A Qualitative Analysis of Young Hindi Film Viewers' Readings of Gender, Sexuality and Politics On- and Off-screen
by
Shakuntala Banaji
This thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Culture, Language and Communication Institute of Education University of London July 2004 Abstract
This thesis presents a qualitative analysis of the connections between meanings made from discourses of gender, sexuality and ethnicity in commercial Hindi films and the construction of gender, sexual and ethnic identity by young adult viewers. While expressing an understanding of cinema texts and audiences as always shaped by and responding to complex intersections of social, psychological and historical events, it also identifies and describes mechanisms of pleasure and discourses of gender ideology in Hindi films from the points of view of 'academic' and 'ordinary' viewers.
Original photographs, observations and interviews at cinema halls and transcripts from in-depth interviews with young viewers from diverse social, linguistic and religious backgrounds in Bombay and London provide the bulk of the data. Critical discourse analysis and aspects of social semiotics and Screen theory provide the tools for analysis of the data.
This study suggests that young viewers respond to films from a variety of intersecting subject positions; they rarely experience film texts as unitary and organic entities, treating certain sequences as far more significant than others. This study also finds strong connections between the discourses of gender, sexuality and politics articulated by or read into Hindi films and those voiced by young South Asian viewers. Saliently, though certain viewers use sequences in Hindi films as justifications for their political beliefs and/or private actions, others who express similar enjoyment, ridicule or despise the meanings they read into film sequences, remaining wary of their perceived 'effects'. Many Hindi films may be read as ambiguous or overt interventions in conflicts over religious, national, gender and sexual identity, and some young viewers clearly show a predisposition to what can only be called certain films' authoritarian or fascistic imaginaries. For others, pleasure and involvement in aspects of these films does not preclude skepticism or ideological critique. 3 Contents
Abstract 2 Contents 3 List of illustrations 6 Acknowledgements 7 1 Introduction 8 1.1 Beyond the heroic: commercial films meet ordinary viewers 8 1.2 Guilty pleasures 9 1.3 A framework for 'viewing' Hindi films 13 1.4 Entering the 'diasporic imaginary'? 15 1.5 The thesis 19 Notes 21
2 Hindi films and their audiences: theoretical debates and contemporary studies 22 2.1 Introduction 22 2.2 Early accounts: from escapist fantasy to textual pleasure 22 2.3 Ideology, hegemony and interpellation: exploiting the form of Hindi films 29 2.4 Cultural critics and 'popular' texts 36 2.4.1 Gender representations: textual analysis and feminist critique 36 2.4.2 The researcher's lens: Southall youth talking popular culture 39 2.5 Reconciling 'fantasy' and 'reality'; beyond 'compliance' and 'resistance' 42 2.5.1 North Indian men watching movies 42 2.5.2 North Indian women watching television 45 2.6 Beyond simplistic oppositions: which 'modernity' and whose 'tradition'? 49 2.7 Conclusion 52 Notes 54
3 'Sex roles' and the media: theorising identity and spectatorship through notions of gender 56 3.1 Introduction 56 3.2 'Sex roles': functionalist conjectures or elusive facts? 58 3.3 Beyond sex 'roles' 63 3.3.1 Interaction, power and change 63 3.3.2 Constitutive discourses and the fragmentation of identity 66 3.4 Conclusion 75 Notes 76
4 Methodology 77 4.1 Introduction 77 4.2 Data collection 78 4.2.1 The sample 79 4.2.2 Participant observation 83 4.2.3 Interviewing 84 4.2.4 Ethical considerations 87 4 4.3 Data analysis and the politics of theory 89 4.3.1 Breaking down the data, building up the narrative 91 4.3.2 Discourse Analysis and Cultural Studies 94 4.4 Conclusion 98 Notes 99
5 Contemporary Hindi films and the viewing context in two countries 100 5.1 Why watch audiences? 100 5.2 Cinema-halls and audiences in historical and geographic perspective 102 5.3 Going to the cinema in Bombay: reality, refuge or romance