Suchergebnisse

Through a review of the 2012 documentary film The World before Her directed by Nisha Pahuja, this article provides a critical reflection on how neoliberal governmentality appropriates women's bodies and subjectivities in two women's boot camps in India: the Miss India contest and the Hindu militant Durga Vahini camp. Studies on appropriation of women's bodies in the neoliberal ideology of the market and in varied religious ideologies have generated rich feminist insights into the structures of women's oppression across the world. Feminist academic research has traditionally looked at market- and religion-based oppressions separately. In this critical reflection we articulate how women's bodies get incorporated into the service of varied ideologies, namely neoliberal capitalism and religious fundamentalism, through processes of ritualisation, responsibilisation and subjectivation. Drawing on the shared elements of neoliberal (capitalism) and Hindutwa (Hindu fundamentalism) ideological projects, this article proposes a renewed analysis of the location of women in various ideological projects and the nature of women's negotiation of these power structures or women's agency within these structures.

Through a discourse analysis of four commercially successful Bollywood films between 2012-2013, this paper investigates Bollywood's role in creation of hierarchical identities in the Indian society wherein Muslims occupy the position of the inferior 'other' to the superior Hindu 'self'. Focusing on Muslim heroines, the paper demonstrates that the selected narratives attempt to move away from the older binary identity narratives of Muslim women such as nation vs. religion and hyper-sexualised courtesan vs. subservient veiled women, towards identity narratives borne out of Muslim women's choice of education, career and life partner, political participation, and embodied practices. However, in comparison to signs of change the sites of continuity are strongly embedded in the religious-nationalistic meta-narrative that drives the paradigms of Indian femininity/ womanhood. To conclude, the nature of the recent deployment of Muslim heroines in Bollywood reinforce the hierarchy between the genders (male-female), between the communities (Hindu-Muslim) and between nations (India- Pakistan).