuality and Agency in a New Guinea Society. Holly Wardlow. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. 284 pp.
The Purchase of Intimacy. Viviana A. Zelizer. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 356 pp.
In 1975, in the classic work The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex, Gayle Rubin established the importance of the exchange of women between households as the foundation for the sex-gender system. Since Rubin's germinal article, anthropologists have increasingly examined both the influence of commodities on women's sexuality and the treatment of women's sexuality as a commodity. The three books reviewed in this essay address both approaches to the intersection between sex and the economy; collectively, authors Viviana Zelizer, Holly Wardlow, and Gloria Wekker suggest that sexuality has been examined too narrowly as either inimical to the economic sphere or deeply subsumed within it. As an alternative, the authors suggest that sexuality is embedded within the economic sphere, influenced by economic changes yet not determined by them.
Economic sociologist Viviana Zelizer's book, The Purchase of Intimacy, examines the relational behavior of intimacy and finances in the U.S. legal and social systems. Using a sophisticated collection of legal cases and secondary data, Zelizer uses an expansive definition of intimacy to explore a range of intimate economic transactions from coupling to household commerce. This definition extends beyond sexual relations to incorporate usually excluded intimate relations such as the attorney-client privilege, which treats communication of personal information as a type of intimacy.
Zelizer's research challenges the two dominant theories on intimacy and economics-what she refers to as the "hostile spheres" and "nothing but" theories-in favor of a relational theory of economics and intimacy. The "hostile spheres" argument suggests that "sustaining intimacy" and "corrupting markets" are inherently contradictory (p. 40). The "nothing but" argument is a collection of theories that reduce intimacy to factors such as the market or culture without examining the intersection between intimacy and economics. Zelizer proposes instead the "relational" or "connected lives" argument, namely arguing that "people who blend intimacy and economic activity are actively engaged...