Gender, Cinema, Streaming Platforms

This book offers interdisciplinary examination of gender representations in cinema and SVOD (Subscription Video on Demand) platforms in India. This book will identify how the so-called feminist enunciations in twenty-first century film and SVOD content in India are marked by an ambiguous entanglement of feminist and postfeminist rhetoric. Set against the backdrop of two significant contemporary phenomena, namely neoliberalism and the digital revolution, this book considers how neoliberalism, aided by technological advancement, re-configured the process of media consumption in contemporary India and how representation of gender is fraught with multiple contesting trajectories. The book looks at two types of media-cinema and SVOD platforms, and explores the reasons for this transformation that has been emerging in India over the past two decades. Keeping in mind the complex paradoxes that such concomitant process of the contraries can invoke, the book invites myriad responsesfrom the authors who view the shifting gender representations in postmillennial Hindi cinema and SVOD platforms from their specific ideological standpoints. The book includes a wide array of genres, from commercial Hindi films to SVOD content and documentary films, and aims to record the transformation facilitated by economic as well as technological revolutions in contemporary India across various media formats.

Chapter 1. Introduction. - Chapter 2. Biopolitics of Hindutva: Masculinity and Violence in Leila and Aashram. - Chapter 3. Questioning the Great in The Great Indian Wedding : Streaming Feminism through Band Baaja Baaraat and Made in Heaven. - Chapter 4. Questioning the Great in The Great Indian Wedding : Streaming Feminism through Band Baaja Baaraat and Made in Heaven. - Chapter 5. Lust Stories and the Politics of Private Viewing on SVOD Platforms. - Chapter 6. New Feminist Visibilities and Sisterhood: Re-interpreting Marriage, Desire, and Self-fulfilment in Mainstream Hindi Cinema. - Chapter 7. Gaze Averted: Interrogating the Portrayal of Menstruation in Hindi Cinema. - Chapter 8. Gender and Nationalism: The Journey of Sehmat in Meghna Gulzar s Raazi. - Chapter 9. India s Daughter: The Banality of Rape. - Chapter 10. The Deeply Personal Is Deeply Political: New Voices in Women s Documentary Practice in Indian Subcontinent. - Chapter 11. On Cinematic Transformation, Gender and Religion. An Interview with Ashish Avikunthak.