Indian Women – Bitch Flicks

‘Meera’: The Satyagrahi as Social Rebel

In the two most famous films based on Meera’s life, 1945’s ‘Meera,’ starring the legendary M. S. Subbulakshmi, and 1979’s ‘Meera,’ starring Hema Malini, Meera’s social rebellion is made less threatening by her characterization through an Indian ideal of the devoted and submissive wife, albeit devoted to Krishna rather than to her earthly husband. Nevertheless, each film offers an interpretation of Meera’s resistance that represents its own philosophy of female emancipation.

Written by Brigit McCone.

“Mirabai is said to have offended her husband by following her own conscience, was content to live in separation from him and bore with quiet dignity and resignation all the injuries that are said to have been done to her … Mirabai practised Satyagraha.” – Mahatma Gandhi

Meera, or Mirabai, was a 16th century mystic poet from Rajasthan, North India. Over 1000 poems are attributed to her, which speak of her renunciation of worldly wealth, her devotion to Krishna, her surviving attempts to poison her, and her defiance of family and society. In her willingness to suffer for her beliefs, resisting social pressures, and convincing others through the power of words and example, Mirabai was cited by Mahatma Gandhi as an embodiment of satyagraha (truth force), his philosophy of non-violent resistance. While our culture offers us female martial artists and superheroines as icons of unreal empowerment, it is worth remembering that social orders built on violence inherently disadvantage women, while the philosophy of satyagraha offers women a potentially level playing field in its emphasis on moral courage rather than physical strength.

In expressing her devotion to the divine by calling herself slave or bride to Krishna, Meera may be compared to Christian nuns who conceived of their religious vocation through the feminine role of “bride of Christ,”, even while rejecting dependence on men and often becoming the most educated women of their time. Yet, unlike Christian nuns whose social impact was usually limited by their entering a cloistered, regulated community, Meera roamed freely across the countryside and interacted with people of all castes and genders, making herself a powerfully subversive icon of popular resistance to the dominant social order.

In the two most famous films based on Meera’s life, 1945’s Meera, starring the legendary M. S. Subbulakshmi, and 1979’s Meera, starring Hema Malini, Meera’s social rebellion is made less threatening by her characterization through an Indian ideal of the devoted and submissive wife, albeit devoted to Krishna rather than to her earthly husband. Nevertheless, each film offers an interpretation of Meera’s resistance that represents its own philosophy of female emancipation.

“My eyes have their own life; they laugh at rules” – Mirabai

Made as a Tamil film in 1945, remade in Hindi in 1947, and regarded as a milestone in the development of Indian cinema, Meera is one of only a handful of films to star the Carnatic singer M. S. Subbulakshmi, whose iconic status as the “Nightingale of India” led her to perform for the United Nations in 1966, to be awarded the Indira Gandhi Award for National Integration in 1990, and India’s highest civilian honor, the Bharat Ratna (Jewel of India), in 1998. Subbulakshmi plays Meera as a “simple, untutored” girl, but one with fervent belief and musical talent. After protecting Krishna’s temple bodily, against a cannon sent to demolish it on her husband’s orders, Meera is inspired to leave her husband’s protection and go to Brindhavan (where Krishna is said to have lived as a mortal), renouncing her wealth and royal title “in search of Him who grew up in the humble dwellings of the Ayar clan, of him who is the kinsman of the poor.” Her resistance to caste prejudice and solidarity with people in poverty is one of the core characteristics of this interpretation of Meera. Meera wanders alone among rocks, singing hymns, demonstrating her endurance and independence, before being revived with water by a peasant boy embodying Krishna.

