Abstract

Gender is the category created through copious socio-cultural processes and practices which ensures the embodiment of an individual’s identity. This achieved identity is enacted through the socially accepted gendered binary roles: “masculinity” associated with men or ways of performing maleness and “femininity” associated with women or ways of performing femaleness. Masculinity, therefore, signifies the gendered male being embedded in the congealed web of social institutions, beliefs, values, cultural behavioral patterns, language, learned interaction and other constructions. These social constructions of masculinity profoundly formulates and reformulates men’s roles, actions, societal expectations and related stereotypes; both in public as well as private domain guided by the principle of heteronormativity. The stereotyped masculine roles in family and marriage require investigation to make conspicuous the underlying hegemonic gendered norms of the society. Articulated from this heteronormative hegemonic construction, the paper is keen to understand married men’s participation in the unpaid work within the domestic domain. It also seeks to investigate the care giving role of married men within heteronormative families. A descriptive quantitative method have been applied wherein a survey have been conducted in South Kolkata in which fifty Bengali married men have been interviewed for data analysis. Interview schedule was applied to draw data from men residing in nuclear families.