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

perform family-like rituals and tradtion, this section illustrated how ‘choice’ is shaped
and co-constituted by ‘structure’ and how family and kinship play an important role in
the performance and cultural imagination of male homosociality and heterosexual
masculinity. The next section will illustrate nuanced negotiations of masculine identity,
by showing that the reproduction of maleness is not only ‘disturbed’ by the male self’s
other, but also by the fractured nature of the self. This internal fragmentation of the self
makes any fixed notion of hegemonic masculinity unstable and reinforces the analytical
departure of my thesis which is the socio-cultural and discursive construction of
heterosexual identities and intimacies.
Critiquing Narrative Discourse of ‘Liberating’ Male Homosocial Intimacy
and ‘The Real’ Male Self:
Exploring the perils of the male peer group was much more challenging than exploring
the pleasures of the male peer group. It is useful to explain in this context how my autoethnographic
epistemological position as a female researcher who is automatically an
‘other’ or an ‘outsider’ to this male space created multi-layered cultural barriers to its
exploration in which my ‘entry’ into such a male world was narrativized as “fortunate” by
a subject. This in turn, however, engendered substantive theoretical analysis of the
gendered codes of intimacies for the research.
For instance, a continual male surveillance of my cultural position as a twenty-seven
year-old urban middle-class Bengali woman researcher on ‘heterosexual intimacy’
deeply problematized my auto-ethnographic research of ‘home’ as an ‘insider’. It
critiqued the constructed dichotomy of insider/native and outsider/non-native
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