The film cuts to a follower of the guru Rupa Goswami explaining, to an all-male ashram, a chain of authority from mother to father, from father to guru, and from guru to Lord, placing women at the lowest rung of this hierarchy, and a woman’s husband as her intermediary to God. When Meera comes to the ashram of Rupa Goswami, singing of Krishna dwelling in her heart, she is told that the “divine guru will not so much as set eyes upon one born a woman.” Meera asks, “Who in this holy place of Brindhavan can be called a woman, and who a man?” reminding the devotees that they all aspire to emulate the gopikas, cow herding girls famous for their unconditional devotion (bhakti) to Krishna, and therefore that Krishna’s male devotees consider themselves symbolically ‘womankind’ while ironically rejecting fellowship with actual women. The guru (Serukalathur Sama) emerges at her words and professes, “Mother, it is you who are my supreme guru. You have driven out my ignorance.” Woman thus becomes the spiritual equal of man in their shared devotion to Krishna, and Meera becomes the equal of Rupa Goswami in her right to interpret religion.

A similar argument to Meera’s could also be made about Gandhi’s satyagraha as a social philosophy, in that it urges men to renounce traditionally masculine traits of aggression and violence, and to find power in traditionally feminine virtues of patience and self-sacrifice. Where feminism is popularly, if inaccurately, represented only as a campaign for women to adopt stereotypically male roles, satyagraha proposes the equality of male and female through the transformation of both, and as a natural consequence of society’s rejection of all forms of violence and domination. The full film is available on YouTube, subtitled.

“What I paid was my social body, my town body, my family body, and all my inherited jewels” – Mirabai

The 1979 Bollywood film Meera replaces the 1945 film’s visionary mysticism with a portrait more focused on Meera’s satyagraha against the patriarchal social order. The film begins with Meera’s sister (Vidya Sinha) being induced to drink poison because she has been promised to two husbands and must preserve her father’s honor. It climaxes as Meera confronts the head priest, Kool Guru (Om Shivpuri), and is publicly condemned to drink poison because she defied her husband’s authority. Whether sacrificed with her dutiful submission or punished for her resistance, the woman is the victim either way.

Meera’s journey from a theoretical religion of romantic dreaming among books and statues, to the fully embodied beliefs of a satyagrahi, is gradual, and the film slow-paced. She sheds her “inherited jewels” as her dress grows progressively plainer, from bright red to intense saffron to pale yellow to ascetic white. She abandons her “family body” by defying her husband’s family, refusing to cook sacrificial meat and insisting on her vegetarian beliefs, with the same mental independence shown by Subbulakshmi’s Meera. When a temple to Krishna is shut, Meera fasts outside it until it is reopened, a self-suffering protest for religious freedom that recalls the political fasts of Gandhi. Abandoning her husband’s protection and going on pilgrimage to Brindhavan, Meera sheds her “town body” as a wanderer in the wilderness. Finally, she sheds her “social body” as she publicly renounces her family and society before a court of scornful men. As she completes this journey, she is regarded with hostility and fear, not only by the men of her family but by the women, whose rationale for their own lives is threatened by Meera’s freedom.

Through the shedding of “bodies,” or externally imposed identities, Meera achieves a state of selflessness in bleached white costume. Meera’s renunciation of self allows her to publicly voice socially unacceptable beliefs, fearless of death or punishment. The climactic courtroom scene begins with a wide shot of an echoing royal chamber, with a large audience of men rising in unison as the high priest Kool Guru enters, wielding a majestic staff of power. The crowd sits at his command, amplifying his authority, as women watch from the gallery. A gong sounds and the doors pull back to reveal Meera in a martyr’s robe of simple white, isolated and flanked by guards. She steps forward with downcast eyes and modest bearing. The guru proclaims that although a man cannot judge another, “religion and society follow some norms, and anybody violating them is a sinner in the eyes of religion, society and God”.

