PIHC-Masculinity.pdf

The juxtaposition of reviews of three exceptionally articulate books on masculinity traversing the ancient, medieval and modern periods of India's historical past with an insight on the very changes and continuities of gender relations and studies.

South Asian Popular Culture , 2020

Introduction to special issue on Masculinities, co-edited with Praseeda Gopinath

Masculinity is a social construct and sometimes, an identity which has its associations with certain traits and characteristics. Some of such traits are the presence of confidence, leadership qualities, power, dominance and firmness etc. which exist at a psychological level. Others however are physical traits, such as a strong muscular physique and a fine athletic ability. Interestingly, this idea of putting all these traits under a singularumbrellaofmasculinityisvery abstract and there is no firm definition of masculinity. Through this project, we have tried to narrativise this abstract idea, which in common perception indicates ‘the ideal traits of men’. Just like in the case of many other abstract ideas, there is the presence of no singular idea of masculinity and the concept might differ for different civilizations, cultures, classes andpeople. Therefore, there exists no single masculinity and we thus refer to the concept as masculinities. Research papers and articles which academically present the concept were analysed to get an adequate overview of the idea. Alongside, different forms of media, likedocumentarieswereeq paid heed to, so that the popular perception of the idea of masculinitycouldalsobeunderstood. We limited our attempts to understand the idea of masculinity to the Delhi University students itself. To do the same, we found it is important to have directconversationswiththestudentsto achieve a realistic understanding of the concept.

NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies, 2014

this article I seek to re-examine the concepts ‘patriarchy’ and ‘homosociality’, individually and in relation to each other. I argue that the critical tendency to dismiss the utility of ‘patriarchy’ did not engage much with the relations of patriarchal formations to men and masculinities. The latter are shaped and determined by bonds of ‘homosociality’, which, I argue, is not necessarily to be understood as being oppositional to homosexuality or as tantamount to an implicit homoeroticism. This homosociality forms the substrate of other kinds of collective social phenomena like nationalism, caste and religious communalism, chauvinisms of various kinds, etc. It is substantially shaped by the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that determine such collective phenomena, serving as the ‘mediating anodyne’ to the conflicts and contradictions that are often, even inevitably, thrown up in such patriarchal formations. Arguing that a central aspect of this is the relation between the erotic and the politic, I then discuss the relation of masculinity to power, within these dynamics.

The Social Organization of Masculinity, by CONNELL, Raewyn, 2005

"The task of this chapter is to set out a framework based on contemporary analyses of gender relations. This framework will provide a way of distinguishing types of masculinity, and of understanding the dynamics of change. Defining Masculinity All societies have cultural accounts of gender, but not all have the concept 'masculinity'. In its modern usage the term assumes that one's behaviour results from the type of person one is. That is to say, an unmasculine person would behave differently: being peaceable rather than violent, conciliatory rather than dominating, hardly able to kick a football, uninterested in sexual conquest, and so forth. This conception presupposes a belief in individual difference and personal agency. In that sense it is built on the conception of individuality that developed in early-modern Europe with the growth of colonial empires and capitalist economic relations. But the concept is also inherently relational. 'Masculinity' does not exist except in contrast with 'femininity'. A culture which does not treat women and men as bearers of polarized character types, at least in principle, does not have a concept of masculinity in the sense of modern European/ American culture. Historical research suggests that this was true of European culture itself before the eighteenth century. Women were certainly regarded as different from men, but different in the sense of being incomplete or inferior examples of the same character (for instance, having less of the faculty of reason). Women and men were not seen as bearers of qualitatively different characters; this conception accompanied the bourgeois ideology of 'separate spheres' in the nineteenth century. In both respects our concept of masculinity seems to be a fairly recent historical product, a few hundred years old at most. In speaking of masculinity at all, then, we are 'doing gender' in a culturally specific way. This should be borne in mind with any claim to have discovered transhistorical truths about manhood and the masculine. Definitions of masculinity have mostly taken our cultural standpoint for granted, but have followed different strategies to characterize the type of person who is masculine. Four main strategies have been followed; they are easily distinguished in terms of their logic, though often combined in practice."

Anthropology, 2024

Psychology of women quarterly, 1985

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Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2021

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Few theories have had such an impact on (critical) studies on men and masculinities as Raewyn Connell’s framework of hegemonic masculinity. It has been used in order to explore and analyze men’s patriarchal and homosocial relations in society at large as well as in local settings, such as families, schools and workplaces (Hearn et al., 2012). At the same time the concept has been increasingly criticized (e.g. Nordberg, 2000; Demetriou, 2001; Howson, 2006; Beasley, 2008) and alternative theo- ries have been presented (e.g. Hearn, 2004). My aim here is to discuss the advantages and disadvantages with Connell’s concept, and contrast it with parts of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s framework, which has been growing in popularity among feminist researchers.