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

class-centric, family mediated friendships (Davies, 2011: 79, Allan, 1996: 100). The
ideological construction of ‘doing’ or ‘displaying’ friendship in its ‘true’ or ‘real’ form that
equates this ‘doing’ to family relations, presumes a collective imagination and a shared
knowledge of normative family by its audience and participants (Pahl and Spencer,
2010: 205). Through such cultural ‘doings’ of ‘chosen’ friendships, conventional ‘familylike’
qualities are more positively established and reconfirmed (Finch, 2007: 79-80). This
confirms the social constructedness of the ‘personal’, and the familial commitments of
the personal but in a way that redefines the nature and significance of family life; which
in its cumulative character and range of connections, is more “flexible rather than brittle
or breakable” (Smart, 2007: 29). This ethnographic finding helps to answer one of the
research questions: how personal relationships are socially constructed and what roles
family, class and community play in this. The next section will illustrate the gendered
nature of the social constructedness of intimate friendship.
The cultural prevalence and desire to imagine and practice intimate friendship in the
language of kinship is interestingly more common among men than women. Research
revealed that women particularly in the third generation hardly referred to their female
friends as sisters whereas, men across all generations often referred to their very close
male friend as a brother or brother-like. Such male practices can be analyzed as the
masculine desire to hold on to their structured forms of patriarchal kinship of the joint
family arrangements where brotherly love, affection and loyalty are emotions that are
intricately connected to such patriarchal cultural sensibility, and provide the very
foundation of the joint sentiment of the family, both territorially and functionally. A
possible historical and theoretical connection of such imagined and constructed
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