Delving into the Whirlwind: Some Exploratory Notes on Everyday Life and Gender

Abstract

This paper argues that the social sciences in general and mainstream sociology in particular have long ignored everyday life as a theoretical problem. As a result, the social-scientific discourses on social life have become impoverished for it. The writer argues for the need to incorporate everyday life as one of the central component of analysis in sociology. However; the very qualities of everyday life, its pervasiveness, complexity and evanesce, have rendered this area opaque to conventional approaches of sociology. In addition, feminist research has alerted us to the fact that we experience everyday as gendered subjects that further complicates the matter: Here, the writer seeks to explore ways to render everyday life and the gender subjectivity of everyday life more amendable to investigation, particularly within the Malaysian context. The writer suggests that there exists a tradition that has specifically dealt with everyday life and gendered subjectivify of everyday life as a theoretical problem. It is the writer'sposition that one can never truly produce the last word on this subject but rather a tentative first word where one can only extend an invitation for further investigation into this area. By 'modernity' I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable. ... This transitory, fugitive element, whose metamorphoses are so rapid, must on no account be despised or dispensed with. By neglecting it, you cannot fail to tumble into the abyss of an abstract and indeterminate beauty...Charles Baudelaire.

ABSTRAK

Makalah ini menghujahkan bahawa sains kemasyarakatan secara umum, dun sosiologi secara khusus, telah tidak menghiraukan kehidupan seharian sebagai satu masalah teoritis. Akibatnya ia tidak mempunyai keupayaan untuk mengkaji fenomena yang penting ini. Di sini, penulis menghujahkan bahawa adalah perlu menjadikan kehidupan seharian sebagai satu komponen utama dalam bidang sosiologi Namun demikian, kualiti fenomena ini yang begifu kompleks tidak dapat dikaji oleh peralatan teoritis konvensional sosiologi. Di samping itu, penyelidik-penyelidik feminis yang telah mengingatkan kita bahawa kita mengalami kehidupan seharian sebagai subjek gender telah merumitkan lagi masalah ini. Oleh itu, kaedah-kaedah baru perlu dicari untuk menyiasat kehidupan seharian dan subjektiviti gender dalam mengalami kehidupan seharian dalam konteks masyarakat Malaysia. Penulis juga mencadangkan bahawa wujudnya satu tradisi dalam bidang sosiologi yang mempunyai keupayaan untuk mengkaji masalah teoritis ini.