Framing the Feminine: Diasporic Readings of Gender in Popular Indian Cinema

The State of the Art in Feminist Scholarship in Communication

“…This is not to say that contemporary feminism is untouched or uninfluenced by contemporary theory, especially contemporary feminist theories. There is a growing influx of postcolonialist and globalist theoretical orientations (Diaz, 2003;Durham, 2001;Hegde, 1999;McKinley & Jensen, 2003;Parameswaran, 1999;Ram, 2002), as well as influence from womanist theory and critical race theory (Behling, 2002;Carlson, 1999;Hamlet, 2000;Ono & Buescher, 2001). We found echoes of poststructuralist theory in several critical pieces (e.g., Dow, 2001;Lay, 2003;Rockler, 2001;Sloop, 2000;Townsley & Geist, 2000), and several essays also engaged the various understandings of "Third Wave" feminism (Diaz, 2003;Hogeland, 2001;Lotz, 2003;Shugart, 2001;Shugart, Egley, & Hallstein, 2001).…”

“…Other studies have focused on Indian women's "resistance to and collusion with the hegemony of global culture" through their reading of Western romance fiction (Parameswaran, 2002; see also Ram, 2002), on female viewers' evaluation of the television program Ally McBeal (Cohen & Ribak, 2003), on Black women's use of multiple standpoints to make sense of popular film (Harris & Donmoyer, 2000), on young girls' identity negotiation through their interactions with American Girl dolls (AcostaAlzuru & Kreshel, 2000), on young women's interpretations of cigarette ads (Hawkins, 2001), on audience's readings of "gay window advertising" (Sender, 1999), and on online fan communities' interpretations of popular television (Scodari, 1998;Scodari & Felder, 2000).…”

The Globalization of Bollywood: An Ethnography of Non-Elite Audiences in India

“…Such ethnography is informed by a method that Kraidy and Murphy (2003) have termed as a "translocal" ethnographic method which advocates that ethnography's "importance lies more in its capacity to comprehend the articulation of the global with the local, than its supposed ability to understand the local in isolation of large-scale structures and processes" (p. 304). However, scholars, within and outside of India, have conducted textual readings of films (e.g., Kazmi, 1998a;Shah, 1950;Valicha, 1988), studies of political economy of the film industry (e.g., Pendakur, 2003), or narrative history of films (e.g., Dwyer and Patel, 2002;Gaur, 1973;Gopalan, 2002;Jain and Rai, 2002;Ramachandran, 1984), but only recently have studies of audience reception of particular film texts (e.g., Juluri, 1999;Ram, 2002;Srinivas, 2002), on film-going experiences of audiences (e.g., Derne, 2000;Dickey, 1993), and ethnographies regarding Indian film workers (e.g., Ganti, 2002) begun to emerge. While Bollywood is receiving increased academic attention (e.g., special issue in the journal, South I conducted research on audience responses to contemporary Hindi films over a period of 7 months in Patiala, a midsized city in the state of Punjab in North India, where I had arrived as a Fulbright scholar at Punjabi University in 2004.…”

“I Need an Indian Touch”: Glocalization and Bollywood Films

“…There is now a gradual increase in studies critically and empirically addressing issues of media consumption in India or Southern countries where Indian films are consumed. Such audience studies include studies of Bollywood film texts (Juluri, 1999;Ram, 2002;Srinivas, 2002), on film-going experiences of audiences (Derne, 2000;Dickey, 1993), and ethnographies regarding Indian film workers (Ganti, 2002).…”