Symbols of Heterosexual Marriage and Negotiations of Heteronormativity: Narratives of Three Generations of Urban Middle-Class Bengali Women Living in Kolkata
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Type
Article
Date
2019-03
Journal Title
Social Trends
Journal Editor
Roy, Sanjay K.
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of North Bengal
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Das, N. (2019). Symbols of Heterosexual Marriage and Negotiations of Heteronormativity: Narratives of Three Generations of Urban Middle-Class Bengali Women Living in Kolkata. Social Trends, 6, 46–59. https://ir.nbu.ac.in/handle/123456789/3557
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Abstract
Through interview-generated narratives of women of three generations
of urban middle-class Bengalis living in Kolkata and other auto-ethnographic
narrative texts; this paper seeks to examine gender, generation and class specific
meanings of intimate heterosexual identities and relations. It focuses on the
ways in which subjects negotiate, that is, confirm and interrogate, uphold and
challenge, submit and rebel institutionalized heterosexuality or heteronormativity through the practice of bearing, not bearing and negotiating with
symbols of marriage. Subjects’ ongoing negotiations that tell stories of multiple
and contradictory subjectivities, are analyzed to show how personal narratives
of intimacy vary across a range of conflicting and competing colonialist,
nationalist and trans-nationalist discourses of heterosexuality and cultural
mandates of femininity. The paper:
• demonstrates that expressions of heterosexual love are socially ordered,
culturally learnt and linguistically mediated
• examines the power and vulnerability of doing gender and doing class
through doing intimacy
• brings out the cultural politics of gendering that mediated the colonial
history of Bengal
• shows how this politics of gendering still reigns strong within a contemporary,
urban middleclass Bengali society. This is particularly evident in its women’s
narratives of respectable middle-class femininity, who have now come to
embody a “modern” Bengal, without, however, failing to bear the cultural
“authenticity” of her nation, community, and family
• critiques the “individualization thesis” of reflexive modernization by
demonstrating that practices of heterosexual love overlap with gender and
class-cultural practices and are strongly embedded within family relations,
both real and imagined, and • interrogates a colonial-modernist concept of unilinear progress by
illustrating, through generational narratives of heterosexual intimacy, the
shifting meanings and mutual co-constitution of the putative dichotomous
categories of “tradition” and “modern”, “East” and “West”.
Description
Citation
Accession No
Call No
Book Title
Edition
Volume
ISBN No
Volume Number
6
Issue Number
ISSN No
2348-6538
eISSN No
Pages
Pages
46 - 59