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

Cooley’s interactionism which argue that even the ‘I’ is equally socially constituted, for it
is impossible to think of oneself without considering its relationships and interaction with
others (Scott, 2009: 24). A sense of selfhood is also constituted by one’s social,
economic and cultural capital and their associated bargaining power. For instance,
Aparna’s ‘botheraton’ with people’s image of her womanhood, as we can see, is
connected to her professional working status outside home and its material
underpinnings. With time and the consolidation of her material anchorage, she is ‘more
confident’ of the assertion of an independent selfhood and ‘bothers’ less about society,
although cannot completely ignore it. This instance that suggests a degendered
arrangement of household chores interrogates the essentialized feminization of ‘homemaking’
but reinforces the patriarchal capitalist notion of ‘work’ as work outside home, in
the public and its material and cultural recognition.
Also the resilience of hetero-normativity both as practice and imagination, is confirmed
by Aparna’s narrativized ‘incapacity’ to ‘skilfully’ ‘balance’ work and home like her other
professional colleagues who embody an ‘ideal’ state of womanhood through this heteronormative
‘balance’. The internalization of the cultural mandates of womanhood,
through performance of wifehood and motherhood as crucial to ‘doing’ and maintaining
heterosexual relations, is narrativized by many women across all generations and both
by home-makers and professionals. This cultural ‘ideal’ of the balance between work
and home and the cultural ideal of the form of femininity/womanhood which maintains
this balance, unites most women as a collective ‘class’ who are materially and culturally
‘exploited’ and whose labour is appropriated by most men as a collective ‘class’
(Delphy, 1977).
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