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

It is through this fractured female homosocial space and the heterogeneity of the
category woman that I seek to interrogate the trans-historical, monolithic category of
woman through a post-colonialist ‘situated’ feminism (Mohanty, 1991) that critiques a
radical feminist political vision of a universal sisterhood (Raymond, 1986) that is not only
differenciated across cultures but also within a culture and in fact, within the very same
class. By such argument, I also reinforce the academic necessity to focus on
understanding intimate relations as processes of negotiation within specific interactional
situations and relations of gender, generation, class and profession that contextually
come to bear upon heterosexual identities intimacies. My analysis of this space
therefore problematizes what Raymond theorizes as the “Gyn/affection...the passion
that women feel for women, that is, the experience of profound attraction for the original
vital Self and the movement towards other vital women” (1986: 7-8). I argue through
subjects’ narratives that there does not exist any ‘original self’ or ‘original woman’
(Raymond, 1986: 4-5) or the ‘original impulse’ (68) outside of the discursive regime,
power and truth that mediate various processes of gendering and womanhood both at
the material and at the symbolic level (Holland et al., 1998). The original ‘Self’ is already
and always sociological. In that, I agree with Raymond that women’s lives just like their
spaces of friendship have often been in Raymond’s use of Mary Daly’s term
‘dismembered’ under patriarchy (1986: 4).
The patriarchal fiction and ideological myth that ‘women never have been and never can
be friends...or women are their worst enemies’ (Raymond, 1986: 6), maps on to a
corollary patriarchal myth of the liberating nature of male homosocial intimate space, as
the earlier chapter illustrated. In the context of Bengal, this politics of the united,
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