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

‘innocuous’ ragging and informal spaces of college male friendship. Spaces of male
homosociality like school, college, university and adda clubs can be seen to be
performing the social roles of an otherwise weakening Bengali joint family by policing
individual heterosexual relation and by upholding romanticized brotherhood. However,
as much as the figure of the dada is symbolic of male power, he is also sometimes the
symbol of the erotic in his homosocial-homosexual intimacy with the younger cousin
brother. The following section is an analysis of the theoretical blurring of the
heterosexual and the homosexual through the homo-erotic in the homosocial.
b) Male Homosociality and Male Homosexuality:
A narrative of a thirty-five year-old heterosexual unmarried man may be insightful in this
context. Aditya discloses very intimately that,
“‘Too much of male mixings, playful bromance and physical touching’ often
‘awkwardly’ and ‘strangely’ reminded me of my ‘playful’ physical closeness with
my older cousin brother during school days. He ‘got me into being quite close to
him physically, sometimes through his’ dadagiri. ‘You are a researcher and I’m
sure you will not judge me by this childish stupidity’; for it is, as you know, a
secret but common experience of growing up of many Bengali boys, especially
ones who have been in male boarding schools and its sexually restrictive
environment. Thinking about ‘such things’, however, makes me quite ‘unsettled
and discomforted’. A curious desire for male sexual organ basically incited these
‘childish’, ‘stupid’, ‘casual’ touching of each other. In retrospect, this makes me
feel ‘extremely weird, embarrassed and also sometimes disturbed by the memory
of such sexual abnormalities which flashes back occasionally’!” Aditya quickly
rushes in to add after his intimate and secret disclosure, how he is “‘absolutely
straight’, and an ‘absolutely normal heterosexual man attracted and drawn
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