Reinventing Honorable Masculinity

Abstract

This article argues that, contrary to received notions in Indian communities about women’s bodies and actions being the primary sites of male honor, women, too, hold men responsible for male honor and that men’s honor is also shaped by women’s discourses on men’s actions. Additionally, the forms of masculinities men seek to shape have to be considered contemporaneously with the forms of femininities that are emerging around them. Traditional male authority, which rested on the axes of men’s economic provisioning, control over wives, and violence against women, is eroding in newer social conditions in which women are more autonomous. In this fluid situation, men and women, respectively, use concepts of sexual control and understanding to describe and normalize an emerging form of masculinity that allows for men to claim honor when practicing nontraditional gendered actions.

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