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

selfhood and intimate disclosure. By illustrating that subjectivities produced under
conditions of social, cultural and structural imperatives of the family, kinship, community,
class and gender; can, in fact, sometimes develop different but quite strong sense of
shwattya or selfhood like that of Manjir and also resist hetero-normativity to create a
sense of reflexive selfhood through subversive imagination, like that of Pushpa; this
research re-conceptualizes ‘tradition’ or generally power as not merely restrictive but
also productive (Foucault, 1990: 95). Thus, it interrogates whether ‘de-traditionalization’
associated with the erasure of family, class, gender, and kinship ties is the only
condition for a reflexive narrative of self. This interrogation of tradition as necessarily
oppressive and antithetical to reflexivity and selfhood contributes to the academia of
post-coloniality and its feminism by opening up multiple ways of conceptualizing
agency, power, resistance and subjectivity. By appreciating ‘situated knowledge’ within
which subjects give meaning to heterosexual identities and practices of intimacies, this
research empirically grounds the conceptualization of reflexivity and opens up multiple
possibilities and limitations of practising and envisioning reflexivity and reflexive
ordering of self-narratives. By this it not only offers a reflexivity of ‘reflexivity’ but offers a
chain of reflexivity, that is, a reflexivity of reflexivity of reflexivity. In this chain, no
reflexivity is ever final. Instead, it is continually negotiated under varying material, social,
cultural, institutional and discursive conditions.
The research also critiques Giddens’ cross-culturally monolithic ‘narrative of self’ (1992:
75) associated with his claims for “new universalizing tendencies and commonalities in
experience” (Heaphy, 2007: 70) and ‘transformation of intimacy’, in which there are only
‘we’ and no ‘others’ (Giddens, 1991: 27). This research within a context of post-
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