By choosing to portray Meera’s attempted poisoning as a sentence imposed by a crowded courtroom, rather than a secret conspiracy as in the 1945 film, the 1979 film crushes its heroine beneath the full weight of religion and society’s norms, as represented by ornately enthroned religious patriarchy. The first charge — “scriptures and society decrees that a wife should adopt her husband’s religion” — effectively negates woman’s conscience, once more positioning her husband as her intermediary with the divine. Meera replies, “My religion is only devotion to the Lord,” insisting on her right to a direct relationship. The charge “by interacting with people of low-caste, she persecuted the royal honor” requires her support of the injustices of the caste system, in the name of religion and society’s norms. Meera is asked to acknowledge that her “duties to her husband” are to bear him a child, while male onlookers nod in agreement. She replies, “I’m the soul, not the body. I’m an emotion, not a statue of society norms,” demonstrating that she has fully renounced the “social body” in favor of her spiritual self. This version of Meera’s tale also features a compelling performance by Vinod Khanna as Meera’s husband, a man himself torn by the painful contradiction between his conscience and the social role he feels forced to play, squirming in his seat as Kool Guru condemns Meera.

“Don’t forget love; it will bring all the madness you need to unfurl yourself across the universe.” – Mirabai

Meera is framed in close-up, drenched in a golden glow as she calmly stares into the eyes of Kool Guru and declares, in measured tones, “I’m the epitome of love and am not tied in the shackles of family bonds.” In this moment, Meera represents the ideal of a satyagrahi, resisting all external authority in the assertion of her own loving conscience. Hema Malini’s Meera equally represents an ideal of traditional femininity in her soft-spoken delivery and classical beauty, but the radicalism of her message of female emancipation cannot be denied, with its total rejection of society’s concept of woman as a dependent defined by her family bonds. As Meera’s resistance enrages Kool Guru, she calmly declares to the priest, “Anger leads to destruction, so don’t get angry,” denying the legitimacy of violence as the basis of social power, before defending her decision to associate with the Muslim sultan by rejecting sectarianism and xenophobia: “I don’t accept your parameters as my country.” If this courtroom confrontation were edited to replace Kool Guru with many of today’s politicians, Meera’s stand would sadly be as relevant as ever. The film ends after Meera drinks the poison, miraculously survives and roams the countryside, leading devotees in song and establishing an indelible portrait of her beliefs through her poetry. Through this image of Meera, satyagraha emerges as a quintessentially feminine form of social rebellion, one whose power we ignore at our peril.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPW25vLQY84″]

Brigit McCone is not the epitome of love, and is occasionally tied in the shackles of family bonds. She writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and terrible dancing in the privacy of her own home.

Brown Girls Can Be Heroes Too: Why We Need a Ms. Marvel Movie

I’d internalized the rather damaging notion that only white girls deserve to have their stories told. Only white girls can slay the patriarchy without breaking a nail. Only white girls get to be the heroes, and get to be heroes of their own stories. And the rest of us? We don’t matter. … It’s important for young South Asian girls to see that just because they’re South Asian doesn’t mean that they have to be relegated to the sidelines, to being the sidekick, to being the brainy Indian doctor, and so on. They can be superheroes too.

This guest post written by Bhavna Vasnani appears as part of our theme week on Superheroines.

Fans of Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow rejoiced when Marvel’s Kevin Feige finally raised the possibility of a Black Widow movie, which fans have been asking for for a long time now. It certainly is a cause for celebration: Black Widow has played a very significant role in almost all the Marvel movies so far, and she certainly deserves a full-fledged movie of her own. I was probably one of the few who wasn’t excited about this, though, because to me, a Black Widow movie just means yay, more movies about white superheroes!

Marvel may pride themselves on their diversity, but anyone taking a closer look at the racial makeup of the movies that have already aired would find them sorely lacking. Of the superheroes we’ve already seen on-screen, we have nine white characters, three Black men, three non-human characters voiced by white men, a green alien played by a Black woman, and a sentient tree voiced by a person of color (Vin Diesel, who is of ambiguous ethnicity). The recent Captain America: Civil War is an example of how overwhelmingly white the ensemble is, with only three non-white actors in the primary cast. Looking at the dismal number of women, the only Black actress in a major role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) so far is Zoe Saldana, who is painted green as Gamora in Guardians of the Galaxy. The others — Black Widow, Scarlet Witch, Sharon Carter, Pepper Potts, Maria Hill, and Peggy Carter, to name a few — are all white women.

