Examining the Race Stereotype of Heroines in Tamil Cinema - Content Analysis
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International Journal of Advanced Science and Technology Vol. 29, No. 12s, (2020), pp. 2876-2882 Examining The Race Stereotype Of Heroines In Tamil Cinema - Content Analysis Ansu Elsa Joy Assistant Professor, Department of Visual Communication, SRM Institute of science and technology, Kattankulathur, Chennai ABSTRACT: Cinema acts as a significant communication and entertainment tool for all age groups. In general, the cinema has got a lot of culture and tradition involved in it. These educated the people around them. A message isconstructed and conveyed to the audience. Tamil cinema industry, well known as Kollywood has many sectors, and their slots are being rooted in the Tamil culture. Earlier, most of the films have got male dominance, recently the trend has changed, and female lead roles are given importance to their characters, and many are justifying the character too. However, the media has constructed a stereotype in the minds of people, that females should be fair and beautiful. White colour race acts as beauty in the media industry. May it be a film, series, advertisements, etc. The female lead has to be fair and brown colour denotes ugly. From the beginning of the media era, there is a wrong social construction stating female roles are pleasure objects in the eyes of people. People look for colour, instead of the quality of acting. Because of the media constructions insociety, audiences are being forced to view women from a heterosexual male view. Examples of the male gaze include medium close-up shots of women and scenes that frequently occur, which show a man actively observing a passive woman and so on. The ideology of both male and female audiences has changed because of this mass media, and people only like fair-skinned women, their skills in the current field might be less, but they win the market only with their colour. Keywords:Cinema, Tamil cinema, Female leads, Stereotypes, Race, and gaze. INTRODUCTION: Indian cinema created a new way as a global enterprise in the 20th century. Through dynamic and fast modern new media,Indian films exhibited in more than 90 countries.[1] The starting of the Indian film industry can be dated back to 1896 when the legendary Lumiere Brothers of France exhibited six silent short films at the Watson Hotel in Bombay, namely Entry of Cinematography.[2] The decade of the 2000s witnessed the persistent rise of Indian cinema in the world. New Media (technology) took Bollywood to novel peaks about cinematography and storylines alongside mechanical advancements in terms of special effects and animation.[3]Indian cinema is now competing globally with advanced digital projectors, converting digital format and new types of production techniques. Kollywood, became a center in Chennai, is considered a regional cinema and often under-represented and overlooked.[4] Bollywood is usually considered the Indian Hollywood and the capital of the film industry, it is the Chennaibased Kollywood film industry that has animportant impact on the masses.[5] “It has become increasingly pervasive in almost all aspects of the Kollywood field and perhaps the most prominently in political life.” Cinema has become part and parcel of the life of Tamils. It has taken a central place in the life and culture of the Tamil society.[6] It did not vanish with the arrival of the TV; other than the small screen lives at the mercy of cinema, and it remains a poor substitute for the cinema. The number of filmgoers in India is highest in Tamil Nadu.[7] In the State of Tamil Nadu in India, cinema is everywhere, and it is everything. Going through the main streets of the bigger cities one cannot but see the gigantic glittering billboards that advertise the latest films as well as the small posters that are being posted on the walls, with the fan club’s name.[8] ISSN: 2005-4238 IJAST 2876 Copyright ⓒ 2020 SERSC International Journal of Advanced Science and Technology Vol. 29, No. 12s, (2020), pp. 2876-2882 The digital banner culture of today has made it very easy to print the photos of the youth leaders who sponsor the clubs to identify themselves with their film stars. Gender roles are being socially constructed, and they are learned from the behaviour pattern of the elders, mostly as mediated by the popular media. Tamil cinema still perpetuates traditional gender stereotypes because it reflects dominant social values.[9] The cinema narration also reinforces them, presenting them as natural and this is being consumed by the audience. For example, the stereotypes of masculine domination and feminine submission are being portrayed, often justified, and occasionally challenged in cinema, but the predominant images of male domination and female submission are being generally reinforced by cinema.[10] Audiences, particularly the men, learn and identify with male characters and treat females as objects of pleasure.