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Doctoral Thesis
Queering Indian Celluloid: Towards a Genealogy of Non- Heteronormative Female Desire in Hindi Cinema and Bollywood, 1998–2018
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Murdoch University
2024
Abstract
My project is a genealogical investigation with a particular emphasis on uncovering ‘dissident’ desires that have habitually been neglected or marginalized in Hindi cinema and Bollywood. This approach is a critical framework that enables a broader understanding of diverse queer perspectives that do not necessarily coalesce into discourses of sexual identity/ subjectivity. In other words, I engage with unruly aspects of ‘queer’ as an epistemological challenge to essentialist or stabilizing tendencies often associated with traditional identity politics (Berlant and Warner 1995; Butler 1993; Halperin 1995).
Moreover, my study extends on existing interpretations of Indian cinema as an archive “that appears to provide a fertile ground for an exploration of the politics of nationalism and transnationalism, socialism and neoliberalism, corporeality, aesthetics, affect, race, gender, sexuality, queerness, pleasure, and desire” (Osuri and Ghosh 2012, 799).
Intersections between India and its popular cinema facilitate the analysis of the “contradictions of Indian modernity” even as it “illustrates the becoming of a post-colonial archive” (799). Considering that the term Bollywood signifies the transformation of popular Hindi cinema into a globally influential cultural industry, we must consider Hindi/ Bollywood cinema as a dominant cultural repository of global Indian modernity. It prompts us to explore the gaps and omissions that may exist, as well as “the translatable and the untranslatable” trajectories of desires, pleasures, and performances of this archive (2012, 800). Consequently, my project excavates complex trajectories of “the translatable and the untranslatable” (800) by privileging embodiments of queer female desire in reconfiguring dominant narratives of global Indian modernity, particularly, contemporary alignments of nationality, community, gender, sexuality, and kinship.
Details
- Title
- Queering Indian Celluloid: Towards a Genealogy of Non- Heteronormative Female Desire in Hindi Cinema and Bollywood, 1998–2018
- Authors/Creators
- Shabnam Rathee
- Contributors
- Dr Rahul K Gairola (Supervisor) - Murdoch University, School of Humanities, Arts and Social SciencesVijay Mishra (Supervisor)Carol Warren (Supervisor) - Murdoch University, Centre for Biosecurity and One Health
- Awarding Institution
- Murdoch University; Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Identifiers
- 991005648769407891
- Murdoch Affiliation
- Indo-Pacific Research Centre
- Resource Type
- Doctoral Thesis
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