Good job on your diversity, Marvel.

Anthony Mackie, who portrays Sam Wilson/Falcon in the MCU, has spoken up on the importance of having a diverse cast:

“I think we live in a day [and] age now where little black kids feel like they can’t connect to a character who doesn’t look like them. Or little girls feel like they can’t connect to a character who’s a guy, because they’re just different…It’s more so connecting about someone [sic] who looks like you, you know?”

As a Singaporean Indian, I grew up mostly on western media, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed, Angel, Sabrina the Teenage Witch… a lot of media with white leads and a predominantly white cast. Yet it never occurred to me until very recently in my 25-year life that I’d internalized the rather damaging notion that only white girls deserve to have their stories told. Only white girls can slay the patriarchy without breaking a nail. Only white girls get to be the heroes, and get to be heroes of their own stories. And the rest of us? We don’t matter.

The MCU in itself doesn’t do a very good job in diversity, but we can argue that the lack is somewhat made up in Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. The show has several people of color in prominent roles, including Asian-Americans, Black people, and Latinx characters. Chloe Bennet’s Daisy Johnson can be seen as the first Asian-American superhero on television, even though Bennet herself wonders why no one seems to consider her a superhero.

Yet despite the diversity, there’s still a lack of South Asians.

Yes, South Asian representation in Hollywood has increased in recent years, and, more importantly, has gone beyond the racist stereotypes we see in shows like The Big Bang Theory and The Simpsons — just take a look at Aziz Ansari, Mindy Kaling, Priyanka Chopra and Rahul Kohli, to name but a few. But there is also a need for South Asians to be represented in the superhero genre as well — why should we be left out of a genre that has blown up in popularity in recent years? China may be a major market for Marvel, but the Indian market is also important.

The Bollywood film industry is undoubtedly huge in India and is a part of every South Asian’s life, whether or not they actually live in South Asia. But it doesn’t offer much for women: in many, many films, women are relegated to the role of the sexy love interest, although there’s been a slow rise in the number of films that do away with this and bring in more rounded female characters in stories that do not revolve around the guy getting the girl. There have also been a lot of recent discussions on how Bollywood movies contribute to rape culture in India.

This is where we bring our discussion to Ms Marvel.

Kamala Khan is a Pakistani American teenage girl who discovers that she has superhuman powers after being exposed to Terrigen mist and takes on the name of Ms. Marvel, after her icon and role model Carol Danvers, who now goes by Captain Marvel. She’s a Muslim girl treading the lines between being American and Muslim and Pakistani, growing up in a house where her Muslim values seem incompatible with a typical American high school experience. She is a huge fan of the Avengers and writes fanfiction as well.

The first time I came across Kamala, I was blown away by how similar she was to me. This wasn’t the first time coming across a fangirl in fiction — Rainbow Rowell took care of that — but this was the first time a South Asian girl was depicted as a fangirl. Kamala’s struggle with the conflicting facets of her identity — Pakistani, American, Muslim, teenager, and later, inhuman — were so much like what I experience — minus the whole inhuman thing. And in a world rampant with Islamophobia, it is Kamala’s faith and religion that guide her when she’s lost.

Later on, she joins the Avengers, fighting alongside established names like Sam Wilson’s Captain America, Tony Stark’s Iron Man, and Jane Foster’s Thor, and fellow teenagers Miles Morales as Spider-Man and Sam Alexander as Nova — that’s a Black man, a white man, a white woman, a Black teenager and a Latinx teenager. With the inclusion of Kamala, that’s more diversity in the All New, All Different Avengers than we’ve seen in the MCU so far.

The issue with comics is that they aren’t as accessible as television shows or movies, which is why those who need Ms. Marvel may not have access to her… unless she makes the transition to the MCU. And she needs to make this transition, because it’s important for young South Asian girls to see that just because they’re South Asian doesn’t mean that they have to be relegated to the sidelines, to being the sidekick, to being the brainy Indian doctor, and so on. They can be superheroes too.

