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.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | Boyhood Studies |
| Volume | 17 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Early online date | 30 Oct 2024 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2024 |