“Work Is Mandaa”: Breadwinning, Sexual Fitness, and Anti-Productivism among Cycle Rickshaw Men in North India

Abstract

Men who migrate to Delhi, India, from West Bengal to fulfill the male breadwinner expectation by operating cycle rickshaws claim that business is slow, which keeps their families’ expectations for remittances low and helps camouflage their slacking. Slacking is a crucial activity in light of the men’s belief that operating a cycle rickshaw dries out their bodies such that it reduces their sexual fitness. Their laziness supports the masculine goal of remaining sexually fit, and when they privilege this goal over the demand for productivity inherent in the breadwinner role, the standard analytic of productive versus reproductive labor becomes untenable. It is instead argued that the men’s behavior reveals a limited case of anti-productivism. Studies of anti-productivism are usually confined to Western workers, and those that take gender into account usually focus on workers’ gendered positions in society’s division of labor. This article shows how clashes between gender ideals at the somatic level can provoke an anti-productivist response. It also shows that tension between culturally particular ideas about the embodied consequences of labor performance and workers’ gendered body ideals can have profound effects on the workers’ orientation to their labor.¹