Revisions

by Lisa Adkins

"This book will become a critical text in feminist and social theory. It brings together recent sociology of late modernity, particularly sociologies of reflexivity, aesthetics and detraditionalization, with a consideration of transformations of identity, especially transformations of gender and sexual identities. It does so in relation to questions of cultural economy: debates over the role and place of reflexivity in the social sciences; recent controversies over the significance of commodity aesthetics in regard to questions of identity; and debates on the significance of risk for the organization of contemporary sexualities. In so doing it puts forward a distinctive thesis, namely that within late modernity gender and sexuality are being reworked in terms of categories of reflexivity and risk. It shows that this reworking places increasing significance on issues of mobility and identity in late modernity. It therefore outlines the politics of mobility in regard to identity, suggest