The city of homosocial breadwinners

Romit Chowdhury's nuanced, engaging and accessible book, City of Men: Masculinities and Everyday Morality on Public Transport, invites us into the world of cisgendered, heterosexual male public transport operators in Kolkata, India. It is a world where working-class men, in ‘a thoroughly masculinized industry’, affirm their masculinity as breadwinners and where private morality, imbued with patriarchal norms, governs their interactions in the public. It is also a world in which the sociality of public transportation induces cooperation between strangers. Indeed, Chowdhury's rich ethnographic study (participation observation, interviews with autorickshaw and taxi drivers, traffic police officers and commuters) reveals that we must move beyond our focus on hostile and conflictual interactions in the city.

The protagonists of City of Men are two groups of transport workers – ‘local’ autorickshaw drivers and migrant taxi drivers (from Bihar). Chowdhury offers a glimpse into the gendered lives of these transport workers, revealing how their masculinity is intricately tied to their work, their sense of belonging in the city, and their feelings of (in)security. Importantly, Chowdhury illuminates the varied enactments of masculinity among local and migrant men. For example, local autorickshaw drivers – who operate within a familiar restricted geography and follow a sociable routine, typically along routes in their own neighborhoods – develop quasi-familial ties with other drivers and passengers. This embeddedness gives rise to what Chowdhury terms ‘neighborhood masculinity’. To this end, their spatial familiarity enables them to ‘inhabit the city with a measure of confidence’ and engage in risk taking (e.g., driving fast), mastery over space, male camaraderie, and protectionism toward women – particurlarly in shielding them from harassment by co-passengers. Notably, this spatial rootedness also helps mitigate men's feelings of fearfulness in the city, as they can avoid neighborhoods perceived to be more violent. Moreover, they have forged a culture of trust and a community of support with drivers who are part of their spatial routine. In comparison, migrant taxi drivers do not exhibit ‘neighborhood masculinity’ – not only because they are not local, but also because they ‘roam the entirety of the city's landscape as part of their job’. Despite their lack of spatial confidence, taxi drivers position themselves as being more masculine than local men, claiming greater experience in handling urban danger due to their exposure ‘to the inherent unknowability of the city’. Chowdhury also notes that migrant taxi drivers are sensitive to their ‘involuntary introduction to domestic labor in the city’, their experience of violence against outsiders, and their acute sense of urban dislocation, all of which contribute to their positioning as subordinate in relation to local expressions of masculinity in Kolkata. However, the migrant taxi drivers assert their masculinity by invoking a cultural script that constructs a prestige hierarchy – one in which local working-class men in the city are stigmatized for their inability to keep their wives at home.

Chowdhury adeptly uses these two groups of transport operators to challenge scholars to diversify understandings of working-class masculinities and to underscore the imperative to move beyond narratives that portray transport drivers as perpetrators of sexual violence against women. Chowdhury critiques class-based stereotypes of working-class masculinity ‘as unruly and the principal threat to women's safety’, as well as feminist writings that frame cisgender heterosexual men as potential aggressors in public space. Using the lens of everyday morality, Chowdhury argues that transport workers engage moral vocabularies and construct themselves as moral subjects. The empirical work in City of Men illustrates how autorickshaw drivers find sexual harassment morally reprehensible – grounded in their belief in consent and in the patriarchal, heteronormative notion that a woman's body belongs to her husband or father. Accordingly, autorickshaw drivers ‘intervene in encounters involving harassment as well as visually police men who are seen as likely to inflict such harm’. Although they oppose their unfair portrayal as sex offenders, some drivers nevertheless strategically make an overt gesture to position their body far away from female passengers.

