Episode 13: Masculinities in cities

Why is it that big jerky is able to reassert itself in cities in spite of all the changes activism and social policy changes that have happened? Welcome to Struggles in the City, the podcast to understand power relations in cities. I'm Melodyne Sommier, I'm working as an Academy of Research Fellow at the University of Uwaskola in Finland. Our guest today is Romit Choudhury, who works as Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Erasmus University College in Rotterdam. And today we're going to talk about masculinities in cities based on his book "City of Men, Masculinities and Everyday Morality on Public Transport" that was published in 2023. Your book, Romit, presents the findings from a rich ethnography you conducted in the city of Kolkata in East India for about 18 months. And today we're going to talk about what it means to research masculinities in urban settings, we're going to talk about your research design as well, and of course some of your findings. Maybe first we can actually zoom in on the city that you have conducted the research in, so the city of Kolkata. Can you tell us a little bit more about it, what size is it and maybe why you actually decided to do ethnographic work there? Thank you very much Paladin for the invitation, it's a pleasure to be speaking to you here. So Kolkata is a city that I grew up in, I lived there fairly continuously until I was about 28. It's a city that has, it's essentially around 730 square meters and it has a population of a little less than 15 million, kind of city that we're talking about. It's the capital of the Eastern Indian state of West Bengal. So in your book you talk about the ethnographic work that you've conducted there and specifically you're looking at the construction of masculinities and urban space. Maybe we can talk a little bit about the kind of people then that you're focusing on, you're focusing on a specific social professional group of men, they are public transport workers and they are two groups in particular. One group is people who are working as auto drivers and the other ones are taxi operators. Can you explain why you decided to focus on public transport workers in particular? In particular I thought there were a couple of reasons. One is that we know from the literature that within patriarchal societies a man and masculinity are often associated with mobility and the freedom to roam, whereas women and femininity are associated with stasis, with dwelling of course with the indoors. So that is the kind of sort of construction that I wanted to explore ethnographically, that's one. Interestingly there was also an empirical provocation since at least December 2012. There's been a lot of public discussion on agenda-based violence that women face, especially on moving vehicles in public transport frequently. So I wanted to explore how masculinity is related to exactly that, the question of gender-based violence in spaces of mobility in the city. So spaces of mobility and of course also men who are associated with even the idea of or the profession of mobility, that's a really interesting design I think. And I think what was really interesting, at least for me when I was reading the book is well you have this group and they are all working-class men, taxi drivers and auto drivers, but you explain really well how they have different trajectories and different positionalities that of course affect how they are mobile in the city. Can you maybe explain a little bit about the differences between these groups and how in a way it helped you tapped into intersectionality because even though it's masculinity it's not homogeneous, right? Certainly, thank you so much for that question. Indeed I definitely wanted to explore men's and masculinity's relationship to the city, but I was also very inspired by the comparative gesture within urban studies that's talking about comparing different kinds of cities, perhaps similar cities, perhaps very different cities, but I was especially interested in how different groups of men experience different cities within the same city. So different cities within a singular city, that's the kind of dynamic that I was interested to explore. And here I focused as you correctly summarized two groups of transport workers who are all indeed men and certainly all of them are working-class, but they have a very crucial demographic differences. So the auto rickshaw or the auto drivers are largely so-called local men who lived in the city over multiple generations and taxi drivers are frequently new migrants into the city. And this is a very crucial demographic difference of course, but there's also a difference in the scale of operation. So auto rickshaws typically apply on a designated route back and forth on a circular path that connects only a few neighborhoods in the city and there are many such routes in the city that auto rickshaw is plier, whereas the taxi has the freedom to roam the entirety of the urban landscape. Now this difference in the geography also has implications for how men experience and perform as they which I tried to show in the book. Yes, thank you. I think it's really interesting this idea of different cities in the city. I think it resonates quite well with everyone's