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

CHAPTER-5 NARRATIVES OF FEMALE
HOMOSOCIAL INTIMACY: CONSTRUCTING
AND NEGOTIATING FEMININITIES
By exploring intimate spaces and stories of female homosociality and by analyzing
cultural constructions and expectations of heterosexual femininities, this chapter seeks
to understand the power and vulnerability of the processes of ‘doing gender’ (West and
Zimmerman, 1987) through doing feminities. Through a colonial-induced modernity,
women of India, and thereby also women in Bengal, particularly middle-class women
termed as the bhadramahila (respectable woman), were expected to uphold ‘modern’
identities of femininity without failing to perform ‘traditional’ roles of good mothers, wives
and daughters-in-law (Puri, 1999; Sarkar, 2001). The aspect of Bengal’s social life that
was most seriously affected by the colonial-national encounter was the ‘woman
question’ – the question of remoulding or recasting middle and upper middle-class
women (Chatterjee, 1989; Sangari and Vaid, 1989). This chapter appreciates subjects’
narratives of heterosexual feminine identities from within the space of female
homosociality and situates these narratives within the cultural politics of gendering that
mediated colonial Bengal.
Through a socio-historical contexualization of contemporary cultural narratives, this
chapter aims to examine the processes by which women negotiate; that is, confirm,
subvert and challenge heterosexual femininities and its hetero-normative underpinnings
within the spaces of homosociality. Through the lens of interactionist feminism (Jackson
and Scott, 2010), the chapter will empirically illustrate that femininity as an object of
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