Drivers of Masculinity: Marginality, Manhood, and Mobilities during a Pandemic

The social, economic, psychological, and epidemiological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in India has been well-documented in academic writing. A common finding in this writing is that the risk of viral contagion and the economic disaster that followed intersected with the reality of economic marginality, precarity, and systemic vulnerability of those who were always already at the cusp of financial risk in the country. In India, one group profoundly affected by these “compounding risks” exacerbated by the pandemic were drivers of app-based cab aggregators like Uber and Ola. While there has been notable documentation of how app-based cabdrivers coped with the conditions of precarity made worse by the pandemic, we know little about how the pandemic has transformed and/or affirmed ideas and practices of masculinities during this time. Extending research on the pandemic’s effect on economically and socially marginalized groups such as app-based cabdrivers and by taking into account masculinity as a framework of analysis, 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? In this exploratory paper, I show how the pandemic reproduced certain norms of masculinity (such as the “provider” and “protector” norm), while complicating practices and performances of care, outside the home. Ultimately, I argue that interrogating “men as gendered, and not only empirical, subjects” (Hopkins & Murray, 2019, p. 303) opens up the possibility of exploring the links between crisis, gender, and social change – particularly in the Global South.