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

This brings us back to the appreciation of intimate relations and reflexive practices as
mediated by gender relations and their socio-cultural embeddedness within other
relations of class and race and generation (Smart, 2007; Jamieson, 1999, 2011). In this
context, it is important to appreciate Heaphy’s (2007) argument that the theory of
reflexive modernization, in promoting ‘new universalities and commonalities in human
experience’ (170) that cut across ‘old boundaries of class, generation, geographical
location’ (9) and where there are no ‘others’ (4); often fails to recognize and therefore
incorporate the centrally important questions of ‘otherness’, ‘difference’ and their
strategies of power that heavily shape everyday personal intimate lives (4). The theory
of reflexivity failed to recognise the limits of reflexivity and therefore, “failed to be
reflexive” (Heaphy, 2007: 177). The following section, through a critique of the
individualization thesis and broadly and perhaps grossly categorized under the label of
‘anti-individualization thesis’, is an appreciation of the sociological relationalities of
intimate and personal lives through the conceptualization of the ‘individual’ as ‘person’
(Smart, 2007).
‘Transformation of Intimacy’ and ‘De-traditionalization of Intimacy’
Reconsidered through ‘Connectedness Thesis’
Drawing on an impressive array of research on marriage and families, Jamieson (1998,
1999) provides an empirical assessment of the contemporary intimate ideals and finds
that the transformation of intimacy as suggested by Giddens has been over
exaggerated, for there is still evidence of unequal gendered division of housework and
emotional rewards in marriage. She shows that these families are based not solely on
the ideals of pleasure and self realization but also on traditional notions of commitment,
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