Bollywood

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.

Through engaging media coverage of the public lives of Bollywood actresses, this book unveils understandings of idealized femininity and gender within this cultural context. Beyond its own borders, such a context is unique given the global relevance of content from and about Bollywood with members of the diaspora as well as those culturally Indian individuals that are no longer part of the diaspora. This book thus engages these actresses as global Indian celebrities who are framed and presented as contemporary urban Indian exemplars of gender via media coverage about them.

Bollywood's New Woman examines Bollywood's construction and presentation of the Indian Woman since the 1990s. The groundbreaking collection illuminates the contexts and contours of this contemporary figure that has been identified in sociological and historical discourses as the "New Woman." On the one hand, this figure is a variant of the fin de siècle phenomenon of the "New Woman" in the United Kingdom and the United States. In the Indian context, the New Woman is a distinct articulation resulting from the nation's tryst with neoliberal reform, consolidation of the middle class, and the ascendency of aggressive Hindu Right politics.

Bollywood and Its Other(s) aims to compensate for the lack of scholarly literature on Indian film by opening up hitherto unexplored sites or sites that are in formation. It focuses on the aesthetic-philosophical questions of the other, Indian diaspora's negotiations with national identity, alternative reading strategies/research methods, marginal genres (sci-fi, horror), marginal characters (flaneuse, vamps), marginal gender (non-normative sexualities), marginal cinema (Hindi avant-garde), marginal language (Hinglish), and marginal regions (the Kashmir valley).

The book uses the notion of travel analytically in and through the cinema to comment on films that have dealt with Indo-Pak border crossings, representations of diaspora, and gender and sexuality in new ways. It engages with common sense assumptions about everyday South Asian and diasporic South Asian cultures and representations as expressed in Bollywood cinema in order to look at these issues further.

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.

This book tells the story of twenty incredible women, many with no prior connections in the industry, who have carved successful careers despite significant challenges. They often work away from the public gaze-as studio heads, producers, directors, make-up artists, stylists, script writers, lyricists, editors, choreographers, stunt artists, set designers, and in the many other jobs that support the making of a movie. These women deserve to be applauded and their journeys acknowledged, as they transform Bollywood and in the process, create a new India.

Bollywood movies have been long known for their colorful song-and-dance numbers and knack for combining drama, comedy, action-adventure, and music. But when India entered the global marketplace in the early 1990s, its film industry transformed radically. Production and distribution of films became regulated, advertising and marketing created a largely middle-class audience, and films began to fit into genres like science fiction and horror. In this bold study of what she names New Bollywood, Sangita Gopal contends that the key to understanding these changes is to analyze films' evolving treatment of romantic relationships.

Consuming Bollywood is a major activity in the Indian diaspora and the revenue generated from diasporic audiences is growing exponentially. By combining extended qualitative interviews and textual analysis, this book provides an insightful analysis of how the women who are socially located in the Indian diaspora use the spectacle of Bollywood cinema to renegotiate cultural meanings of home, gender, belonging, and identity. By taking the experiences and interpretations of diasporic women as central, this book substantially adds to the literature on gendered and transnational identity in the context of migration and globalization. Furthermore, it considers the emergence of Bollywood as a potent global brand that is reconstituting cultural identities within a transnational, neoliberal, market-driven economy.

Indian cinema is the only body of world cinema that depicts courtesans as important characters. Ruth Vanita's groundbreaking study of courtesans and courtesan imagery in 235 films brings fresh evidence to show that the courtesan figure shapes the modern Indian erotic, political and religious imagination.

This book unpacks a particular gendered vision of nation in the modern Indian context by drawing on popular films. This muscular nationalism is an intersection of a specific vision of masculinity with the political doctrine of nationalism. The idea of nation is animated by an idea of manhood associated with martial prowess, muscular strength and toughness, but coupled with the image and construct of virtuous woman - a gendered binary of martial man and chaste woman.

Global Bollywood shows how this currency in popular culture and among diasporic communities marks only the latest phase of the genre's world travels. Chapter titled "Queer as Desis: Secret Politics of Gender and Sexuality in Bollywood Films in Diasporic Urban Ethnoscapes."

From Gothic ghost films of the 1950s to snake films of the 1970s and 1980s to today's globally influenced zombie and vampire films, Meheli Sen delves into what the supernatural is and the varied modalities through which it raises questions of film form, history, modernity, and gender in South Asian public cultures. Arguing that the supernatural is dispersed among multiple genres and constantly in conversation with global cinematic forms, she demonstrates that it is an especially malleable impulse that routinely pushes Hindi film into new formal and stylistic territories. Sen also argues that gender is a particularly accommodating stage on which the supernatural rehearses its most basic compulsions; thus, the interface between gender and genre provides an exceptionally productive lens into Hindi cinema's negotiation of the modern and the global.

With the turn of the century, slowly a change began to come over the women in mainstream Bollywood films. The female lead shed-off her cardboard role of the beloved and gained complexity that reconciled career, ambition, and personal fulfillment, along with an assertion of the right to be feminine. The present work studies this shift and traces the emergence of a new Bollywood brand - the millennial woman - that took its cue from a new globalized India where the educated working woman became more self-assertive and unapologetic about her life choices. Rao argues that contemporary popular cinema has sensed a change in the zeitgeist and worked it into trusted formulaic stories in small safe doses so that the audience continue to take home a feel-good factor without feeling threatened by it.

This book introduces the term "otherism" and looks at the discourse of otherism and the issue of otherness in South Asian religion, literature and film. Chapter titled "Queer Bollywood : Same-Sex Sexuality, Gender Transgression and "Otherness" in Indian Popular Cinema of the 1990s" and "Towards an Inclusive, Fluid Construction of Gender and Sexuality in Commercial Indian Cinema(s)."

Although Asian films have reached a new height in popularity worldwide, Queer Asian Cinema: Shadows in the Shade is the first full-length book in English solely devoted to examining the aesthetics and politics of homosexuality in Asian films. This unique book presents multiple points of view on the portrayal of gay, lesbian, and transgendered people in film throughout Asia. Chapter titled "Queering Bollywood: Alternative Sexualities in Popular Indian Cinema."

This book develops a queer methodology to analyse a queer archive for the impact of normativity on subjecthood and the ways in which it shapes and curtails gender and sexuality. Chapter titled "Between Signs: Bollywood, Normativity, and Same-Sex Sexualities."

Queer Theory: Law, Culture, Empire uses queer theory to examine the complex interactions of law, culture, and empire. Chapter titled "Bollywood Cinema and Queer Sexualities."

Explores the complex relationships between cinema, industry, cultures, labour and gender during the studio era (1930-55) The fourth book in the Readings in Gender Studies series, Voices of the Talking Stars is a feminist historiography for films compiled by the School of Women's Studies, Jadavpur University.

Wanted Cultured Ladies Only! maps out the early culture of cinema stardom in India from its emergence in the silent era to the decade after Indian independence in the mid-twentieth century.