experiences as well. We all experience our own city in a way. When you're zooming in on what's happening in Kolkata through the experiences of those two groups of men, you also explain that like other cities in South Asia, Kolkata has undergone a lot of transformation towards a more globalized consumer culture. And you talk about how that has played out at the really local level with deepened urban inequalities, for instance, and that has consequences for the group of men that you've worked with. Can you maybe talk a little bit about that as well? Certainly. I mean, again, very much, this is perhaps true of many South Asian cities, if not all, that post-liberalization, post-1990s, city and city planning has really seen a shift from an earlier focus on slum development, improving the condition of slums to focusing on middle class spaces of both dwelling and consumption. So now increasingly municipalities, city municipalities are focusing on building high-rises, gated communities for middle class residents of cities, trying to expand opportunities of entertainment in the shape of malls and other leisure venues. And this, of course, has a serious implications for less privileged urban residents. And perhaps, and certainly there is a gender dimension to this, that increasingly middle class residents of South Asian cities want the pleasures and the comfort of the working classes services, but they don't want to see them performing the sleep, because working class bodies, in a general sense, their disposition is seen as incongruent with the image of a globalized city that the middle class aspires towards. So they want access to their services, but they don't really want to see. Now, I show in the book how precisely because often women's work is performed, first, women's work is not even recognized as work. And secondly, a lot of women's labor is performed indoors, whereas working class men's labor is often ends up being visible in the city. So the working class man then is subjected to a great deal of policing, both literally and also figuratively, from both law enforcement officers, but also from middle class residents in the city. Yeah, I think that's interesting, this policing from the other residents in a way, right? But also this formal policing. When we hear you talk about those socioprofessional groups of men that you've researched, the public transport workers, the idea of social class and intersection with gender, with masculinities that clearly comes across. Are there other social dimensions that you've noticed to play out? I think religion, for instance, was one of them. You also talked about migration before. Can you tell us a bit more about how they really played out? What did you see? Certainly, I think certainly the role of migration is very important here. And because I sort of compared these two groups of transport laborers in the city, you see how precisely because auto-rickshaw drivers have a certain kind of claim on the city, on the basis of them having lived in these neighborhoods where they work, that affords them a certain kind of security. They're also moving in the same path from morning to evening. So they also get to know the very specific neighborhoods in a way that taxi drivers are unable. Firstly, they are new generation migrants. Secondly, they're roaming the entirety of the city. So they're also vulnerable to abuse precisely on the basis of their migrant identity. But it also, I mean, my photography also revealed how migrant these migrant men who are taxi drivers, they also make use of certain kinds of cultural discourses to stake a claim on the city. So there is a wider discourse in India that Bengali men, men from the city of Calcutta, from Bengal, Mojendri, they are largely effeminate, they're feminine, they don't have the kind of hardiness of masculinity in other parts of the country, especially the northern parts of the country. So these taxi drivers, migrant taxi drivers often use this discourse to say that the city needs us because taxi driving is a hard job. And local men are not men enough to perform this job. So again, you see certain kinds of cultural discourses which migrant men are then using to make a claim on the city. Yeah, I think those were really good example of the kind of discourses that are woven into really the urban life and the life of those participants in a way. So I mean, we also get a really clear sense of the connection then between masculinity and urban space. Can you maybe talk a bit about, because in your book you explained that this is rather under research and that you hope that in a way work like yours will help to better understand how that plays out together. Can you tell us a bit about the state of the literature in a way, the kind of research gap you see, what you're hoping for in the future and how you maybe see your work fit in it? That's a lot of questions, but around that area basically. I mean, I essentially began working on this project as a PhD dissertation. So I began in 2014 and when I was doing the literature review then and certainly I developed it, I updated the literature as the manuscript became a book. I noticed that there are a lot of subtextual assumptions about especially so-called heterosexual men's relationship to the city. We know that masculinity is the unproblematized law against which everything else is judged in cities that men have a certain kind of naturalized right to the city that women and gender non-conforming people don't have. And once is certainly true and a very important insight, I was interested to sort of, to kind of fill out this feminist insight with ethnographic data. Like, what does masculinity really mean to these men who have a kind of naturalized right to the city? How do they experience masculinity? So that was really the sort of one of the conceptual provocations of the book. In terms of the larger implications, what I tried to do towards the end of the book, having reported this ethnography is to invite scholars, both masculinity scholars and urban study scholars, to enter into a more sustained conceptual dialogue. I found that there is a great need for both groups of scholars to engage much more with their own intellectual repertoires. And to give you a quick example, I tried to show how the whole body of literature around social infrastructure, which has been so important to urban studies, could actually profit from engaging with the concept of homosociality, which has also been very, very important in masculinity studies. And I also then try and make a case how scholarship on homosociality can also learn intellectually in terms of certain insights, certain analytical gestures from the whole literature on social infrastructure. So essentially to give you the answer in a nutshell, I'm trying to ask you for greater intellectual exchange, conceptual exchange between urban studies and masculinity. Yes, and I mean, when I hear you talk about your hope, I guess, that those disciplines would talk with each other and contribute to one another. I feel that that's something that's very common with all the guests I've had on the podcast and colleagues whom I know who are also working with cities, that there's a lot of scattered maybe literature and there is kind of this hope of building bridges, in a way, in academic work, which is, well, I think always really great when we can do it. But a general hope, I guess, most of us have. You've mentioned some really important concepts now already. One of them is the idea of everyday morality. It's a running theme. In the book, you have a full chapter on it. It even finds its way into the title of the book. So can you maybe explain to us what you mean by everyday morality and maybe starting with that and then also giving us some concrete examples of how it played out in your study? I'm sure. I would say that a problem that has pretty extensively exercised feminist urban scholars is that why is it that in spite of so many social changes, why is it that patriarchy is able to renew itself in cities? Why is it that patriarchy is able to reassert itself in cities in spite of all the changes, for example, social policy changes that have happened in the post-globalization period? And I think the concept of morality, I found it useful to respond to that question. And to give you a very concrete example, in the ethnography that I did with traffic cookies, I often saw law enforcement officers restraining errant drivers, errant transport workers, using the morality of very heteronormative moral ideas about the good man. So for instance, a traffic police might restrain, say, an auto-rickshaw driver who's been very aggressive towards a passenger by saying that this is no way for a good father to behave. If your daughter were to see you behaving like this on the street, she would be ashamed of you. So this kind of moral logic is often pertaining to the heteronormative family you did, often ends up structuring everyday mobility in the city. And I guess the point, if I could put it polemically, I mean, I'm sure you would remember that during the public discussions around me, too, a lot of men said that, sure, but not all men. And I think what I tried to show in the book is that even good men, so-called good men, might actually be bad for a feminist. Because often good men rely on the moral logics of heterosexuality, of heteronormativity, in order to perform their masculinity. And while that might not result in overt acts of violence, it still denies women and gender non-conforming people a full right to the city. So that's how I use the concept of morality. Thank you. Really interesting to hear the construction of masculinity by different actors in the city and by different discourses, and reproducing those discourses as well. And now when you were mentioning those examples, something came to mind also in the book. And you started, for instance, by saying that one of the reasons you wanted to look at this is also because we know of violence in Indian cities against women and what mobility there can be in terms of challenges, for instance. But in your book, and not done playing that, of course, but in your book, you also mentioned good examples of how those drivers, for instance, had good experiences with some of the people that they carry around. Do you want to talk a little bit about that, those negative and positive examples? Certainly. I think I wanted to highlight this sort of good examples, not to in any way exonerate men from the patriarchal dividend that all men enjoy, regardless of so-called good intentions. But I saw that in the feminist urban studies literature, certainly in India, in South Asia, but also more internationally, a lot of the focus has very rightfully been on violence that women and gender non-conforming people are denied access to the city through violence, through denial of access to urban resource. I was interested to see if there is another grammar, another idiom for reproducing the city as a patriarchal space. And given my experience of living in the city of Kolkata, I saw that often there were very mundane cooperative gestures that were playing out between men, but also between men and women. That I thought, you know, shown the light on a new kind of grammar for the reproduction of the patriarchal city. So you might have transport workers helping women. You might have transport workers helping each other. And these are often nice things to see. And in a way, certainly, they are good to the extent that they take the threat of violence, of immediate violence away from women's experiences of the city. But I would say that they still are patriarchal in the sense that they still make masculinity and men ideologically tied to the city. And they tie conversely women and femininity to dwelling. And as I show in the book, and this perhaps also returns to the question of morality, which you raised earlier, that the city continues to be seen as the legitimate site for men's paid labor. And men's paid labor is seen as a moral thing. It's seen as a morally good thing that men who earn and support their family, who provide for their wives, you know, children, their parents, are good men. And this ultimately is an extremely patriarchal and heterosexist constant. So that's, yeah, that's how I would, I guess, I would respond. Thank you for sharing these insights, yeah, that that is really interesting. Also how you try to, I mean, how your book talks to existing literature as well, right? And once again, highlighting gaps and then, yeah, suggesting other grammars as well. But also how that reinforces patterns in in some way, I think that's really, really interesting. I would like to maybe talk a bit about the method that you use. So you did ethnographic work for 18 months. And even though we've mostly talked about those two group of men that you are researching, you talked with a wide range of people. You did many kinds of ethnographic, we didn't tell many kinds of things there in the field. Do you want to, yeah, give us some insight into that? What did you do there? How was it to do ethnographic work, especially as a, as a local or former local of the city you were researching? So sharing those kind of insights with us. I guess when I entered the field, I sort of had assumed that I would be able to do interviews in a very traditional setting in the sense that I would perhaps be able to schedule appointments with these transport workers and perhaps meet them, but, you know, in a stable space, I'd talk to them for an hour or a half, but I quickly realized that these men work excruciatingly long hours. Often they work, you know, seven days a week, eight, 10, 12 hours a day. And they only take a break, you know, when there's some kind of emergency, you know, and they're really tired or they have to run a very important errand. So the only way that I could actually do the interviews is to travel along with these transport workers as a passenger and talk to them, you know, while they were driving. So on the one hand, this was physically a bit difficult. I mean, as you can imagine, see, interviewing a traffic sergeant in the middle of the streets in Indian cities where traffic is swirling, there's bad weather, there's all kinds of crazy noise. So yeah, it was challenging in those senses. But often, see, for instance, if I was interviewing an auto-rickshaw driver while sitting next to him, we were, of course, driving through the path that he has been on several times in a day over several years. So very naturally, some spaces in the city would serve as pegs for memory. We might be passing through a particular street and he would be reminded of an important thing, a kind of an interesting encounter that he had had there. So he would then say that, do you remember, I mean, I just remembered something that had happened here as we were passing through that spot and he would tell me a story. So in many ways, this kind of go-along interview also served as a rich resource of ethnographic stories of anecdotes. And certainly my own positionality as a middle-class gender male researcher certainly helped me to gain access to these spaces in the sense that given the routines and the cultural norms of the city, especially around these mobility spaces, it was absolutely seem as unproblematic for me to have these casual chats on the go or even say hang around with these transport workers in these neighborhood kiosks which are there in the city. So yeah, so I would say that's how the ethnography played out. I really like how you started with talking about this researcher's plan, right, and this ideal of and how that was shattered by the lived reality of those participants. I think that's something that resonates with many of us. But in your case, it did work out nicely. And I think in a way it's also, I mean, highlights