Youth Futures and a Masculine Development Ethos in the Regional Story of Uttarakhand

Research on the Uttarakhand region, which became a new state in 2000, has focused largely on agrarian livelihoods, religious rituals, development demands, ecological politics and the role of women in regional social movements. This essay discusses another dimension of the regional imaginary—that of a masculine development ethos. Based on ethnographic research and print media sources, this essay focuses on stories, politics, mobilities and imaginations of young men in the years immediately after the achievement of statehood. Despite increased outmigration of youth in search of employment, many young men expressed the dream of maintaining livelihoods in the familiar towns and rural spaces of Uttarakhand, describing their home region as a source of power and agency. In rallies and in print media, young (mostly upper caste) men expressed their disillusionment with the government and the promises of statehood, arguing that their aspirations for development and employment were left unfulfilled. Gendered stories of the region, told in Hindi in rallies and print media, contained references to local places, people and historical events and were produced through local connections and know-how, fostering a regional youth politics. The article argues that Uttarakhand as a region is shaped by the politics of local actors as well as embodied forms of aspiration, affiliation and mobility.

"Thank Goodness We Have a He-Man’s School”: Constructing Masculinity at the Vancouver Technical School in the 1920s

ABSTRACTThis article investigates how the male students of the Vancouver Technical School (VTS) learned to become citizens of Canada and the British Empire, focusing particularly on the ways in which the boys re-imagined modern men’s relationships with women and femininity. The 1920s climate of nation-building, women’s increased presence in the paid workforce, and advances in industrial capitalism meant that the cornerstone of the VTS’s male citizenship project was the construction of males as worker-citizens. In particular, the technical school became a place to reassert men’s monopoly on the “breadwinner” image. This meant that boys were socialized to perceive women and femininity’s encroachments on male spaces as threats to their own masculine development—and thus as dangerous to the social order as a whole. While this often manifested itself as subtle wariness of deviant masculinity, it could also mean overt chauvinism and misogyny.RÉSUMÉCet article explore comment les élèves masculins de la Vancouver Technical School (VTS) ont appris à devenir des citoyens du Canada et de l’Empire britannique en s’intéressant particulièrement aux moyens qui permettaient aux jeunes hommes de réinventer leurs relations avec les femmes et la féminité. Durant les années 1920, dans l’esprit de l’édification d’une identité nationale, la présence accrue des femmes sur le marché du travail et les avancées du capitalisme industriel, tout cela signifiait que la pierre angulaire du projet de formation à la masculinité de la VTS s’orienta vers celle de citoyens travailleurs. L’école technique, en particulier, préconisait l’image de l’homme seul pourvoyeur du foyer. Par conséquent, les garçons étaient éduqués à percevoir les femmes et leurs empiètements dans l’univers masculin comme des menaces à leur propre masculinité en développement et par conséquent comme un danger à l’ordre social en général. Cette attitude a souvent été perçue comme une manifestation subtile de masculinité déviante, mais elle pourrait aussi être interprétée comme du chauvinisme et de la misogynie mal déguisés.

The Perils of Leukippos: Initiatory Transvestism and Male Gender Ideology in the Ekdusia at Phaistos

This article aims to interpret an annual initiation ritual celebrated in Hellenistic Phaistos (Crete), at a festival known as the Ekdusia, in which young men had to put on women's clothes and swear an oath of citizenship before they could graduate from the civic youth corps (the agela) and enter the society of adult male citizens. It begins by reconstructing the ritual and situating it within its historical and social context. It then reviews the two major theories which have been used to explain transvestism in Greek initiation-structuralist and psychological-and attempts to expose their shortcomings. The author remedies the difficulty with the structuralist approach-its focus on abstract symbols divorced from their social context-by understanding the ritual change of clothes (feminine clothes exchanged for masculine clothes) at the Ekdusia in terms of the radical gender segregation in Cretan society and the gradual transition Cretan boys made from feminine spaces to masculine spaces in both city and home. The author remedies the main problem with the psychological approach-its focus on the psychological dynamic between mother and son rather than the motivations of the rite's adult male sponsors-by looking at how adult men, particularly in modern non-Greek societies which hold initiation rites, understand male adolescent development and create rituals in accordance therewith. This comparative model shows how men in gender-segregated societies think of boys as feminine themselves and believe that their masculine development is at risk if they are not rescued from the dangerous feminine realm, and forced to undergo a combination of defeminization and masculinization rituals. Although there is no direct evidence to suggest that Greek men thought of boys' transition rites in this way, the myths told about three different figures named Leukippos, related directly (etiologically) and indirectly to the Ekdusia, reveal this pattern of thought in its full form.