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

c) gender, class, generation, community, family and kinship shape personal intimate
relations of homosociality and heterosexual coupling, of ‘true’ friendships and
marraiages of ‘choice’ and pabitra prem;
d) the Bengali bhadrasamaj, despite its fragmented and heterogenous nature, uphold its
‘class distinction’ and ‘taste’ by narrating a ‘respectable’ and ‘sophisticated’ ‘script’ of
intimate rituals and language;
e) subjects conform, circumvent, subvert and challenge national and trans-national
hegemonic discourses of intimacy and institutionalized heterosexuality at the intersubjective,
everyday practices and cultural imaginings of intimacy.
The following section summarizes the ideas of the four chapters of analysis.
Summary of Analyses:
Through various cultural practices, ideological constructions, and subjects’ narratives of
intimacy:
a) The first chapter analyzed the processes of constructing and negotiating
heterosexual identity through negotiating masculinities and illustrated how
middle-class men experience, practice and narrate intimacy. The chapter showed
that everyday relations of male friendships are classed, gendered, communalized
and serve a political purpose of patriarchal nation-building through the fusion of
family/kinship practices and practices of homosocial fraternity/brotherhood. The
power and vulnerability of the ‘liberating’ discourse of male homosocial intimacy
that shape and are shaped by the discourses of heterosexual coupling are shown
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