It’s About Me!: Un(dress)ing Hindi Celluloid Feminine Subjective I-dentity

It’s About Me!: Un(dress)ing Hindi Celluloid Feminine Subjective I-dentity

Vinayak Yashraj¹ & Priyanka Tripathi²
¹National Institute of Fashion Technology Patna, India
²Indian Institute of Technology Patna, India

Abstract

Contemporary women’s Hindi films play a critical role in constructing feminine subjective I-dentity by contesting discursive models rendering current feminism to be “it’s about me!”. Appropriation of this post-feminist framework builds upon the semiotic understanding of the process in which the reflective use of dress and dressing-up has been seminal in constructing self-oriented choices and corporeal practices. Therefore, dress leads to the possibility of exploring significant scope in disentangling the contentious post-feminist developments in emergent women’s Hindi films. With a locus on the post-feminist framework as posited by Rosalind Gill, Michele M Lazar, Angela McRobbie, and the nuanced semiotic scaffolding of use of dress as hypothesized by Roland Barthes, Malcolm Bernard, Joanne Entwistle, et al., this article examines select women’s Hindi films like Margarita With A Straw by Shonali Bose, Lipstick Under My Burkha by Alankrita Shrivastava and Aisha by Rajshree Ojha to forward embryonic post-feminist approaches.

Keywords: Corporeal, dress and dressing, postfeminism, subjective I-dentity, women and Hindi film

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Vinayak Yashraj is an Associate Professor in the Department of Fashion and Lifestyle Accessories at the National Institute of Fashion Technology Patna. He teaches fashion society and culture, fashion and film image, design methodology, history, and philosophy of design and fashion. His research area includes the ethnographic study of film costumes, fashion, and feminism.

Priyanka Tripathi is an Associate Professor of English, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Patna. She works in South Asian fiction, gender studies, place and literature, and graphic narratives.

Correspondence to: Vinayak Yashraj, Department of Fashion & Lifestyle Accessories, National Institute of Fashion Technology, Patna-800 005, India.