Kamala is also important because her struggles with the differing aspects of her identity are something that kids of South Asian immigrant parents deal with, especially when your parents are a Buzzfeed article come to life. The first issue sees Kamala sneaking out of her room at night to go to a party even though her parents have explicitly forbidden her to. Her desire to be a normal American teenager from Jersey City is at odds with her Pakistani heritage, and in embracing her superhero self as Ms. Marvel — rather than an imitation of Carol Danvers’ old identity — she embraces her identity as a Pakistani American teenager as well.

Since Iron Man was released in 2008, the MCU has become a brand name. What this means is that Marvel can afford to take risks in casting and in its lineup of movies. All we have to do is look at Guardians of the Galaxy for proof of this: Marvel took a risk with a lesser-known comic series, and it paid off, grossing $733.3 million. Marvel can afford to take risks, and yet, with the exception of Black Panther, they are sticking with the same formulaic stories revolving around white characters. We’re getting tired of the same old, Marvel — please give us the Ms. Marvel movie that we need and deserve.

See also at Bitch Flicks: Superheroines of Color and Empowerment in Fantasy on TV

Bhavna Vasnani is a Singaporean Indian, an English graduate, a former journalist, and a feminist. She’s also been a fangirl since before she knew what a fangirl was. She can be found tweeting @bhavvyyy intermittently and tumbling frequently.

“We’re Not So Different”: Tradition, Culture, and Falling in Love in ‘Bride & Prejudice’

Though clearly based on the novel, ‘Bride & Prejudice’ is a successful piece of transnational cinema, which uses the interracial relationship between the Bakshi’s second eldest daughter Lalita and white American Mark Darcy to discuss differences in race, tradition, and cultural imperialism.

This guest post by Becky Kukla appears as part of our theme week on Interracial Relationships.

The late 90s, early 2000s saw a boom of Jane Austen inspired adaptations hitting our screens. Clueless, Emma, Pride & Prejudice, Sense & Sensibility, Bridget Jones’s Diary, and the later 2005 Pride & Prejudice are just some of the well loved movies which are pretty much straight translations from the book itself. This phenomenon is still going on (audiences just love Jane Austen) with the recent release of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies which is another, rather different take on the classic novel. There’s one Austen inspired film, though, which stands out above all the others: Bride & Prejudice (Gurinder Chadha, 2004). Instead of keeping it traditional with the era, nationality of the characters or even the country in which the original novel is based — Bride & Prejudice transports the story to India and introduces us to the Bakshi sisters. Though clearly based on the novel, Bride & Prejudice is a successful piece of transnational cinema, which uses the interracial relationship between the Bakshi’s second eldest daughter Lalita and white American Mark Darcy to discuss differences in race, tradition, and cultural imperialism. Of course it features a lot of singing and dancing, as any film dedicated to exploring social commentary should.

Writer and director Gurinder Chadha is renowned in her filmmaking for focusing on Indian women reconciling their culture and traditions with modern day living, usually prompted by the female protagonist living in the UK. Bride & Prejudice is no exception to this, apart from the location. The film primarily takes place in the Bakshi’s hometown of Amritsar but the family travels to Los Angeles, London, Windsor and Goa throughout the film — making the film a truly eclectic mix of both Bollywood and British Cinema. Chadha builds on the existing identity crisis within the original Pride & Prejudice and adds into the mix the clashing of cultures, expectations and a transatlantic love story. The story closely follows the novel; Elizabeth is replaced with Lalita (Aishwarya Rai), younger sister to Jaya (Namrata Shirodkar) and older sister to Maya and Lakhi. Lalita and Jaya meet Balraj (the Mr Bingley character, played by Naveen Andrews) and Will Darcy (Martin Henderson) at a spectacular wedding. Jaya and Balraj fall for each other in the first instance whereas (true to the novel) Lalita and Will spend the rest of the film misunderstanding each other, fighting and eventually declaring their love for one another.

