Sexuality In Hindi Cinema Essay

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The aim of this essay is to trace the changing representations of female sexuality in popular Hindi cinema or Bollywood, through a reading of films like Kuch Kuch Hota Hai(1998), Jism(2003), Ishaqzaade(2012) and Gangs of Wasseypur, Part I(2012) that were released in and around the first decade of the twenty first century. Through these visual texts, the esssay intends to examine how in popular Hindi films the depictions of heterosexual love, desire and the act of lovemaking or sex till date continue to be portrayed more often than not, only with respect to the female body. Even as the modes of depiction have changed over the years, the heroine’s body continues to be used by the male filmmakers, as sites for the projection of the male protagonist and the audience’s fantasy and sexual desire. In the event of the female protagonist’s presence being minimalistic, and her role limited to the purpose of providing what the pioneer feminist film critic Laura Mulvey (1986,p.202-203) termed ‘scopophilic’ pleasure as ‘erotic object for characters within the screen, and… for the spectator within the auditorium’ in a male driven narrative that denies her the representation of her subjectivity, I see the woman’s body projected on screen as the source to reading her life. Using the movies I refer to as cultural texts, I should like to show how female bodies and sexuality have been used to generate and perpetuate the gendered divide of what constitutes the feminine or the unfeminine, and how this in turn works towards the creation, disruption, and the re-instatement of the patriarchal conception of the domestic ideal of ‘family’ and ‘home’. Therefore, I argue that while the first two movies I discuss (Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Jism) posit femal...

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