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

eclipses the conditions of its own emergence; it eclipses power with power” (1997: 14).
Pushpa’s agency can be seen from the point of view of Butler’s account of agency that
recognizes its inherent ambivalent nature, the fact that it is always situated in existing
relations of power and in relations to prevailing norms.
Pushpa was anything but a passive recipient of the patriarchal authority of her time. She
strategically circumvented norms and disciplines of the family by creating her ‘dream
home’ within the familial ‘home’; a space for herself from where she secretly articulated
her intimate wishes and heterosexual desires. How an ordinary, otherwise feminized
household chore like bringing down dried clothes, was complied with and yet gradually
built upto a rebellious act, is a classic exemplar of a paradoxical state of resistance
through compliance. Her silence indicated through mere exchanges of glances should
not be read as passivity as it has often been understood in the male, orientalist
discourse of modernity (Mohanty, 1991). Her conformity can rather be read as a
creative negotiation where an ordinary chore in an ordinary mundane space is turned
out into a means for momentarily breaking out of the normative restrictions and a
disciplinarian regimentation. This provides an empirical instance of Foucault’s assertion
that as soon as there is a power relation, there is the possibility of resistance (1990: 95).
Carving out a space amidst the strict surveillance of a patriarchal family, through the
strategization of a mundane feminized domain, engenders negotiated meanings of
agency and power that can only be appreciated through a ‘situated knowledge’ of the
structural and cultural imperatives of her generation. An appreciation of ‘situated
knowledge’, that is intergral to my post-colonial and post-structuralist feminist
epistemology, helps to privilege ‘local’ narratives of power, subjectivity and agency over
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