By the Men, For the Men: Online user-generated content and gender attitudes among young men from underprivileged backgrounds in Kolkata (India)

Abstract

In recent years, alongside OTT platforms, there has been a meteoric growth of online user-generated content (UGC) that has dominated the audiovisual social media culture worldwide, including memes, edited videos and formatted texts among others. In India, this development has accompanied the socio-political (dis)continuities of recent times, and the steep rise and affordability of smartphone-Internet. While tying these threads together, two aspects generally get overlooked: i) the regional socio-political diversities within India and ii) particularities of specific demographic groups influencing UGC consumption patterns. This paper is based on 9 months of (digital) ethnographic fieldwork in 2023-24 with 20 young men aged 18-22 from underprivileged backgrounds in Kolkata. Through qualitative analysis, it seeks to understand the ways in which the political and economic climate of West Bengal shapes the gender stereotypes prevailing in online UGC, and its reception among young men with low economic and cultural capital. The findings show e.g. the misogynistic posts often use as justification the women-centric policies of the TMC govt. It also highlights the interplay between such online content reflecting socio-digital trends in India like post-feminism (Chakraborty Paunksnis 2023), ‘manosphere’ (Majumdar et al. 2020) etc. and the overall gender attitudes of these men, thus extending the knowledge of relationship between media, gender and socio-political contexts in South Asia.