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

knowledge and practice is an ongoing accomplishment and the product of interactionspecific
accountability (Garfinkel, 1967). As argued by McRobbie and Garber (1976),
the cultural politics of gender will be shown to have material affects on the life chances
and experiences of women as individuals. My analysis, however, moves beyond this to
illustrate that the category ‘woman’ within the very same middle-class is often
differentiated, owing to their differential socio economic position in relation to the
patriarchal mode of production. The cultural construction of “house-wife” and “working
woman” and its material consequences on and oppression of women will be analyzed to
illustrate the intertwined operation of the social and the discursive. The chapter will then
bring out the ways in which ‘home-makers’ through their homosocial intimate spaces
simultaneously confirm and interrogate the capitalistic notions of ‘time’ and ‘productivity’
associated with the patriarchal discourse of public ‘work’. The chapter will show that
women’s experiences are both collective as a gender and also variable in terms of their
class-culture, profession and generation. Through various empirical instances, the
chapter will reiterate the theoretical point that without losing sociological focus on the
collective effects of the gender discourse at large at the institutional level; it is important
to appreciate ‘women’ as a heterogeneous contextual analytic (Foster, 1999) by
privileging the meanings that women themselves give to their identities of femininity
from their experiences of power, or lack of it. In this regard, the chapter will suggest a
‘politics of difference’ (Haraway, 1991) and its ‘situated politics’ of hetero-normative
subversion. This recognizes the importance of fragmentation in a post-structuralist and
deconstructive academic climate but also ‘still’ recognizes the lived experiences of
sexed subjects-in-culture (McRobbie, 1997). The chapter will finally conclude by hinting
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