Making Men out of Boys
Revisiting Connell through Twenty-First-Century Indian Picturebooks
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Abstract
With Richa Jha and Gautam Benegal's picturebook The Unboy Boy (2013), India acquired the notion of alternative masculinity in children's literature for perhaps the first time, and initiated the depiction in picturebooks of male characters who love soft toys, cook, dance, and dress in a way considered feminine. This article turns the critical lens toward gender codes that form the basis for masculinity discourses. Primarily drawing on Connell's concept of hegemonic masculinity, it explores how contemporary Indian picturebooks in English are challenging the representation of traditional masculinity. Through the lens of content analysis, this qualitative research adopts a multimodal approach and scrutinizes three other picturebooks: Abba's Day (2017) by Sunaina Ali and Debasmita Dasgupta, Kali Wants to Dance (2018) by Aparna Karthikeyan and Somesh Kumar, and Guthli Has Wings (2019) by Kanak Shashi.
Contributor Notes
Sridipa Dandapat is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Patna. For her doctoral thesis, she is working in the field of contemporary Indian picturebooks in English. She has published recently with the New Review of Children's Literature and Librarianship. Email: shreedipaa@gmail.com
Priyanka Tripathi is an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Patna. She is also the Co-Executive Editor of the Journal of International Women's Studies (published by Bridgewater State University, USA). She has been awarded a Visiting Research Fellowship (2022–2023) by the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, for her project titled “Optimizing Caste Intersectionality: A Decolonial Reading of Gender-Based Violence in Select Subaltern Fiction in India.” Her forthcoming monograph with Bloomsbury is titled The Gendered War: Evaluating Feminist Ethnographic Narratives of the 1971 War of Bangladesh. She works in the areas of gender studies, South Asian fiction, GeoHumanities and graphic novels. Email: priyankatripathi@iitp.ac.in. ORCID: