Masculinity, Consumerism and the Post-National Indian City: Streets, Neighbourhoods, Home

The book explores how masculinity is defined in urban spaces in India, considering how men navigate between different contexts such as the home, street, family, and public spaces. It emphasizes the need to engage with specific historical and social contexts to avoid universalizing models of urbanism.

Format: Hardback
Length: 210 pages
Publication date: 05 January 2023
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Imagining the city as a series of interconnected spaces, the book explores how several such connections – between the home and the street, family and public spaces, religious and non-religious contexts, for example – relate to the topic of masculinity. How do men – elite, subaltern, consumers, heads of the family, members of Hindu fundamentalist organizations, readers of pulp fiction and footpath pornography, those who admire the strong political leader – move between these spaces, define them, and are defined by them? Urbanization in India is a vibrant site of an extraordinary cultural, social, and economic churn, a context of both the consolidation of masculine identities as well as anxieties regarding their place in the city. The book suggests that sustained and in-depth engagements with specific historical and social contexts avoid tendencies to imagine cities as nodes of comparison that frequently generates universal models of urbanism.

Imagining the city as a series of interconnected spaces, the book explores how several such connections – between the home and the street, family and public spaces, religious and non-religious contexts, for example – relate to the topic of masculinity. How do men – elite, subaltern, consumers, heads of the family, members of Hindu fundamentalist organizations, readers of pulp fiction and footpath pornography, those who admire the strong political leader – move between these spaces, define them, and are defined by them? Urbanization in India is a vibrant site of an extraordinary cultural, social, and economic churn, a context of both the consolidation of masculine identities as well as anxieties regarding their place in the city. The book suggests that sustained and in-depth engagements with specific historical and social contexts avoid tendencies to imagine cities as nodes of comparison that frequently generates universal models of urbanism.

Weight: 566g
Dimension: 237 x 162 x 20 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781009179867