Born Liquid

Zygmunt Bauman (Author), Thomas Leoncini (Author)

9781509530670, Polity Press

Hardback, published 12 October 2018

100 pages
19.3 x 12.4 x 1.3 cm, 0.2 kg

"A welcoming introduction to Bauman’s sociological craft and a kind of goodbye to a man whose thoughtfulness has marked our discipline. In these conversations, he comes across as someone of immense humanity, at ease with thinking but open to the challenge posed by others."
Sociological Research Online

Born Liquid is the last work by the great sociologist and social theorist Zygmunt Bauman, whose brilliant analyses of liquid modernity changed the way we think about our world today. At the time of his death, Bauman was working on this short book, a conversation with the Italian journalist Thomas Leoncini, exactly sixty years his junior. In these exchanges with Leoncini, Bauman considers, for the first time, the world of those born after the early 1980s, the individuals who were ‘born liquid’ and feel at home in a society of constant flux. As always, taking his cue from contemporary issues and debates, Bauman examines this world by discussing what are often regarded as its most ephemeral features. The transformation of the body – tattoos, cosmetic surgery, hipsters – aggression, bullying, the Internet, online dating, gender transitions and changing sexual preferences are all analysed with characteristic brilliance in this concise and topical book, which will be of particular interest to young people, natives of the liquid modern world, as well as to Bauman’s many readers of all generations.

1. Skin-deep transformations Tattoos, plastic surgery, hipsters 1

2. Transformations of aggressivity Bullying 29

3. Transformations of sex and dating Declining taboos in the era of finding love online 53

Postscript The last lesson 87

Subject Areas: Sociology & anthropology [JH]