Processes of negotiating intimate heterosexual identities and relations: narratives of three generations of urban middle-class Bengalis living in Kolkata, India

Das, Nabamita (2013). Processes of negotiating intimate heterosexual identities and relations: narratives of three generations of urban middle-class Bengalis living in Kolkata, India. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

Through interview generated narratives of subjects of three generations of urban middle-class Bengalis living in Kolkata, India and other auto-ethnographic narrative texts; this research seeks to examine generation, gender and class specific meanings of intimate heterosexual identities and relations. It focuses on the ways in which subjects negotiate institutionalized heterosexuality or hetero-normativity within everyday practices of intimacy. Subjects’ on-going negotiations that tell stories of multiple and contradictory subjectivities, are analysed to show how personal narratives of intimacy vary across a range of conflicting and competing colonialist, nationalist and trans-nationalist discourses of heterosexuality. Through analysing stories of homosocial intimacy, heterosexual coupling and expressions of intimacy; the research examines the power and vulnerability of ‘doing gender’, illustrates how ‘practices of intimacy’ overlap with ‘family practices’ and demonstrates that expressions of intimacy are socially ordered and linguistically mediated. The research critiques the ‘individualization thesis’ of reflexive modernization by showing how practices of intimacy are socio-culturally embedded within family relations, both real and imagined. By appreciating multiple meanings of power and agency, it also critiques a colonial-modernist notion of linear progress by illustrating the shifting meaning and the mutual co-constitution of the categories of ‘past’ and ‘present’, ‘tradition’ and ‘modern’, ‘East’ and ‘West’.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

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