The social life of transport infrastructures: Masculinities and everyday mobilities in Kolkata

Abstract

Through ethnographic contact with the working lives of male autorickshaw drivers in contemporary Kolkata, India, this article unravels the gendered politics of co-presence in shared movement systems in the city. In doing so, it makes a feminist intervention in the literature on urban infrastructures by revealing precisely how ideas of masculinity operate as an invisible structuring principle of everyday mobility. The discussion foregrounds conflict, cooperation and disappointment as the key experiential axes along which male transport workers inhabit infrastructural space in the city. It argues that urban infrastructures are experienced by working-class men as a reminder of their struggle to accomplish the norm of respectable breadwinner masculinity, even as they function as a terrain which allows other expressions of masculinity – such as risk-taking, mastery over space, camaraderie – to be enacted and affirmed. Using a micro-sociological approach to understanding interactions in the spaces of commuting, this article brings into view the interface between cultures of masculinity and the social life of transport infrastructures through which gendered spatial inequalities are lived in the city.

Auto-rickshaw and its impact on the economy in Egypt (Case study: East Shubra Al-Khaimah district in Cairo)

“…As the rate of depression increased, so did the rates of alcohol abuse. Depression rates increased with the number of years of driving [12].The Indian experience was to prevent and reduce the phenomenon of violence against women from harassment, kidnapping, and rape, is that India presented a pink rickshaw similar to the Iranian experiment and the experiment was a great success, as the pink rickshaw was distinguished by the use of additional systems such as GPS and other tracking systems [13]. But some things happened that shocked society, which as the exploitation of women's weaknesses and the rape of female drivers in many cases [14].…”

The crowd and citylife: Materiality, negotiation and inclusivity at Tokyo’s train stations

“…There is now a substantial body of scholarship that has rescued commuting from being understood solely as an isolating and enervating urban experience, to capture the wide array of social meanings that accrue to public transport in cities (Bissell, 2018; Chowdhury, 2021; Hansen, 2017; Shaw and Sidaway, 2011). Alongside this cluster of writings that has recuperated the complex social subjectivities entailed in shared movement through urban space, anthropologies of traffic in the non-West have interpreted road congestion as narratives of paralysis and relief in Jakarta (Lee, 2015), production of everyday moralities in the navigation of traffic in Istanbul (Nuhrat, 2020), the bottleneck as a metonym for shrinking opportunities of urban life in Dakar (Melly, 2017), the links between governance of traffic snarls and deepening urban divides in Beirut (Monroe, 2016) and the politics underpinning infrastructural projects to decongest roads in Bangalore (Gopakumar, 2015).…”

Urban studies in India across the millennial turn: Histories and futures

“…Phadke et al (2011) interrogate discourses around women’s safety in public spaces by spotlighting complex questions of class and caste and the multiple exclusions of ‘unfriendly bodies’ that such discourses purvey. Our third selection for this theme is a recent piece by Chowdhury (2021, this volume). that employs ethnographic interactions with auto-rickshaw drivers in Kolkata to characterise urban transport systems, here exemplified by a private ‘para-transit’ sector, as a heavily gendered public space structured by working-class masculinities.…”