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For example, when (heterosexual) love became the constitutive theme of the novel, few noticed that it became tightly intertwined with another theme, no less central to the bourgeois novel and to modernity at large: that of social mobility. As suggested by the two examples of Catherine and Emma disc…

Precisely because we live in a time where the idea of individual responsibility reigns supreme, the vocation of sociology remains vital. In the same way that at the end of the nineteenth century it was radical to claim that poverty was the result not of dubious morality or weak character, but of sy…

By our own standards, Catherine and Emma’s pain seems extreme, but it is still intelligible to us. Yet, as this book seeks to claim, the romantic agony that both of these women experience has changed its content, color, and texture. First of all, the opposition between society and love which each e…

Is this still capitalism, or something worse? Haraway was already grappling with a new language for it in her “Cyborg” text. Whatever it is, it produces a new worldwide proletariat, new distributions of ethnicity and sexuality, and new forms of the family. Haraway was writing about an earlier momen…

I have always dissented from part of this narrative. I think the category of the “immaterial” is meaningless, and modifiers such as “cognitive” and “semio-” don’t really capture what is distinctive about the forces of production and reproduction in our times. I also think it best not to assume in a…