1st Edition
Women in Contemporary Indian Films and Media Representations and Responses
This book investigates the ways in which contemporary Indian cinema, particularly 2010 onwards, has projected and represented women on screen – not just on films and TV but also on new media platforms like OTT and other digital media.
The wide-ranging essays reflect on issues of gender violence, sexuality, performance, domestic and public spaces, along with the role of women in the Indian film industry. They draw on current global discourses on gender including #Me Too, ‘Time’s Up’, LGBTQIA, and a call for wages for women on a par with their male counterparts and other socio-cultural debates in the Indian society.
The book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of film studies, gender studies, culture studies, and South Asian studies.
1. Challenging Norms, Subverting Stereotypes: An Overview of the ‘New-ness’ of Representations
Aysha Viswamohan
Part I: “Social Media and Visual Culture”
2. #MeToo and Time’s Up: Slippage of Facework in Malayalam Cinema and Industry
Arya Aiyappan
3. Indian Women Rising: Tracing Star and Screen Coordinates of the Hindi Film Industry post #MeToo
Akriti Rastogi
4. No Country for Aunties: Gender, Age, South-Asian Diaspora and Stereotypes in Brown Feminist Instagram Art
Shromona Das
Part II: “Feminism and Contemporary Indian Cinema”
5. Experience in/of Cinema: Gender and Spectatorial Subjectivity in The Great Indian Kitchen
Kavya Krishna K.R. and Vipin K. Kadavath
6. Controlling the Narrative? Female Journalists in New Cinema in Kannada
Nikhila H.
7. Exonerating Disruptive Mothers and Rebellious Daughters: Individualized Femininities in Shakuntala Devi and Tribhanga-Tedhi Medhi Crazy
Sanchari Basu Chaudhuri
8. Feminist Optics: Women and Gender in Contemporary Popular Bengali Cinema
Smita Banerjee
9. De/Sexed Ageing: Representations of Female Sexual Subjectivities in Select Indian Media Texts
Debashrita Dey and Priyanka Tripathi
10. ‘Glocal’ Contestations through Female Subjectivity: Narratives from Small-town India in Dum Laga Ke Haisha and Anaarkali of Aarah
Sayanty Chatterjee and Aysha Viswamohan
Part III: “Producing Cinema of Disruptions”
11. Women Producing Cinema: Guneet Monga and the Rise of the Independent Global Producer in India
Harmanpreet Kaur
12. Producing the Vampire: Neo-Victorian Afterlife of the ‘Un-Dead’ and Contemporary Sexual Crime in the Cinema of Anushka Sharma
Shuhita Bhattacharjee
Biography
Aysha Viswamohan is professor in the Department of HSS at IIT Madras. She works in the areas of Film studies, Fashion studies and American Literature. She has published in journals from Oxford University, Cambridge University, Penn State University, Routledge, Sage, and Intellect. Her recent books comprise edited anthologies: Women Filmmakers in Hindi Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), Stardom in Contemporary Hindi Cinema: Celebrity and Fame in Globalized Times (Springer, 2020), Behind the Scenes: Contemporary Bollywood Directors (Sage, 2017) and Post-liberalization Indian Novels in English: Global Reception & Politics of Award (Anthem, 2013). She was awarded Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute’s Canadian Faculty Enrichment Program Fellowship in 2009. She was a Visiting Faculty at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver in 2012.
