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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Raksha Pande
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
In this lecture, I want to recast the sexual harassment of women as a men’s problem. One of the unintended effects of rightly privileging women’s voices in debates around sexual harassment is, that it ends up being imagined and domesticated as a women’s only issue – as evidenced in the routine victim blaming and shaming that underlines societal attitudes to sexual harassment. Men are the key protagonists in the story of sexual harassment as they are the perpetrators, so we need to discover what drives them to such behaviour. In concert with feminist scholarship that highlights the severe harm sexual harassment causes to women, I will draw upon a case study of verbal street sexual harassment of female students, known as ‘Eve-teasing’ in India, to explore this issue from the perspective of young men who commit these acts. I will show that their routine street harassment of women is linked to the lament of a melancholic masculinity - one which deploys sexual harassment as a means of exhibiting both, a powerless masculinity that justified Eve-teasing as an outlet for frustrations related to an uncertain economic and marital future in neoliberal India and a powerful masculinity manifested in coding such street level sexual harassment as ‘harmless fun’. The poor employment prospects that these young men face under neoliberalism, coupled with parental pressure for idealized heterosexual relationships produce and legitimise a sense of victimhood among them. This sense of victimhood, it will be argued, presents itself as a melancholic form of masculinity which involves the internalization of an ambivalent attachment to the women that they sexually harass. The lecture closes by highlighting the paradoxes of young urban masculinities and calls for more attention to be paid to men’s role in eradicating sexual harassment.
Author(s): Pande R
Publication type: Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstract)
Publication status: Published
Conference Name: RGS-IBG Annual International Conference
Year of Conference: 2022
Online publication date: 02/09/2022
Acceptance date: 30/08/2022
Date deposited: 18/06/2024
Publisher: Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)
URL: https://doi.org/10.57711/q7c0-pc65
ePrints DOI: 10.57711/q7c0-pc65
