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

friend with whom I can share these feelings of intimacy without being judged and
same for her.”
These narratives of female homosocial bonding can be read as feminist critique and
subversion of the “hetero-relational” vision which conventionally perceives that women
left alone could not have been happy together, and that, women’s activities produce
less than happy women (Raymond, 1986: 3). Subjects’ sharing of the deepest secrets
of first love and ‘unconventional’ ways of being intimate outside institutional marriage
can be seen as nurturing collective indigenous feminist-feminine homosocial
experiences of, and desire for, subverting and circumventing hegemonic, heterosexual,
monogamous marriage and its associated identities and intimacies. It also interrogates
‘compulsory hetrosexuality’ (Rich, 1980) by undermining its compulsory prioritization
over other forms of intimacy, both in practice and imagination.
Academic scholarship on ‘bedroom cultures’ (McRobbie, 1978) has similarly focused on
the ‘private’ bedroom as the only biographical space – the personal, personalized and
the intimate space over which teenage girls are able to be ‘private’ from parents and
siblings within the home (Lincoln, 2001: 7-8 cited in Nayak and Kehily, 2008: 55).
Ethnographic exploration of this space suggests a cultural reproduction of the ‘girly
activities’ and an enactment of a range of a feminine activities that reinforce heteronormativity
(Nayak and Kehily, 2008: 54-56). My subjects’ narratives of this space in its
emotional undertone do uphold such culturally traditional feminine emotional intimate
subjectivities that are also a confirmation of the Enlightenment coupling of femininity
with the emotional and private. However, the narrative meaning of this space as a
personalized ‘window of the heart’ also radically reconceptualizes the coupling of
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