Abstract

This paper will look at the fetishism of firearms/guns and hyper-masculinity in recent pan-Indian blockbuster films like KGF 2, Vikram, Pushpa and RRR. Indian films have had a long history of the production and consumption of ‘men with guns’, specifically rooted in the genre of action and gangster films. Gender-coded for a predominantly male audience, these gun-toting genres have been studied for the relation between spectated violence and the potentiality of real-life violence. My paper seeks to probe these films for their construction of hegemonic masculinities within the figuration of the gun/the firearm. How does owning, holding, firing and being fired upon by a gun dictate, inform or proscribe masculinist protagonism/agentiality? The fetishism of guns becomes important in the context of a perceived crisis in masculinity and male roles and the pushback from a heteromasculine normativity that has become synonymous with the rise of Hindu nationalism as noted by PK Vijayan who argues for a consideration of a two-way symbiosis between hegemonic masculinity and Hindutva (hyper-)nationalism. Using the framework of critical masculinity studies, the paper analyses the construction and circulation of masculine identities, questioning the (hetero)normativity of the masculine, in discourses of the body, gender, sexuality, nationalism, power and representation.