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

and beliefs that distinguishes them or their cultured, educated, progressive community
of middle-class culture from the ‘ordinary middle-class’ and the ‘new middle-class’. Such
affiliations to family, community, culture and the ideologies they represent problematize
their apparently unbounded self reflexivity and unbridled individual agency, choice and
consent. The self is understood as part of the family, the family as part of a certain
section of middle-class and the class as representing certain world view and political
commitment with regards to intimate practices and identities. The individual is therefore
strongly embedded within family relations, culture and history (Smart, 2007), and
produced by chains of cultural significations, representations and discourses (Hall,
1997a).
Subjects’ narratives illustrate the interconnection between power and subjectivity
through Foucault’s notion of ‘subjectivation’, the process of becoming a subject and
becoming subordinated to power- family, peer group, and the ideologies they come to
represent, create Sunanda and Udayan as subjects by subjecting them to their power
(Foucault, 1982: 212). This is also an instance of Foucault’s concept of
‘governmentality’ (1991) in which power is internalized and works to regulate the
behaviour of individuals. Foster (2011) brings out this aspect of Foucauldian
governmentality by arguing that “in the word govermentality, we encounter the word
mentality” which “indicates that one governs oneself by internalising social, political, and
cultural regulations, rules, and norms” (139). Taking from Butler’s reading (1997) of
Foucault’s ‘subjectivation’, I argue in this context that subjects’ conformity to a modern
legal language of intimacy also provides them the very condition of their ‘modern’
identity because a subject is formed ambivalently by being subjugated or subjected (7,
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