Unpacking Agency and Coercion
Boys’ Views on Gender, Romance, and Violence in Central India
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Abstract
This article offers insights into how ‘boyhoods’ are shaped by class locations and experiences of poverty and problem-solving in the central Indian city of Indore. In their classed and gendered efforts to find routes to socioeconomic survival and mobility, schoolboys construct competing understandings of the relative (im)morality of violence, romance, and vigilantism. Drawing upon interviews with boys aged 13-17years, the paper unpacks how these views are shaped by caste patriarchy, urban poverty and economic informality, and local politics centering on right-wing nationalism in Indore. In the process, this article responds to calls by childhood scholars to rethink ‘agency’ in a relational and contextual way and offers accounts of marginalized masculinities that hold out possibilities for a ‘social democratic transformation’ as imagined by Raewyn Connell.
Contributor Notes
Reva Yunus is a Lecturer in Education and Social Justice at the Department of Education, University of York. She is a sociologist and an ethnographer interested in the impact of economic change and marginalization, and increasingly precarious work on families and young people's education, work, and strategies of mobility in urban India and England. Her long-term theoretical interests include rethinking agency in relation to coercive forces; theorizing shifts in the nature of the state and its relationship with global capital; and conceptualizing social class inequalities in the context of precarious work. Orcid: