narratives of three generations of urban middle-class - eTheses ...

“Other things may change such as our generation men probably being more
understanding in conjugal life than our fathers did but the ‘basic foundation of’
Bangali pourush (Bengali masculinity) ‘remains same’. It lies `in ‘middle-class
Bengali intellect that distinguishes us as superior from the ‘dumb Punjabis’
(people from Punjab in northern India) whose masculinity is all about ‘muscle
power’ and money!”
These narratives illustrate that the very concept of hegemony is a ‘slippery concept’
(Rojek, 1995) and the very construction of ‘real’ or ‘true’ masculinity is vulnerable to
contested codes of hegemonic masculinity. In this context, in as much as the concept
hegemony is rooted to critical structuralism of Gramsci (1971), it can also be interpreted
as close to a Foucauldian model of power; that is power as circulatory rather than
centralized where hegemony becomes less about domination and more about
negotiations (Hall, 1991). Negotiations of hegemonic masculinity are, however, shaped
and constrained by hegemonic codes of class, culture and community.
The male space becomes a battling ground for competitive homosocial bodies who
struggle to inhabit ‘true’ masculinity. On one hand they compete against one another
within the group to claim deeper intimacy and more closeness to the most influential
one within that group. On the other hand, they compete against one another in the
game of heterosexual intimacy to get closer to the ‘other’, the woman, outside the
group. These competitive homosocial bodies in this way negotiate between competing
discourses of intimacies, loyalties and commitments, competing masculine subjectivities
(Connell, 1995). The following section will provide an illustration of these competing
masculine subjectivities through the competing intimacy between men-men friendship
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