Crisis of capitalist patriarchy: renegotiating masculinity and the heteronormative family in Kumbalangi Nights

Abstract

The Malayalam language film Kumbalangi Nights was released in 2019 and narrated the story of working-class people negotiating structures of capitalist patriarchy, encountered at moments of its crisis, which are also moments that indicate possibilities for social transformation. The trajectory of its narrative, the characters, and the tropes addressed in the film offer a new synthesis—both, of hegemonic masculinity and the kinship structure of the heteronormative family. Here, working-class lives are foregrounded in the contemporary crisis of patriarchy, accelerated by the crisis of social reproduction under neoliberal capitalism. Central to this crisis of masculinity and the bourgeois family form depicted in the film is the “crisis of care” that has been explained in recent scholarship on social reproduction. Nancy Fraser uses the expression to analyse the contradictory capitalist tendency to strain the conditions of social reproduction necessary for its own reproduction and stability. Through an analysis of the film, and the social realities of contemporary Kerala, this paper identifies the contours of this new synthesis. The film imagines a new mode of existence for subordinate masculinities, and challenges some of the ideologies of capitalist patriarchy, while continuing to valorise romantic love and its relationship to work.