Similarly, the taxi drivers in City of Men challenge the narrative that the othered migrant male body poses a threat to middle-class women. Although, their sexuality is constructed as lascivious, rapacious and impulsive, Chowdhury explains that they refrain from sexual (mis)conduct in the city, practice self-control and position themselves as respectable men and responsible workers. Notably, they use a moral framework to consider their work as public service, thereby making sexual misconduct ethically unthinkable. The taxi is considered sacred – not only for its function as a public vehicle in the city but also because it sustains the economic life of the driver and his family. As such, taxi drivers have little interest in jeopardizing their masculine role as providers. Chowdhury also highlights that taxi drivers cultivate an attitude of sexual indifference – sometimes rooted in patriarchal exaltation of monogamy, and at other times driven by fears that rumors of unethical behavior might get back to their village. Chowdhury argues that this ethic of indifference ‘conditionally abates the threat of gendered based violence on city streets and creates spaces of safety and sexual pleasure for women passengers in the interiors of public vehicles’. While I do not think this argument is farfetched, I think it could have been strengthened had Chowdhury provided supporting evidence – such as perspectives shared by women passengers he interviewed. As it stands, the claim seems more like an extrapolation.

In addition to critiquing the framing of cisgendered heterosexual men as potential sexual aggressors, Chowdhury also uses the lens of everyday morality to challenge the antithetical framing of the relationship between urban policing and marginalized groups. Specifically, Chowdhury offers the concept of ‘homosocial trust’ to illustrate the nature of the cooperative relationship between traffic police officers and public transport drivers. Homosocial trust refers to the transaction of situational forms of trust and mutual reliance which draw on heteronormative valuations of masculinity and its associations with urban spaces. Chowdhury argues that homosocial trust – which is predicated on a particular moral vision of street and family life – produces the city as a male space. To exemplify, Chowdhury details how transport drivers step up and provide infrastructural support in situations when emergency services are unreliable and help traffic officers. In turn, transport workers expect recognition of their role as breadwinners and thus reciprocity from traffic officers when leniency is needed in instances of traffic violation. Chowdhury also highlights how the all-male Safe Drive Save Life sensitization workshop program for transport workers promotes safe driving practices and traffic norms by naturalizing male heterosexual lust in public space. Additionally, the program reminds transport workers that failing to fulfill their breadwinner role is a major consequence of traffic violations. To this end, while on the streets, some officers invoke moral tropes of good fathering as policing tactics, shaming drivers for certain behaviors on the road.

While I found Chowdhury's examples of homosocial trust both fascinating and compelling, I had questions about his assertion that the ‘policing of urban traffic and the functioning of the everyday state in the city are mediated by the heteronormative construction of paid work as the primary site of adult masculine identity’. The assertion seems to be a major leap given that we are not provided information on how the police interact with other traffic violators beyond the two groups of transport workers. Moreover, what happens in contexts where homosocial trust may not be paramount, perhaps in interactions with female drivers?

Chowdhury also asserts that homosocial trust which ‘legitimizes the city as a site of hegemonic masculine performances simultaneously heighten women's sense of being out of place in the outdoors and embolden ideological structures that hinder women's access to public spaces’. It is unclear to me whether this assertion is based on fieldwork data as Chowdhury does not provide evidence to support this claim of women's sense of feeling out of place. Further, I read the examples cited in the chapter on homosocial trust as upholding normative notions of masculinity and gendered roles and a little less about patriarchal power and the exclusion of women from urban space.

Overall, this book's strength is its attentiveness to class and its relationship to working-class men's vulnerabilities and sense of belonging in the city. I also appreciate how Chowdhury painstakingly emphasizes the salience of cooperation in the city and draws attention to how men's public lives are intricately connected to their private lives as providers.

One set of questions that remain in my mind upon finishing City of Men are: given the purported newfound economic self-sufficiency of young urban middle-class women through employment, what does this mean for the conceptions of gender roles in Kolkata that ties respectable femininity to domesticity and views men's inability to keep women at home as a failure of masculinity? What would it mean to unread Kolkata as a patriarchal city of men – one where women's presence in public is not an anomaly, and is instead normalized, valued and recognized as central to the (re)production of urban space? Relatedly and curiously, I also wonder – drawing from my observations in Ibadan, Nigeria – what happens when (or if) the public transport industry is no longer a ‘thoroughly masculinized industry’ in Kolkata? What then becomes of the city of homosocial breadwinners?