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

co-constituted the self and the other. Narratives confirmed the binary and often
superiority of ‘us’ and ‘our’ through its implicit logical other ‘they’ and ‘theirs’ (Hall,
1992). A discourse analysis brings out these binaries and helps understand how
discourse and subjectivity are co-constituted. A deconstruction of the very same
narrative ‘text’ can then lay bare fractured, contradictory, ambivalent subjectivities that
cut across a range of multiple and conflicting discourses. In the context of this research,
this can be understood as the revealing of gendered and classed subjectivities that cut
across co-existing but often contradictory discourses of colonialism, nationalism, transnationalism,
neoliberal politics and their narratives of intimacy. Laying bare these
ambivalences requires the researcher to not only stick to subjects’ surface narratives
but to read in between the lines along the sociological tradition of hermeneutics and
also go beyond them. I have attempted to partially accomplish this by focusing on two
aspects of narratives. They are:
• Goffman’s (1959) concept of ‘Dramaturgy’ in narrations that involve, what I call,
‘extra-narratives’ or “paralinguistic features (“uhms”)” (Riessman, 1993: 19-19)
and other bodily movements (Bauman, 1986).
• Multiplicity of narratives, where one self-narrative is internally contradicted with a
contrasting self-narrative that aims to bring out differences in the processes of
meaning making in different contexts and interactional situations and discourses.
‘Extra narratives’ and multiple narratives tell multiple stories, subjectivities,
interpretations, discourses, and hence, multiple narrative texts. Understanding this
multiplicity is necessary in order to bring out the network of power relations within which
everyday stories are caught up and operate.
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