Vijayan, PK, PhD student

By Katherine Harrison on 23 Apr | 0 comments

GEXcel project:

This project seeks among other things, to theorise an understanding of ‘patriarchy’ as ‘masculine hegemony’. Drawing on and continuing with my ongoing work, the proposed project, as a specific part of the larger project, will focus on working out the utility (or not) of the understanding of patriarchy as masculine hegemony with regard to the question of embodiment. To do so it will first argue for the process of embodiment itself as a gendered one, and then examine the ways in which specific hegemonic orders get embodied (in the double sense of the bodies of its subjects as well as the material incarnations of the hegemonic ‘body’ itself: institutions, organisations, laws, policies, etc), and the gendering of that process. Of necessity here it will examine and engage the related ideas of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ and ‘the hegemony of men’. Since any given social context is traversed by multiple hegemonic orders, this project will choose to undertake the analysis of embodiment on the register of the hegemony of the nation and the nation-state, examining embodiment and its gendering in both senses identified above. The site of analysis in both instances will be the masculine hegemony of Hindu nationalism and the putative Hindu nation. The underlying intent of the project is to use the opportunity to test the thesis of patriarchy as masculine hegemony – both, in terms of its usefulness for understanding the processes of embodiment, and in terms of the broader research themes being examined by GEXcel.

Biographical notes:

PK Vijayan is a senior lecturer with the department of English, Hindu College, Delhi University. He is also registered as a doctoral fellow with the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague. His doctoral research is on the relations between gender, specifically men and masculinity, and Hindu nationalism in India. His other research interests include gender, sexuality and literature.