Whilst we already know from their first meeting that Lalita and Will are going to end up together, a fascinating dynamic between them speaks volumes about the imperialist relationship between India and Europe/USA. It is through their relationship as people from two wholly different cultures that the film is able to explore just how perversely the West treats Indians and Indian culture. Whilst Jaya and Lalita are accompanying Balraj and Will on a trip to Goa, Will tells Lalita that his family plans on building a hotel in the area. He expects her to be pleased, assuming that she will be happy that his business will bring jobs to the area. Lalita, instead, is furious and talks at length about how the tourism industry is destroying the more rural parts of India. Lalita explains to Will that she can only see how the big hotel companies are draining the culture out of India, and that they want the experience of India without the Indian people. “Five star comfort with a bit of culture thrown in? Well, I don’t want you to turn India into a theme park.” We trust Lalita as our protagonist and we understand her views — the comparison between her home town of Amritsar and the beautiful tourist resort of Goa is proof enough that what she is saying is true. There is a clear divide in opinion about what Will Darcy believes is good for India, and what Lalita (the person who actually lives there) believes. It’s by no accident that Will Darcy is a white man trying to tell Lalita that he actually knows better than she does. Lalita herself mentions the history of British Imperialism within India, and accuses Will of doing the same with his family’s hotel business. Bride & Prejudice, although predominantly a feel-good film, doesn’t hold back with it’s thoughts on how Europe and America have systematically exploited the Indian people and land, and indeed continue to do so.

Throughout the film, the Bakshi parents’ main motivation is to marry off each of their daughters to a suitable husband. As Bride & Prejudice is an amalgamation of both British and Bollywood cinema, Will can almost be seen as a surrogate for Western audiences watching the film. Specifically, his view on arranged marriages. The arranged marriage is a slightly foreign concept for many viewers in Europe/USA in comparison to those watching the film in India, who would (generally) be more knowledgeable and understanding of the situation. Will speaks out about the concept, in a similar vein to how most Americans would feel — remarking how the idea of an arranged marriage is ‘backwards.’ The irony here of course is that in the original novel, the marriages are pretty much arranged for both Elizabeth and Jane. At least, their mother (in both Bride and Pride) is set on finding suitors for both girls, and each girl would only be allowed to get married with the permission of their father. The irony runs even deeper, when Lalita discovers that Will’s own mother is arranging him a marriage back in Los Angeles. Whilst Lalita accepts the differences and similarities within the two cultures, Will is unable to see past his ignorance and superiority to understand that the two of them are not so different or that the idea of an arranged marriage is not ‘backwards.’

Bride & Prejudice uses stylistic elements from both traditional Bollywood cinema with English dialogue and Western references as a metaphor for the interracial relationship between the two main characters. The visuals marry both types of cinema: we are treated to large scale dance numbers that are performed in English, or accompanied by a gospel choir on a beach in LA. If the technical elements of the individual national cinemas can come together, then so can Lalita and Will. The discourse within the film is almost postcolonial via the character of Lalita herself — she encompasses the traditional nationalism by performing traditional Bollywood choreographed sequences with her sisters and undergoing the conventional ‘love story’ narrative. Yet her views and opinions about the world she lives in are incredibly modern (particularly the song ‘No Life Without Wife’) which puts her at a unique crossroad.

Of course, these themes are surrounded by extravagant dance numbers, catchy songs and comedic dialogue. Despite its family-friendly, light-hearted approach, Chadha doesn’t hide the ideas about cultural imperialism. Bride & Prejudice proves that a film can be playful and funny but also make serious comments on race, tradition and culture. Its message is slightly diminished by the reconciliation of Lalita and Will at the end of the film — mostly because it takes very little time for Lalita to suddenly decide that Will is actually a nice guy. Most of Will’s niceness stems from the fact that the character of Johnny Wickham is worse than Will, putting him into a much better light in the Bakshi’s eyes. He does redeem himself and one of Bride & Prejudice’s accomplishments is that Lalita does not have to compromise her views and meet him halfway, like so many other flawed couples have to do. It is Will who changes his opinions completely and refuses to allow his family to build a hotel, much to Lalita’s happiness. It is coy, and the film ends with the double wedding of the two eldest sisters (as in the novel) but coyness doesn’t mean that it doesn’t speak volumes about the cross-cultural barrier that Lalita and (mostly) Will had to navigate around.

