Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses housewives' everyday work of making middle-class homes in Kolkata as part of wider discourses on the good life, social mobility and gendered work that enables an embrace of individualism.

Paper long abstract:

This paper dicusses novel notions of 'housewives' and 'home-making'and the kind of kin work required in order to produce suitably modern middle-class families in Kolkata. India. Based on over two decades of fieldwork the persistance of the joint family ideal and new ideologies of individualism are discussed in the context of everyday kin work middle-class women undertake in order to reproduce status and support collective strategies for upward mobility. The paper focuses on consumption as a global middle-class concern and home-making as an assemblage of practices that negotiate neoliberal ideals of choice, individual agency and entrepreneurial selves in the global city.