Towards Mature Manhood: The Representation of Neoliberal Boyhood in Bollywood Cinema
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In India, social, economic and cultural barriers shape boyhood as a precursor to masculine authority in a traditional patriarchal sense. This paper examines how the radicalness of rebellious boyhood challenges the dominant discourses of traditional masculinity and constructs a reconfigured masculine ideal in a world defined by the pressures of modern values. Through a close textual analysis of the 2010 Hindi film Udaan, this article explores the tensions between societal norms and individual aspirations in the construction of Indian boyhood. The film portrays boyhood as a rebellious category that attempts to subvert traditional Indian patriarchal notions of manhood and family structure, replacing them with a new masculine ideal aligned with modern concepts of freedom, self-reliance, and cooperative engagement. Interpreted within the context of neoliberalism in India, the paper illustrates how the boy protagonist detaches himself from conventional patriarchal constraints and rebuilds his identity, gaining agency in a liberal society that values freedom and choice. The exclusion or devaluation of female characters in the film further suggests that while neoliberal boyhood reconfigures traditional patriarchal masculinity, it simultaneously perpetuates male freedom to perform heteronormative identities within a transformed patriarchal framework.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".