Recommended Reading:

Gurinder Chadha’s Bride & Prejudice: A Transnational Journey through Space & Time by Elena Oliete Aldea

Becky Kukla lives in London, works in film production, likes G&T’s, and watching every Netflix original series ever. She blogs about on-screen representation at her blog Femphile and writes for Film Inquiry.

Negotiating Race as the Female Indian Love Interest in ‘Bend It Like Beckham’ and ‘The Darjeeling Limited’

Both ‘Bend It Like Beckham’ and ‘The Darjeeling Limited’ examine Indian women and their romances with white men. Within the interracial relationships explored in these respective films, both Jess and Rita… are burdened with navigating deeply impressed racial boundaries as they move through a modern society.

This guest post by Allie Gemmill appears as part of our theme week on Interracial Relationships.

Through Western lenses, Indian women are often framed as an exotic and forbidden ideal. Depicted as embodying a degree of Eastern mysticism, rooted in a culture of patriarchal duty, the Indian woman as love interest or girlfriend is often paired with a white man who views her with a sense of “otherness.” It then falls to the Indian woman to negotiate a specific kind of Eastern-Western iconoclasm — a clash steeped in racial and cultural sentiments — in order to let her romance with a white man flourish. The white male-Indian female dynamic is also often portrayed as a threat to traditional Indian expectations of a woman marrying within her racial group and the emphasized gender roles she has been raised to conform to are challenged.

Both Bend It Like Beckham and The Darjeeling Limited examine Indian women and their romances with white men. Within the interracial relationships explored in these respective films, both Jess (Parminder Nagra) and Rita (Amara Karan) serve as love interests but not long-term romantic partners for their white male counterparts. They are burdened with navigating deeply impressed racial boundaries as they move through a modern society. Meanwhile, their white male love interests are allowed to indulge their romantic curiosities with relative ease. This is crucial to note because these white men are rarely challenged to share the burden of interracial courtship, free from the onus of cultural or racial expectations. For Indian women, as experienced here, it is difficult to separate race from amorous pursuit; race serves as a definitive and non-negotiable aspect of the relationships between the Indian women and white men.

BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM

In Bend It Like Beckham, protagonist Jess is torn between honoring her Punjabi Sikh Indian roots (as embodied in her strict parents and sister, who is marrying according to racial and cultural codes) and the English culture which she has embraced and surrounds herself with (as embodied in her love of soccer and her budding romance with her white coach, Joe). Although she bears the burden of fetishization from her English peers in conjunction with her pursuit of a soccer career and gendered/racial expectations from her family, Jess for the most part negotiates a coalition between the two insofar as she is able to pursue her personal ambitions. Jess is forced to reckon with a strict code of honor and respect for her family throughout the film, as outlined by her Indian culture, which the film positions as a threat to not only Jess’s happiness in soccer but also in her budding romance with Joe (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers).

Gender is constantly conflated with racially-based codes of conduct: Jess is repeatedly questioned by her mother and sister about why she would not eagerly desire to marry young and marry an Indian man. Her mother is quick to bawl her out for participating in soccer, here read as masculine and therefore thoroughly out of line with how Indian women should act in public. Jess is considered a reflection of her family’s morals at all times when she is in public and any time she acts according to her own desires, she risks shaming her family and threatening her sister’s impending nuptials. In this world, Jess bears the brunt of delicately mollifying her family while speaking for her “white/masculine” athletic ambitions.

