摘要：Contrary to large bodies of scholarship in
socio-legal studies and feminist theory,
The Purchase of Intimacy argues that intimate relations and
economic transactions are not mutually corrosive. They
are not, to use Viviana Zelizer¡¯s term, ¡°hostile worlds.¡±
Nor are intimate relations merely economic transactions
occluded by the fog of culture. They are not, in Zelizer¡¯s
term, ¡°nothing but¡± economics. Rather, as this book eloquently
demonstrates, intimate relations are supported and
even constituted by economic transactions. What distinguishes
intimate exchanges from other kinds of transactions
is not the extent to which there is money involved in
them, but rather the way in which the monetary part of the
transaction is defined by the transactants and explained to
third parties.
