Masculinities and Everyday Gendered Violences in Urban India

Shannon Philip explores the gendering of everyday urban spaces and the social production of gendered violence. Through ethnographic data collected by ‘hanging out’ with young Indian men in New Delhi, he discusses the ways masculinities are constructed and performed, and how these in turn produce hostility, fear, and violence for women and girls accessing the same urban spaces.

Through weaving together material from myriad urban sites like gyms, bars, trains, street corners, night clubs, gay cruising parks as well as shopping malls, Philip explores how there is an attempt to make the city a masculine space, with a hypersexualization of women in the same spaces. However, this process is not even or uniform, with several masculine anxieties and vulnerabilities also emerging in men’s claims on the city from queer and non-masculine bodies. In this way, the urban space becomes an interesting palimpsest to explore the politics of gender, class, sexualities, and violences on an everyday level. 

Please join us for this virtual conversation. Register here.

About the Speaker

Dr Shannon Philip is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of East Anglia, UK and a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, UK, and the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. His first monograph has recently been published with Cambridge University Press (2022) titled Becoming Young Men in a New India: Masculinities, Gender Relations and Violence in the Postcolony. Shannon’s new research project comparatively explores youth, sexualities, urban transformations, and gender in South Africa and India.

Presented by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. Co-sponsored by the South Asia Program, and the Gender and Security Sector Lab.