City of Men: Masculinities and Everyday Morality on Public Transport

The Lecture

In Indian cities, 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 his book, City of Men, Romit Chowdhury's presentation gives an ethnographic account of autorickshaw and taxi operators in Kolkata. It locates 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. If indeed masculinity and the home are co-constitutive, Chowdhury's book 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.

The Speaker / Author

Romit Chowdhury is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Erasmus University College, Rotterdam. He is an urban ethnographer interested in masculinities, public transport, and everyday life in cities.

Registration (required)

All are welcome. Please register using the web form on this page so we know how many people to expect; seating is limited. There will be a lunch for participants who register by noon on Friday, May 3.