Still/moving images: Performing masculinity and making place in Delhi’s “hotspots”

This chapter considers the image-making practices that are constitutive of masculine becoming and placemaking in urban India. We focus on urban sites across Delhi that are commonly referred to as hotspots and the digital-visual practices young men utilize to construct ideas of self and place in them. Young men from villages across the region travel hundreds of kilometres to these locations to produce images of themselves in situ. These images are not singular portraits or selfies but rather a series of “frames” capturing poses that are then stitched together to produce videos that highlight different affective registers—attitude, fight, romance—to be circulated on Instagram Reels and, in a previous moment, the now banned social media site, TikTok. We scrutinize the aesthetic practices and placemaking strategies of these still/moving images, to argue for an attention to the ways masculinity is linked to particular spaces and repertoires of capitalist modernity.