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

to confirm, subvert and reproduce the cultural constructions of hegemonic
masculinity at the inter-subjective level of everyday interaction, gender
performance and gender accountability. Narrative texts were deconstructed to
show that construction of hegemonic masculinity necessarily depended on the
discursive subordination, rejection of and distantiation from the ‘other’ in creation
of ‘a circle of legitimacy’ around the self. This paradoxical nature of masculine
self-making which depended on an ‘other’ and simultaneously rejected it; brought
out the mutual co-constitution of self and other; of homosociality and
homosexuality and the multiple codes of hegemonic masculinity including the
competing meanings and practices of ‘real’ heterosexual masculinity. Masculinity
in this sense was shown to be constituted simultaneously at the level of
structural, institutional, experiential, embodied and discursive.
b) The second chapter analyzed the processes of constructing and negotiating
heterosexual identity through negotiating femininities and illustrated how middleclass
women experience, practice and narrate intimacy. Like the previous
chapter, it showed that femininity as an object of knowledge is an ongoing
accomplishment of interaction-specific accountability and cultural performances
of femininity/womanhood. Through different stories of female homosociality, the
chapter illustrated that women’s experiences of femininity are both collective as a
gender and also heterogeneous. Thse experiences were shown to be socially
and discursively constituted by an inter-play of the subject’s generation, class,
culture, profession and relation to the patriarchal mode of production. This
specific positionality and subjectivity was then shown to have consequences on
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