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

the continuous discursive construction of heterosexual identities and intimacies. This
appreciation of multiplicity both within and between the global and the local resists
homogenization of men’s and women’s experiences of masculinities and femininities,
and is able to appreciate multiple and often competing cultural narratives of ‘tradition’
and ‘modernity’ in relation to practices of intimacy that are gendered, raced, and
classed. The tensions among these discourses and subjectivities are then shown to
open up spaces for subverting and disrupting the discursive regime that construct the
hegemonic narratives of ‘tradition ‘modernity’ and their associated politics of time, space
and people.
By contextually applying the centrality of ‘power and difference’ that lies at the heart of
Bourdiueu’s and Wacquant’s (1992) vision of ‘reflexive’ sociology (Heaphy, 2007: 178-
179); and the deconstructive spirit of post-structuralism, post-colonial history and
feminism within a sociology of heterosexual identities and intimacies, this research
problematizes the ‘reflexive’ nature of reflexive modernization, reflexive narrative of self,
the reconstructivist theories of modernity and the sociology of reflexivity it promotes
(Heaphy, 2007: 15). This problematizing of the claims of ‘reflexivity’, through the
recognition of the central importance of power, difference and otherness, in any form of
knowledge production, theoretically and epistemologically contribute to criticality and
continuing debates within and outside of the discipline of sociology. This research
suggests some possible although not exhaustible bases of self-criticality:
a) recognition of power, difference and otherness even within the most ‘personally
intimate’ and ‘objective’
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