ABSTRACT ON CHOPRA'S “FROM VIOLENCE TO SUPPORTIVE PRACTICE: FAMILY, GENDER AND MASCULINITIES”

ABSTRACT ON CHOPRA'S “FROM VIOLENCE TO SUPPORTIVE PRACTICE: FAMILY, GENDER AND MASCULINITIES”

• The research has tried to bring into focus the way that men's support can be outlined and reflected upon in the context of gender equality and domestic democracy
• While feminist writing and research has established the fact that women are not passive subjects doesn't mean agency and subjectivity are not fixed or absolute
• Neither is women's agency wholly recognised as an absolute goal of all feminists
• Some feminist theories have insisted that agency cannot only be understood as an exercise of volition in the abstract
  • Martha Nussbaum shows how agency to her is fixed on the horizon of human rights
  • Agency as an issue has to address the horizons within which it is articulated and realised as a political and substantive position
  • It is precisely this frame of women's agentic positions located within material conditions of existence – that has also produced the view that understanding women's lives is incomplete without looking at their everyday locations within families that must, of necessity, include relations with men.
    • The household is an arena of political division along fractured lines of deprivation
      • The experience of being male needs to be placed within these questions and masculinity as an identity has to be understood as a complex negotiation between gender, class and power
        • Outlining deprivation has produced another dynamic: the need to redress unequal distribution
          • E.G: Microcredit is a way of entering households to redress unequal distribution and at the same time promote gender intervention and gender sensitisation
            • Microcredit provides women with the means to secure livelihoods for themselves and their families
              • This stimulates men to be more suportive, involving them on reproductive healthcare
          • This outline reworks men's subject positions within the home by expanding and elaborating the role of men beyond the sexual, into the intimacies and the work of care
          • Violence is also framed and formed by cultures of power and deprivation
            • Adding to this, however, there's the role of social and cultural contexts shaping men's role in violence – what demands a closer investigation.
              • More critically, no analysis that seeks to understand men can confine itself to understanding men only in relation to violence
        • The deprivation approach, or entrance, however, focus only at men in the household, particularly in the category of husbands, and women only in the category of wifes in the reproductive phase of their lives
          • An analysis of men's everyday speech will allow us to tease out another dimension of gender relations that has remained muted, the support that men extend towards their families
            • The concept of supportive partners is a relational question because support can really only be understood in its relationalcontext
            • If support is relational its also context specific
              • E.g: In South Asia usually sons need to extend support to older parents, particularly widowed mothers, an aspect that the man-as-supportive partners programmes overlook
            • Those who seek to enter the household through intervention need to ask whether supportive practices already exist at the level of the everyday
            • Supportive practices need to be located in relational contexts between men and women, as well as between men and men
              • we need to address a dimension of relationships that patriarchal structure often hides or mutes and look more closely at the everyday practices of men.
                • There's a need to explore men's perceptions of supportive practices.
• A research on men's supportive practices and their subsequent perceptions was realized by UNFEM India and Delhi University
  • Methodological choices:
    1) Not intended to change the way people think
    • Rather it was to track the way people think differently with the horizons and limits of their cultural and social positions
    • It's an anthropological rather than intervention research
      • Anthopological researches are defined as projects to be discovered during the investigation
      • Intervention researches have a choice already made intended to be informed and inflicted on the subjects of investigation
        • In essence, intervention echos the same problems that lie in words like penetration. Feminist writings have alerted us to the power of penetration which blanks out agency and subjectivities of those who are positioned as penetrated
          • She says that: “This is not to claim that transformation is not a valid agenda. But I think it is important to recognize that people confront and engage with change and transformatioon continuously in their everyday lives. Daily lifes are altered through movements of migrants, through doing effeminate work, by expanding the role of fathers towards other adult men”
    2) The choice of the family as the single most definite institution within which to explore the lives and everyday relational practices of men
    3) The choice to demarcate 4 contexts of men to men supportive practices:
    a) Family businesses
    • It enabled a view of the father-son relationship within the domestic domains as well as the expansion of the family ideology beyond the immediate boundaries of the home
    • It highlighted the material substance of supportive practices and the affirmation of the ideology and ethos of the family when extended towards the economic institution of the shop or business
      • The three generational business enabled us to track the variety of supportive practices across time and through various male-male relationships
    • The involvement of uncles, nephews and other non-direct parents reveals the expansion of the authority of the father as both re-enforced and simultaneously dissolving as it expands beyond the single person of the geniter
      • She points that, in fact the dispersal of fathering over many men demonstrated the need to think about supportive partners in a more elaborate and far more nuanced way
    b) Lives and histories of male domestic workers
    • By choosing to look at unconventional work performed by men we were able to analyse both existing paradigms of divisions of labour and how these are contravened in everyday choices that very ordinary men make
      • Unconventional in the way it lies outside the accepted division of labour.