because you said they were working really long hours, right, about this maybe gap that there is sometimes between how we think people might have time to talk about their experiences and how we actually need to follow them. Are there any lessons in particular you're taking from that experience that maybe you want to share with potential listeners who are thinking of doing ethnographic work? I mean, I would say that and this is like I teach a course on urban sociology here in Erasmus University College. And I think, you know, what I tell students is, you know, the hallmark of a good, you know, ethnography is being surprised. I mean, if you're surprised by something that's happening in the field that perhaps is an indicator that the research is going in a good direction. But I would say that as an urban researcher, I think being an urban researcher means kind of straddling at least two different kinds of personalities. If we are familiar with the city that we are researching, we are accustomed to behaving in the city in a particular way. And oftentimes being an urban researcher requires you to, in a way, jolt yourself out of that position. And to give you a concrete example, I mean, again, you know, as a daily passenger on these auto rickshaws in Calcutta, if I saw any kind of, you know, conflict break out, say between passengers or between the passenger and the driver, my tendency as an urban resident would be to sort of, you know, just turn a blind eye, I would maybe put on your plugs and kind of zone out or, you know, just ignore it as much as possible. And that is a tendency that you also have when you're doing ethnography. But of course, the urban ethnographer, the urban researcher needs to do the exact opposite. I mean, they need to get much, much more involved in these conflicts that are playing out. So that maybe these conflicts are telling us something important that is a sociologically important. So in a way, being an urban ethnographer requires you to jolt yourself out of the good urban citizen. Yeah. So we get back to that every demorality, in a way, even in research. Yes. You've mentioned several important concepts during our conversation. Is there any work in particular that has influenced you or inspired you, any, yeah, any title, any author you would want to share with us? I would say that the urban anthropologist and masculinity studies scholar, Indian masculinity studies scholar, Sanjay Srivastava, I mean, he has been certainly very, very influential in my thinking on both cities and masculinities. And perhaps, you know, this is because, you know, when I was studying for my bachelor's and master's degrees in India between 2004 and 2010, there wasn't, I mean, masculinity studies hadn't really entered the curriculum. I mean, there was, you know, a group of researchers who were working on masculinity. So I can't say that masculinity is what we studied, but it hadn't really entered the curriculum in a very prominent way. So I mean, engaging with his work, you know, as a graduate student, certainly helped me to clarify my own voice. So I would certainly say, you know, his books mean entangled urbanism. That's a book I think that he published in 2014, which is on Delhi. And a lot of articles that he has published on the linkages between the heterosexual masculinity and urban spaces has been very inspiring, but also the work of feminist urban geographers like Linda McDowell, you know, who are showing the connection between identity and space, that the question, who you are, can't really be answered if you also ask the question where you are. So that kind of linkage between identity and space that has come from feminist urban geographers has also been very, very inspiring to me. Wonderful. Thank you for these recommendations. We're getting to the end of today's episode, and I always finish with a more personal and playful question. So now is your turn, Romit, would you tell us what your favorite city is and what makes it your favorite city? But you're asking me this question, you know, at a phase when I'm feeling very nostalgic about my time in Singapore. So I spent four years there as I studied for my PhD there. So and I'm currently feeling very, very nostalgic because I haven't returned to Singapore since I graduated in 2018. So and, you know, urban scholars love to, and we write for the urban scholars love to quote Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities. And there is this line in that book where he says that, I mean, cities are memorable, not just because of the seven or 70 wonders that they might have. But in the answer that it gives to a question of yours. And I think, you know, when I move to Singapore, a question that I had for myself is, you know, do I have the capacity to build a life that is meaningful away from the life that is familiar to. So I would say that, you know, Singapore is in a sense special to me because it helped me to find an answer to that question in the affirmative that yes, indeed, I would be able to build a meaningful life away from the life that I was familiar with. Well, that is a beautiful and that would make sense that it would be your favorite place then definitely. Thank you so much, Romit, for joining me today. And thank you all for listening. [Music]