Conférence de Romit Chowdhury, Erasmus University College
In most cities of the Global South, men are everywhere. And yet we do not seem to know very much about precisely what men do in the city as men. How do men experience gender in city spaces? What are the interactional dynamics between different groups of men on city streets? Based on my book, this presentation follows autorickshaw- and taxi drivers in Kolkata, India, to locate certain ideals of masculinity - related to fatherhood, marriage, filial ties, heterosexuality, and family honour - as compelling social forces that mediate everyday mobilities in the city. While social geographers have highlighted the value of thinking of masculinity and the home as co-constitutive, my presentation takes this symbiosis outside the threshold of the house to show how it conditions the urban outdoors. At the intersection of familial ideologies and masculine subjectivities, everyday morality and cooperation become motors for the gendered reproduction of the city.
Romit Chowdhury is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Erasmus University College in Rotterdam. He primarily teaches courses on Urban Sociology, Gender Studies, and Ethnographic Methods. He has researched and written on masculinities in relation to public transport, sexual violence, pro-feminism, care work, and men's rights movement in India.