This article examines representations of masculine identity in select Parsi fiction within the spatial context of urban postcolonial Bombay, foregrounding the impact of decolonization on the identity politics of this ethnic minority. The Parsis, a Persian migrant community, prospered during the British Raj as a westernized comprador mercantile group in colonial Bombay. The study positions Bombay as simultaneously a lived environment and a symbolic construct, charting the emergence and consolidation of Parsi masculinist-supremacist discourse in the colonial metropolis and its eventual deflation in the postcolonial city. It analyses literary strategies and recurring tropes that depict the reversal of this discourse and explores the performative and experiential dimensions of ‘emasculated’ Parsi identity after decolonization. These dynamics are read across urban spaces – streets, neighbourhoods, homes and workplaces – through the lens of urban theoretical frameworks.
This article examines contemporary chef narratives as sites for negotiating masculinity, mobility and metropolitan space. Focusing on Gordon Ramsay’s documentary television persona, Jon Favreau’s film Chef (2014), and Christopher Storer’s series The Bear (2022–present), it argues that popular food media repeatedly mobilizes what I term the harmful-masculinity redemption arc. Within this narrative trope, male chefs experience crises precipitated by toxic masculine practices – such as emotional repression, aggression and an inability to accept vulnerability – which are subsequently resolved through spatial movement, professional reorientation and affective labour. Drawing on gender studies, food studies and urban cultural theory, the article situates professional kitchens as metropolitan microcosms in which hegemonic, subordinate and alternative masculinities are produced, contested and reconfigured. While earlier formats such as chef autobiographies and documentary television often frame redemption retrospectively and heroically, Chef and The Bear foreground spatial confinement, mobility and relational labour as central to masculine transformation. In particular, The Bear complicates the redemptive logic by embedding masculinity within a multicultural, multi-generational ensemble and by resisting the complete narrative closure characteristic of cinematic redemption arcs. Ultimately, the article argues that contemporary chef narratives both critique and reproduce masculine privilege. While they gesture towards more caring, reflexive and relational masculinities, they frequently recentre male subjectivity and marginalize women’s labour. As such, cooking narratives offer a revealing lens through which to examine the ambivalences of masculinity in neo-liberal, urban culture.
This article examines Chinese male netizens’ backlash against Ding Zhen, a young Tibetan man who suddenly gained popularity due to his exotic, handsome appearance in 2020. Through the lens of urban masculinity, this article analyses 41 posts made by Chinese male netizens on Zhihu , a popular question–answer social media platform in China. Discourses among these posts reveal that the legitimacy of the urban hegemonic masculinity is affirmed not simply by a man’s wealth and fame but by one’s entrepreneurial spirit and the honoured socialist subject position of ‘working people’ endowed by post-socialist state’s discourses. In the end, this article argues that these Chinese men exhibit a cruel, optimistic attachment to urban masculinity as active subjects rather than passive recipients of hegemonic masculinity. Their affective investments reaffirm the structural social inequalities of gender, class and ethnicity that simultaneously reproduce their struggle in contemporary urban China.
This article examines how urban walking shapes the production of masculinity in spaces defined by disaster in the science-fiction horror film Cloverfield . Initially, the film’s affluent young male New Yorkers traverse public and private urban spaces unimpeded, their privilege symbolized by their stewardship of a handheld camera. The film’s depiction of a giant monster’s subsequent attack on New York allegorizes the 9/11 terror attacks, displacing cultural anxieties about America’s proclaimed identity as a masculine nation state. The attack creates a monstrous new urban fabric in which White male dominion is overturned. As escape routes are cut off, the now inert and incapable male protagonist initiates a peripatetic romantic quest to rescue a former lover, seeking to recuperate unheroic masculinity through agency and movement. Imagining urban space as palimpsestic, his redemptive quest seeks to rewrite urban space previously associated with his failures as a lover and inadequacy as a hero.
The intersection of gay male sex work and urban spaces is a sparsely researched area of masculinity and urban studies. The underground spaces of gay male sex work in 1950s and 1960s New York City is best captured through the texts of John Rechy’s City of Night (1963) and Jim Carroll’s The Basketball Diaries (1978). Both authors explore the relationships between gay male sex work, urban dwelling and masculinity. The subversive nature of gay male sex work allowed for the development of gay hedonistic spaces outside of the heteronormative structures of New York City. These locations in turn inspired gay and queer culture, media and texts influencing the direction of gay and queer culture to this day.
