narratives of three generations of urban middle-class - eTheses ...

Of the 28 women, 9 are home-makers, 12 working professionals and 5 students. The
number of women across the three generations who participated in the research is split
in the following manner
Generation
Number of participants
Third 11
Second 6
First 2
In between First and Second generation 1
In between Second and Third
generation
4
The sample makeup stated above is only a synopsis and a detailed description of
subjects’ biography is listed in Table-1 and 2 of the Appendix.
Besides the 56 participants who were interviewed for personal stories of intimacy and
whose narrative texts were analyzed in the research, I also interviewed 10 male and 4
female professionals who are well known public personalities from the fields of arts,
culture and academics directly or indirectly connected to issues on intimacy. These
public personalities were interviewed not to elicit personal stories of intimacy but to
provide a cultural background of their underderstanding of heterosexual intimate
relationships and identities of masculinities and femininities within the urban Bengali
bhadrasamaj.
Since the works and ideas of these personalities are heavily consumed by a major
section of the Bengali bhadrasamaj, I interviewed them in order to get a perspective of
the nature of readership of urban middle-class subjects with regards to the issue of
intimacy. This dimension was focused through questions on their works about the
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