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. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of Figures List of Contributors Foreword Acknowledgements Chapter 1 Challenging Norms, Subverting Stereotypes: An Overview of the “New-ness” of Representations Part I Social Media and Visual Culture Chapter 2 #MeToo and Time’s Up: Slippage of Facework in Malayalam Cinema and Industry Chapter 3 Indian Women Rising: Tracing Star and Screen Coordinates of the Hindi Film Industry post #MeToo Chapter 4 No Country for Aunties: Gender, Age, South-Asian Diaspora, and Stereotypes in Brown Feminist Instagram Art Part II Feminism and Contemporary Indian Cinema Chapter 5 Experience in/of Cinema: Gender and Spectatorial Subjectivity in The Great Indian Kitchen Chapter 6 Controlling the Narrative?: Female Journalists in New Cinema in Kannada Chapter 7 Exonerating Disruptive Mothers and Rebellious Daughters: Individualised Femininities in Shakuntala Devi and Tribhanga-Tedhi Medhi Crazy Chapter 8 Feminist Optics: Women and Gender in Contemporary Popular Bengali Cinema Chapter 9 De/Sexed Ageing: Representations of Female Sexual Subjectivities in Select Indian Media Texts Chapter 10 “Glocal” Contestations through Female Subjectivity: Narratives from Small-town India in Dum Laga Ke Haisha and Anaarkali of Aarah Part III Producing Cinema of Disruptions Chapter 11 Women Producing Cinema: Guneet Monga and the Rise of the Independent Global Producer in India Chapter 12 Producing the Vampire: Neo-Victorian Afterlife of the “Un-Dead” and Contemporary Sexual Crime in the Cinema of Anushka Sharma Glossary Index