[13]Good women are presented as submissive, sensitive, and domesticated; whereas bad women are being projected as being rebellious, independent, and selfish.[11]Girls learn from the cinema that they are supposed to be pure, obedient, soft-spoken, confined to the household and agriculture. They are supposed to be affectionate, gentle, sympathetic, dependent, emotional, nurturing, and supportive of men. In popular culture, particularly in movies, black is an excuse to ridicule (and self-ridicule) one's skin colour and to worship fairness.[12]Rajinikanth, the biggest movie star of the south, is also the worst offender in this.[14]In many of his movies, he is apologetic about his skin-color, particularly when expressing his love to a woman, who is always fair-skinned. OBJECTIVE OF THE RESEARCH: To analyze the race stereotypes practised in Tamil cinema for the past decade. To examine the quality of the female lead characters in Tamil cinema in the last decade. REVIEW OF LITERATURE: During (1989), Laura Mulvey has penned a book called “Visual and Other Pleasures” in which he talks about Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. He states that demanded by the ideology of the patriarchal order as it is been worked out in its cinematic form, i.e. illusionistic narrative film in which a further layer is added. An argument is taken a step further into the structure of representation for the active gaze of a man for whom the image of a woman is as passive raw material.The argument is again turned into the psychoanalytic background, in which woman is signified as castration, inducing voyeuristic or fetishistic mechanisms to circumvent her threat. So, on the whole, a woman is shown as a pleasure object to the man who sees them in a gaze.And according to Ahmed.S(2007), his research article about the phenomenology of whitenessin Feminist Theory states thatwith a cultural pervasiveness unparalleled in Western films, the inter or extra-textual references to contemporary pop culture and society enrich Tamil cinema by presenting it in films.With few characteristics functioning more than the filmy text, the inclusion of those references and semi-diegetic sequences gives a sense of the film. It overflows beyond the traditional confines of diegesis.Thus whiteness involves more by adding western tradition to enrich Tamil cinema scenes as well.Chinniah&Sathiavathi (2008)in his book, has quoted a chapter “The Tamil film heroine” in which he talks about heroines who have become pleasure objects nowadays. He also says that several popular soap operas and commercials have adopted film industry stereotypes and insensitive representations of sexual violence are also taken place in mass media. According to them, heroines are becoming pleasure objects to the viewers. Though strong roles are given to the female lead roles in some movies, their reach is less, compared to item songs in certain movies.Nakassis.C. V, during(2015) worked on a research article which was about Tamil-speaking Heroine in the Tamil film industry. In a survey done, actresses who are showcased as fluent Tamil speakers are not competent Tamil speakers. Many of the top lead heroines in the Tamil industry are neither from Tamil Nadu nor know proper Tamil ISSN: 2005-4238 IJAST 2877 Copyright ⓒ 2020 SERSC International Journal of Advanced Science and Technology Vol. 29, No. 12s, (2020), pp. 2876-2882 language.Audiences or industry insiders don’t consider many of the actresses to be ethnolinguistically Tamil or to speak Tamil.According to Meenaatchi(2017), a stigma around acting is being fortified and the contemporary female actors are impacted by the strict understandings of Tamil womanhood. She majorly talks about nativity and whiteness which is been constructed in media. In her thesis, she has focused on Amy Jackson who is from a western country and western culture, but the roles given to her in Tamil cinema were mostly Tamil girl and girl next door character. Since certain stigmas are already set in the film industry, performing intimate scenes on-screen have hesitated by the Tamil heroines but heroines like Jackson is ready to act in such scenes, due to the freedom afforded by her western upbringing. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY: Data for this study was been done using content analysis of 10 top Tamil heroines who were beenintroduced between 2010 and 2020.A sampling frame with more than 30 heroines was created, based on searches using five different Internet search engines. The research is influenced by social construction theory and visual deconstruction to examine the female lead roles in the Tamil cinema for the pastdecade. The shortlist was created based on the activeness and popularityof Tamil heroines in Tamil cinema and has acted more than five films in their period in Tamil alone. Top 10 heroines who werebeen shortlisted for the analysis have been given below: 1) Amalapaul 2) Aishwarya Rajesh 3) Samantha 4) Amy Jackson 5) TaapseePannu 6) Hansika Motwani 7) Rakul Preet Singh 8) Lakshmi Menon 9) Nikki Galrani 10) Keerthy Suresh DATA ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION: 1.