Convener: Dr Ankita Pandey
Speaker: Shannon Philip (UEA)
In this talk I explore 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, I reveal the ways in which their youth masculinities are constructed and performed, and how these in turn produce hostility, fear and violence for young 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, I explore how there is an attempt to make the city a masculine space, with a hypersexualisation of young women in the same spaces. However this process is not even or uniform, with several masculine anxieties and vulnerabilities also emerging in young 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, youth, sexualities and violences on an everyday level.
Shannon Philip is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Sociology at the University of East Anglia and a Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg. He recently published his first monograph with Cambridge University Press entitled Becoming Young Men in a New India: Masculinities, Gender Relations and Violence in the Postcolony (2022). His current research comparatively explores youth, masculinities, sexualities, urban transformations, and gender relations in South Africa and India.
A City of Men? Youth Masculinities and Everyday Gendered Violences in Urban India | St Antony's College (ox.ac.uk)
