Men and Masculinities

During British colonial rule some matrilineal Thiyya women in North Kerala, India, had liaisons with British men. While the response of the caste (here, a Backward caste) to these liaisons shifted over time, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century many women who had liaisons and their families were excommunicated. A “white connection” became a stain and kinship with the white man was denied or shrouded. This article looks at the ways in which both the liaisons and the denial of the white man as father or relative were located within practices of matrilineal kinship. Furthermore, this article seeks to understand how these liaisons are remembered today and how the presence of the white man as a relative is layered over by processes of forgetting and remembering.

This article addresses the issue of gendering the veil and argues that veiling must expand beyond the primary focus on clothing and must be viewed as a system that frames bodily styles, speech forms, and the language of gestures. Veiling has feminine and masculine forms but evokes different things for men and women and is experienced in dualgendered ways. The ethnography focuses on the lives of male domestic workers who are liminal and incomplete members of contemporary urban households to address the issue of the performance of maleness and male veiling practices by the partial members of social units such as households to argue that we must understand veiling as a way of undoing gender. The intersections of class, sexuality, and gender within interior spaces of domesticity reconfigure relations of gender. Work as a site within which masculinity, identity, and power are constituted enables us to view male veiling beyond the shame and honor discourse to address the bodies and dispositions of men who labor.

Many competing sociological debates intersect in the world of beauty parlors. There is an increasing proliferation of male or “gents” parlors—a space where a new formation of the male self is being produced and established through new cultures of care and work. Because “work” has always been understood as central to the lives of men, a major basis of their identity, it is often seen as being identified with masculinity. “Beauty” and “caring,” on the other hand, are often viewed as something intrinsically feminine. This article weeds out such notions by presenting life histories of men in “beauty work” and argues that just as different work situations produce different models of masculinities, the same work situation also may prove an arena of a variety of masculinities. The article also explores the possibilities and potentials of understanding gender relations in South Asia that will prove helpful in making comparisons with other masculinity studies.

This article draws on fieldwork conducted in a central prison in Kolkata, India, which I experienced as an overwhelmingly male space. This ethnographic material demonstrates the nature of the male space and the practices through which male identities were made and defined within this space. I argue that the experience of the prison and incarceration is one in which the dominant norms of maleness are challenged. Through the processes of divestiture of rights implicit in imprisonment, the image of a man as an independent agent of his destiny, as protector of his family, as a worker and bread earner, or even as a strong and influential man in the neighborhood are displaced. I explore the ways male prisoners deal with this “less than a man” image within the prison. The gendered nature of the prison as an organization emerges when examining contexts in which male identities are enacted and made.

Drawing from fieldwork in a shantytown called Dharavi in Bombay, this article considers the effects of communal violence between Hindus and Muslims in December, 1993, and January, 1993. The effects of violence are charted through narrative accounts of residents of Dharavi. The article argues that collective violence brings together the nation, the neighborhood, and bodies of participants. The intersection of these three shows the procedures by which Muslim men are denuded of their masculinity.

During the eighteenth century, new ideals, theories, and practices of masculinity and sexuality developed in the countries of Northwestern Europe. This article discusses these ideals mainly using the example of the life and the works of the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814). While old ideals of Christian or noble masculinity demanded chastity or restraint and new Enlightened ones vigor and control, Sade's perspective that stressed sexual humiliation was in stark conflict with both the old and new ideas on male honor, masturbation, and same-sexual acts. The article discusses his life and some of his works before reviewing his philosophy and his views on masculinity and sexuality. It ends with the importance of Sade's work for his own times and for contemporary discussions.

The following essay examines the congruence of American labor and social history scholarship with actualworking-classexperiences. Particularly, it compares an author's immersion in a masculine working-class environment with recent ideas in historical research about the interplay of gender and work. The author argues that the challenge of working on a fast-paced loading dock with male coworkers was made less onerous by the free expression of working-class male behaviors. Sexual kidding, physical posturing, and profanity, sometimes accentuated with crude but appreciable wit, made the demanding labor more bearable, a theme borne out by recent scholarship on masculinity and the workplace.