Corporate offices are aspirational places to work in postcolonial countries like India and South Africa where poverty and deep inequality continue to shape everyday gendered lives. The mushrooming of these corporate offices are relatively new in the Global South but these workplaces now employ significant numbers of middle-class and upwardly mobile men, women and queer people, and they represent various ideas of national ‘progress’ and ‘development’.

Building on queer-feminist sociological perspectives, I critically explore the everyday gendered cultures of such corporate spaces and focus on the ways in which young men embody and create their corporate masculinities, and the many consequences these have for women and queer people in such corporate workspaces. I reveal how a politics of gender, class, race, caste and sexuality intersects and transforms global inequalities to create a culture of ‘corporate machismo’ in the Global South wherein gendered and class anxieties and aspirations relationally produce contemporary masculinities, femininities and sexualities.

Through ethnographic observational data, as well as qualitative interview data from long-term fieldwork in Johannesburg and New Delhi, I explore how neoliberalism, heteronormativity and transforming gendered relations are producing new and insidious forms of gendered inequalities, heterosexist marginalisations and sexual harassment within these allegedly ‘modern’ workplaces. I offer ‘corporate machismo’ as an important analytic that brings together these classed and gendered anxieties, aspirations and transformations taking place in the Global South and their many consequences.

Please join either in person or online. For in-person attendees, the talk will be preceded by a light lunch at 12.15pm.

Please email comms@sociology.ox.ac.uk with any questions or to receive the Microsoft Teams link.