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

within the lives of women across all generations. However, it also showed that these
homosocial spaces are highly classed and fragmented in terms of the discursive
construction/label of one’s position as a ‘house-wife’ or a middle-class working
professional. Through various empirical instances, the chapter illustrated that such
discursive constructions and labelling do have social and material consequences on
women’s lives which interconnects the discursive with the social and the material.
Through examining gendered spaces of intimate friendships, the previous chapter and
this chapter sought to analyze the processes of negotiating heterosexual intimate
identities of masculinities and femininities. These negotiated spaces were shown to
exist in critique of and relation to institutionalized heterosexuality or hetero-normativity.
The reflexive narration of these identities were illustrated to be simultaneously shaped
and constrained by inter-subjective relations and meanings of gender, class, classculture,
generation, profession and their discourses within the narratives of nationalism,
colonialism and modernism. The institutional, material and particularly social, cultural,
and symbolic consequences were then brought out through the processes of these
negotiations. The next chapter takes from the analyses of heterosexual identities of
masculinities and femininities in order to explore the ways in which such identities come
to bear upon subjects’ negotiation of hetero-normativity through heterosexual coupling.
199