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

how participants gave meaning to their power in terms of their negotiation with
hetero-normativity and of the cultural mandates/expectations of womanhood
within the family, community and nation. Through appreciation of culturally
contingent positionality and meanings of femininity, the chapter brought out the
necessity to appreciate ‘situated knowledge’ of women’s agencies and
subjectivities that emerge through continual negotiation and ‘bargain with
patriarchy’. By situating women’s narratives within colonial and post-colonial
male hegemonic discourse, the chapter showed how women strategically
circumvent and challenge both national and trans-national discourses of
femininity and the social and discursive construction of the bhadramahila. It
finally illustrated the potential possibility of homo-erotic bondings within female
homosociality that critique hetero-normativity but does not lie outside its
imperatives.
c) The third chapter analyzed the processes of negotiating hetero-normativity
through negotiating heterosexual coupling and illustrated how gender, class,
generation shape and give meaning to heterosexual courtship, coupling and
conjugality. Building on the analysis of the construction of heterosexual identities
of masculinities and femininities, it analyzed how such identities come to bear
upon the meaning and practices of heterosexual coupling. It illustrated that
subjects’ ongoing negotiations of coupling, courtship and conjugality at the inter
subjective levels, tell stories of multiple narratives of ‘progressive’, ‘modern’ and
‘traditional’ forms and practices of intimacy that cut across conflicting and
contradictory discourses of colonialism, nationalism and trans-nationalism. Such
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