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

c) Self-Other Destabilization and Cultural Hybridity:
Through the very relational nature of self and other discourse, and the instability at the
heart of the ‘self-other’ construction, this research has theoretically and empirically
demonstrated the continuing mutual co-constitution of the self and its other. This mutual
co-constitution appreciates the existence of a 'third space' that embodies cultural
hybridity but does not uphold in this hybridity; any coherent, monolithic, distinguishable
category of a pure self and its pure other. The hetero-normative identities of
masculinities and femininities are expressed in the third space through potential
homoeroticism belied in their homosocial ties. These homosocial-homoerotic spaces
simultaneously confirm and subvert institutionalized heterosexual identities of
masculinity and femininity. The heterosexual coupling represents its third space through
the co-constitution of the categories of tradition-modern, past-present, East-West,
conformity-subversion, subject-victim, religious-secular, sexual-emotional, self-society,
love marriage-arranged marriage, normative-non-normative imaginings, domestic-nondomestic,
material-spiritual, inner-outer, private-public. This co-constitutive third space
located in the research contributes to the scholarship of anthropology and post-colonial
studies in the way it interrogates essentialzed meanings and any claims for inherent
superiority of the self over the inherent inferiority of the other.
Although intersectionality and discursivity of self and other are not completely new
theoretical insights, what is new about these dimensions of knowledge is its sociocultural
contextualization within the specific empirical field of the urban post-colonial
Bengali bhadrasamaj in India. What is also new about the project is to examine the
309