        • E.G: When men worked as domestic lobourers, work which they talked of as effeminate or not male within the division of labour, they said that they did domestic work despite this feminine orientation for the sake of the family
    • Domestic workers revealed to be a bridge between their own family and their 'expanded family'.
      • The subjective position of the man is splited between two contradictory contexts – as a fully entitled male member in one family context, and as a partial member in the other
      • It reveals that the family needs to be viewed as an arena within which not just women, but particular categories of men occupy positions of deprivation as subalterns
    c) Male beauty parlour workers
    • A situation that was unusual and normally associated with women
    • The deliberate choice of a non-family field enabled an exploration of the ideology of the family as an institution of care and learning and the way that care is articulated in non-family contexts
    • They provided an insight into the value of friendship as social and cultural capital
      • Supportive practices here are elaboreted by men, for the sake of other men and the families of these other men. Thus men's supportive practices may not only orient themselves towards their own families, but to other families as well
    • It yelded important insights and allowed us to explore both the subversions of masculinities and the re-assertions of the male self through the performance of work
      • Beauty work entails a physical exchange between the bodies of men who care for the appearance of the male self
        • New formations of masculinity and the male self are produced through cultures of body care
    d) Boys club in Kolcata
    • It provided an opportunity to explore formations of masculinity in the public, or non-domestic, domain
      • E.G: The process of passing on maleness from adult men to adolescent boys
        • The passing on vital knowledge between elder club members and new or potential members imitated, in some part, the idea of passing down inherited knowledge that was more overt in the family businesses.
    • The choice for analysing this category followed the more prolific investigations of Western gangs and pubs
      • It's important to notice that those spaces are not hidden or marginalised
    • Our attention was drwn to the hidden social value of hanging out
      • The clubs are collective bodies that initiate and introduce boys into worlds outside the family – non-formal sites of socialization of boys into the world of power and support
  • Conclusions:
    • The question of hierarchies between men is one critical issue. At the same time, this hierarchy is counterpoised with the spirit of egalitarianism that also seems to be crucial in forming relations between men
      • What place does friendship have in the lives of men?
    • The two field sites 'outside' the family provided a constrast for the research within the family. In addition, these two sites simultaneously enabled the possibility of understanding how work and non-work were key issues in the formations of masculine identities and in the lives of men
    • The research highlighted the way that the concept of effeminacy needs to be expanded to be able to address sexual identity through work and labour.
      • Labouring bodies confront the issue of male identity and effeminacy in extremely complex ways that complicate the relationship between sexual identity and effeminate bodies
    • One of the critical arenas of support between men was through friendship
      a) Enabled entry into working lives and the reproduction of necessary skills.
      b) Friendship networks were the context for men to re-articulate autonomy, a sense of male self 'lost through the performance of women's work'
    • One of the issues raised by this research, most importantly in the field of family business, but also in the other field sites, is the ways in which practices that constitute fathering might also be placed within the context of supportive relations and support practices
      • Fathering is a role centred on more than one single man because it is an ideology more than a biological fact.
        • Most clearly on the family businesses, where continuation is not necessarily in a direct lineal or agnatic line, but along affinal or collateral lines
          • Just as there might be a proliferation of businesses that make up the family business, there is the equal possibility of a proliferation of fathers who play a critical role in the lives of younger men, not necessarily their sons
    • The social networks of support are those that are drwn upon during times of need and times when a family affirms and celebrates itself
      • It reveals certain institutionalised support networks
        • E.G: Deepchand, a Dalit who was supported by upper caste friends on settling his own business and currently has overcome hierarchies on stablishing a level of intimate friendship with them.
    • Support has a material and non-material aspect
    • Support practices are diverse in terms of the cultural contexts within which they are articulated
    • Supportive practices are distinguished between those that already exist and those that come into existance or are created when people find themselves in situations of deprivation and a perceived loss of autonomy
      • Supported among men is not taken for granted. It is cultivated with care and time (a thing of value) is freely spent in the cultivation of support networks
    • Conflict between the father and son standing in a direct lineal relation may be diverted by overemphasising the support from other fathers (maternal uncles, for example). The future reproduction of the family is assured by the strategic displacement of support and the consequent deflection of conflict
      • Apart from uncles in business families, hierarchically placed upper caste men do assist low-caste men to get work and support their families, indirectly entering as supportive partners of lower caste men
    • Drawing from these instances it may be possible to argue that husbands are not more supportive than parents in certain cases
    • In talking about themselves and their lives, men did not have a very articulate vocabulary to speak about themselves, except when they were narrating the support they received or had given
    • Supportive practices are an idiom which explicate agentic subjectivities and provide a language of engagement with the lives and cultural locations of men.