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

through continual self-surveillance and self-control (Bartky, 1990). Her persistent
longing and hope to be blessed by her family, as familial recognition makes marriage a
‘true’ marraige, in the absence of which it is ‘incomplete’; echoes Smart’s (2007)
‘connectedness’ thesis that stresses on the significance of family, kinship and sociocultural
relationality in shaping our very heterosexual desire and ‘practices of intimacy’
(Jamieson, 2011). Her narrative of the entwinement of family sentiments and happy
conjugality empirically demonstrates the resilience of hegemonic heterosexuality and
renders other sexualities outside the patriarchal family, as deviation from the ‘normal’
(Hockey et al., 2007: 23), as ‘incomplete’ and ‘untrue’. Pushpa’s romanticized
heterosexual familial images of a daughter-in-law and a son-in-law particularly
demonstrate that it is only through heterosexual relationships rather then gay or lesbian
relationships that marraige is made ‘complete’ (Weeks et al., 1999).
b) Imagination: Co-constitution of Self and Society:
An interesting contradiction in the narrative of family as the basis for legitimate sexuality
has been noted by Hockey et al. (2007) in their research on ‘mundane
heterosexualties’. “Despite the social insistence that the family be the legitimate site for
the expression of one’s sexuality, for some of its members, the family – both as an
institution and a ‘location’ – can in practice represent a considerable barrier to sexual
expression, communication or activity” (Hockey et al., 2007: 148). Pushpa similarly
comes to represent contradictory subjecticities of heterosexual intimacy. Despite her
insistence on the familial legitimation of her love, Pushpa constructs an imaginative
space, a space of her ‘own’, her ‘dream home’ within her familial ‘home’ that lies outside
all ‘societal rules and limits’. It is for her intimate imagination, possibly of both emotional
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