Modernity/Modernities and Personal Life

This paper addresses some of the issues raised by thinking about social change, personal life and gender relations in both European and Asian contexts. In particular it is framed as a response to the Eurocentrism of much contemporary theorizing on modernity and the gaps or lacunae in attempts to counter this. While there are a number of relevant academic discussions on modernity and /or intimacy they are taking place in separate intellectual arenas so that connections between them are not always made. Here I pull out some strands of these arguments, focusing on the work of two scholars, Gurminder Bhambra and Chang Kyung-Sup, to raise questions about how we imagine and theorize modernity, gender and intimacy from our differing locations and how we might do so more productively and without taking western modernity as a benchmark against which the rest of the world is compared.