CITY OF MEN: MASCULINITIES AND EVERYDAY MOBILITIES IN KOLKATA

Abstract

This doctoral project is an ethnography-led study of men’s relationship to the city. It is guided by two questions: 1) How do men inhabit the city? 2) How do these modes of being produce the city as a gendered space? The dissertation responds to these queries by following two forms of public transportation – taxis and autorickshaws – in contemporary Kolkata. Using go-along interviews with vehicle operators, commuters, traffic police, and participant observation carried out over 15 months, it examines how masculinities frame everyday mobilities in urban India, especially in relation to the politics of co-presence in cities. The principal argument it makes is that the reproduction of spatial inequality in urban life is to be partially explained by the grammar of homosocial bonds between men in cities. It shows the manner in which cultural logics of masculinity in street-level interactions both produce a sense of urban danger and provide a basis for strangers to transact trust among themselves. By staging a dialogue between urban sociology and masculinity studies, this dissertation makes a case for shifting feminist interpretations of urban conditions away from an exclusive focus on violence to the provisional nature of social collaboration in city spaces.