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

Through various cultural practices, ideological constructions, and subjects’ narratives of
male homosociality, this chapter explored one of the central concerns of the thesis: the
processes of negotiating heterosexual identity through negotiating masculinity. It
showed how everyday male friendships that are classed, gendered, and embedded with
relations of the family and community confirm, subvert and reproduce the cultural
constructions of hegemonic masculinity at the inter-subjective level of everyday
practices and performances of homosociality. Narratives were deconstructed to show
that the construction of hegemonic masculinity necessarily depended on the discursive
subordination, rejection of, and distantiation from the ‘other’, in order to create of ‘a
circle of legitimacy’ around the ‘self’ (Connell, 1995: 76). The paradoxical nature of
heterosexual self-making which depended on the other and simultaneously rejected it,
brought out the dynamic processes of negotiating and ‘doing gender’. This was also
shown by illustrating the multiple codes of hegemonic masculinity and the competing
meanings and practices of ‘real’ masculinity. Masculinity in this sense is shown to be
constituted simultaneously at the level of the social, institutional, structural, experiential,
embodied, and the discursive (Holland et al., 1998: 149). I wish to conclude by arguing
after Robinson (1996: 115) that if we are to see masculinity as contested, ambiguous,
contradictory and open to change, then it is necessary to appreciate the ambiguity in the
way masculinity is simultaneously both vulnerable and powerful. The next chapter,
through an exploration of female homosocial intimacy, seeks to illustrate the
constructive and negotiated nature of heterosexual feminine identities and intimacies.
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