Bad Women Of Bombay Films

This book presents a feminist mapping of the articulation and suppression of female desire in Hindi films, which comprise one of modern India’s most popular cultural narratives. It explores the lineament of evil and the corresponding closure of chastisement or domesticity that appear as necessary conditions for the representation of subversive female desire. The term ‘bad’ is used heuristically, and not as a moral or essential category, to examine some of the iconic disruptive women of Hindi cinema and to uncover the nexus between patriarchy and other hierarchies, such as class, caste and religion in these representations. The twenty-one essays examine the politics of female desire/s from the 1930s to the present day - both through in-depth analyses of single films and by tracing the typologies in multiple films. The essays are divided into five sections indicating the various gendered desires and rebellions that patriarchal society seeks to police, silence and domesticate.

This book is a comprehensive anthology comprising essays on women film directors, producers and screenwriters from Bollywood, or the popular Hindi film industry. It derives from the major theories of modernity, postmodern feminism, semiotics, cultural production, and gender performativity in globalized times. The collection transcends the traditional approaches of looking at films made by women filmmakers as ‘feminist’ cinema, and focuses on an extraordinary group of women filmmakers like Ashwini Iyer Tiwari, Bhavani Iyer, Farah Khan, Mira Nair Vijaya Mehta, and Zoya Akthar. The volume will be of interest to academics and theorists of gender and Hindi cinema, as well as anybody interested in contemporary Hindi films in their various manifestations.

This book, with its focus on the dancing body, is the first of its kind within the larger context of dance in India. The Dancing Body is a body that exists, survives, inhabits and performs in multiple space and time, by moving, laboring, migrating and straddling across geographic, cultural and emotional borders, writing different cultural meanings at different moments of time. In India, discourses around the body in dance have long been trapped within hagiographic histories in and around dancers and their dance. During the last few decades, however, significant scholarly inroads were made into the domain of dance by shaking up the stereotypes, assertions and labels, shaped and moulded by patriarchy, class, caste and power. This book brings together emerging discourses around dance and the body that have become central in the Indian nation-state. Contemporary discourses around identity politics, moral policing, politics of exclusion, and neo-liberal dispossessions vis a vis sexual labour, means of survival, pleasure and agency of dancers have helped frame the focus around labour, leisure and livelihood concerning the everyday existence of the body in dance. This volume will be of great value to students, researchers and scholars in dance, gender studies, cultural studies, and performance studies, with a particular interest in Asian and South Asian Studies. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of South Asian History and Culture. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.

India produces an impressive number of films each year in a variety of languages. Here, Monika Mehta breaks new ground by analyzing Hindi films and exploring the censorship of gender and heterosexuality in Bombay cinema. She studies how film censorship on various levels makes the female body and female sexuality pivotal in constructing national identity, not just through the films themselves but also through the heated debates that occur in newspapers and other periodicals. The standard claim is that the state dictates censorship and various prohibitions, but Mehta explores how relationships among the state, the film industry, and the public illuminate censorship's role in identity formation, while also examining how desire, profits, and corruption are generated through the act of censoring. Committed to extending a feminist critique of mass culture in the global south, Mehta situates the story of censorship in a broad social context and traces the intriguing ways in which the heated debates on sexuality in Bombay cinema actually produce the very forms of sexuality they claim to regulate. She imagines afresh the theoretical field of censorship by combining textual analysis, archival research, and qualitative fieldwork. Her analysis reveals how central concepts of film studies, such as stardom, spectacle, genre, and sound, are employed and (re)configured within the ambit of state censorship, thereby expanding the scope of their application and impact.

This book reconsiders media studies from different philosophical and theoretical perspectives from around the world. It brings together diverse views and visions from thinkers such as Sr Aubrobindo, Jurgen Habermas, Paul Ricoeur, Pope Francis, and Satyajit Ray, among others. The authors focus on the issues of ethics, aesthetics, meditation, and communication in relation to media studies and explore the links between media and mindfulness. The volume includes case studies from India, United States, Switzerland, and Denmark and presents empirical works on new horizons of critical media studies in different fields such as American news media and creative media lab. A unique contribution, this book will be indispensable for students and researchers of journalism, communication studies, social media, behavioural sciences, sociology, philosophy, cultural studies, and development studies.

Perhaps, male-mindedness seems to have adapted to changing-contemporary circumstances to become more covert and conspiratorial. Sexist suggestions—through objectification and substantiated subordination—for instance, may have been explicit in Indian media a decade earlier. But in the contemporary times of online social media and vociferous feminism, such openness of unfairness against women in the media will, more often than not, be met with strife and unpalatable backlash—fearing which blatant prejudice is prudently steered clear of. It is, hence, understandable that patriarchy, to sustain itself as a culture, has adapted to become more benevolent in an increasingly hostile environment. To identify such sly and stealthy sexism embedded in media content, one may need a reconfigured grasp of contemporary feminist issues and an altered nuance for isolation and identification of discriminatory depictions. This book exposes redefined and hidden sexism that predominates the popular visual culture of India—particularly investigating mass and new media representations that are a prime part of and have a domineering effect on the ensemble of popular visual culture—and characterises contemporary feminist movements. It binds a collection of contemporary Indian case studies of sexism and feminism encompassing communication media such as print, cinema, television, Web series and social media. There is a lack of book titles that study media sexism in the present times, and the proposed book aims to explore an unexplored area that is of social and scholarly importance. This book highlights the duality of media platforms: while media is a critical tool associated with fourth-wave feminism, they still remain to be a deterrent to the development of women engendering inherent and age-old patriarchal notions. This book will be an eye-opener to the general readers about benevolent sexism and train them to identify sexism hidden in seemingly pro-women media representations.

Grounded in feminist scholarship, this book upends normative accounts of femme fatale violence to focus beyond the misogyny and the sensationalism and unearth the motivation behind women's roles in homicide, terrorism, combat, and even nationalist movements.

Heroic Girls looks at the recent proliferation of young girl heroes in many recent mainstream films and books. These contemporary ‘final’ girls do not just survive but rather suggest that in doing so they have fundamentally changed something about themselves and or the world around them, seeing them become the ‘First Girls’ of this altered reality. The collection brings together a wide range of perspectives and cultural viewpoints that describe many recent narratives that explore the idea of a Final Girl and her “after-story”. The essays are divided into four sections, beginning with more theoretical approaches; cross-cultural examples; the ways in which fictional narratives bear strong relation to real-world circumstances; examples that more strongly depict themes of resistance, survival, and individual agency; and, finally, those that describe something more fundamental and transformative. Films and television shows covered in the collection include The Girl with All the Gifts, The Witcher, The Hunger Games, Star Wars, The Fear Street and Pan’s Labyrinth. This book will be of interest to researchers and students of film studies, gender studies, and media studies.