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

practices of intimacy and analyze ambiguities of practices of intimacy within generations
and the power relations associated with the narrative of linear modernity.
My research on intimate relations across three generations is understood in relation to
the modernist claims of sociology and its influence on the narratives of subjects.
However, my analysis moves beyond to critically assess the claims of modernist
sociology through these very narratives of intimacy by deconstructing these narratives
and unfolding through them, multiple and contradictory subjectivities that vary across a
range of conflicting and contradictory discourses of modernity. In exploring both
continuities and changes across generations, my research tries to bring out the
ambiguities of heterosexual intimacies and identities that are shaped by heterogeneous
regimes of power and knowledge. Inspired by the critical knowledge that “despite – and
because of – its claims to truth and legitimate knowledge, the social theory of modernity
and the modernist sociology have often been imbued with patriarchal, colonial and
hetero-normative interests” (Heaphy, 2007: 7); I seek to bring into sociology issues of
power, difference and otherness that are concerns of ‘reflexive sociology’ and a poststructuralistic
‘spirit of deconstruction’ (see Chapters 1, 3, 4, 9). Through my research
on intimate relations and subjects’ associated narratives of ‘traditional’, ‘modern’,
‘progressive’, ‘respectable’, ‘Eastern’, ‘Western’ forms and practices of intimacy; I seek
to extend my concern on intimate relations within an everyday specific context, to
broader analyses and stories of colonial-national encounters, postcolonial ambiguities
and its cultural politics of class, gender and race to which everyday narratives of
intimacy are integrally intertwined. These issues of post-colonialism and of everyday
culture which are otherwise integral to understandings within sociology have hitherto
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