Abstract
What can popular cultural production tell us about discourses of sexuality in modern-day sub-Continental India? This chapter will study how the ‘trashy’ forum of the mainstream film produces and eroti-cises ‘alternative’ sexual subjectivities, and whether any emancipatory potentials might be uncovered herein. Films made in India’s mainstream Hindi-speaking ‘Bollywood’, such as Kalyug (2005) and Girlfriend (2004), supply a discourse of lesbian abjection and vilification even as the modern-day reinvention of the male ‘buddy’ film, in Kal Ho Na Ho (2003) and Dostana (2008), for instance, offer startlingly ‘wholesome’ representations of gay men. Can mass-market ‘products’ where pleasure can be derived from the successful combination of plot, music and visual spectacle serve in the hands of critical viewers as tools for destabilising sexual binaries despite their overt narrative outcomes?
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© 2014 Aneeta Rajendran
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Rajendran, A. (2014). Popular Forms, Altering Normativities. In: Kishore, V., Sarwal, A., Patra, P. (eds) Bollywood and Its Other(s). Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137426505_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137426505_10
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-49085-1
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