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

‘woman’ as a collective political identity and yet as simultaneously fragmented (Snitow,
1990:9 cited in Glover and Kaplan, 2007: 6-7) is a concern that echoes a classic
Durkheimian problematic (1893)- what explains enduring connections and togetherness
in social bonds (intimate bonds or gendered bonds in this context) that are enmeshed in
a strong individualist culture. This Durkheimian concern that is broadly the concern of
sociology even in its contemporary times which tries to grapple with the interrelation
between structure and agency (Giddens, 1984), is also a shared concern of the
proponents of reflexive modernization or individualization thesis (Giddens, 1991; Beck
and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002, 1995; Bauman, 2000). The sociological problematic of the
collective versus the specific came with a culture of individualization and was echoed in
the narratives of gender, intimacy and individualization. For instance, with increasing
individualism, men and women wanted to become themselves at the same time when
they wanted to become partners to each other in the face of weakening external bonds
(Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995). This brings us to the question of intimacy that is
constructed within individualized cultures and analyzed by theorists of the
‘individualization thesis’ who offer a sociology of intimacy but often at the cost of over
exaggerating the individual over the social and cultural (Smart, 2007; Jamieson, 1999;
Gross, 2005). The following section is a review of the thesis and its critiques in the
context of intimate relations.
Intimacy and Individualization:
Stone, (1977) used the concept of “affective individualism” to convey the increasing
glorification of personal emotion in England during the eighteenth century which he
linked to a turn towards companionate marriage during that period. A companionate
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