Drivers of masculinity: Marginality, manhood, and mobilities during a pandemic

Abstract

AbstractIn this paper, I consider how the COVID‐19 pandemic shaped the gendered self‐understandings of cabdrivers in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad. Extending research on the pandemic's effect on economically and socially marginalised groups such as app‐based cabdrivers and by taking into account masculinity as a framework of analysis, in this paper, I ask: how does a crisis like the pandemic impact self‐understandings of men cabdrivers? How does the intensification of precarity during a global crisis affect the way men understand themselves as gendered selves? Based on ethnographic fieldwork collected both before the pandemic and during, I trace two emergent patterns which I briefly explore in this paper. First, I show how and why the ‘breadwinner’ trope (and the attendant ideologies of protection and provision) was largely reinforced but also, sometimes, challenged during the pandemic. I then move the analytical gaze outside the space of the home to examine how care structures interrelatedness among cabdrivers as a community in the register of brotherhood. Ultimately, I argue that adopting a gendered lens on the pandemic offers an analytical flashpoint in identifying when and why ideologies of manhood, particularly among subaltern men, intersect with broader socio‐economic forces in shaping individual experiences and narratives.