Add to this a budding romance with Joe, a white Irishman, and Jess’s own racial and gender predicaments double. Through Joe’s eyes, Jess is positioned as an exotic “other,” a young Indian girl seemingly sheltered from the pleasures of contemporary British culture. During Jess’s “transformation” moment — when her friends lender her more revealing and sexy garb to wear out to a club in Berlin — the camera lingers on her body before cutting to Joe’s furtively intrigued looks. Despite there being other women of color in her soccer team, Jess is the only one treated as different from the rest, with other scenes depicting the bemusement her teammates have over her Indian culture. This moment seals the forbidden love that Jess and Joe will cultivate for the latter half of the film. As they find themselves drawn to each other, Joe is narratively allowed the ease to step in when necessary to speak on behalf Jess. Twice he makes speeches to her father about how deeply he cares for her and believes in her abilities as a soccer player. Both times Jess does not get the chance to contribute to the conversation between the men although her agreement is implied. Joe risks little in taking a romantic shine to Jess whereas Jess appears to risk everything. Furthermore, he is allowed to pursue her, however discreetly, without threat of losing his job or credibility.

As gender and race are tightly bound up together in Bend It Like Beckham, director Gurinder Chadha makes it clear that an interracial relationship of this specific dynamic (white man-Indian woman) is a sincere threat to a young Indian woman. Even when transplanted to the London suburbs, Jess and her family seem to live in a tight-knit Indian community seemingly bent on being hermetically sealed from white English life. This clash of racial and social ideologies make for the biggest villains to Jess’s own chance at happiness.

THE DARJEELING LIMITED

In The Darjeeling Limited, Rita is reduced to an object that Jack (Jason Schwartzman) is infatuated with while on vacation with his older brothers. Jack’s storyline is centered around a recent and gruesome breakup, leaving him vulnerable. Upon seeing Rita for the first time, while she makes the brothers comfortable, Jack firmly sets his sights on her. While Rita is a minor character in the adventures of the Whitman brothers, she can be read as a boldly fetishized representation of Indian women. In doing this, we place further burden on how Indian women are characterized onscreen.

Rita is presented as a modern and beautiful woman, but ultimately repressed, ostensibly by the Indian culture in which she was raised. She is seemingly trapped aboard the train, The Darjeeling Limited, with her boyfriend, an intense young Sikh man who runs the train with an iron fist. She is willing to bend the moral code by sneaking away with Jack to have sex (which she enjoys in the moment) but rebuffs him when he continues to make advances. She sneaks cigarettes in between service snacks and pouring tea. Albeit committed to her duties, she does them as if half-zombified, stating at one point that she has “got to get off this train.” She is deadened in a stylish way as only Wes Anderson creates his characters. In all of these little actions, Rita becomes Jack’s forbidden interracial-love-interest-cum-souvenir.

In addition to having little screen time, the script seems further set on reducing Rita to being a faceless trope when Jack returns to the trio’s train carriage, attempting to appear nonchalant after having sex with Rita mere moments after meeting her. Jack’s brother Francis (Owen Wilson) incredulously asks, “Did you just fuck that Indian girl?” It’s a small moment but effective in immediately redacting any shred of agency Rita may own. A white man simply lumping Rita into the throngs of Indian women that surround him betrays an intact colonial hierarchy as modern microagression. Jack does nothing to protest this categorization of his potential love interest and instead continues to pursue her, believing she may somehow heal him or make him feel better about himself for a time. Rita’s treatment as a cure-all to white male pain feels oddly preposterous, especially considering the film is set in a modern era. What right does Jack have to take so quickly to Rita in both a romantic or needy aspect? What entitles him? While Rita gives Jack a reason to believe there may be the stirrings of a romance, their love seems doomed not only because of his neediness and apathy to fully commit, but also because she seems wholly restricted by her relationship to a traditionally Indian man as well as her innate sense of duty to her work.

Amidst the flurry of lust flung upon her by Jack, Rita appears to be inured to this kind of attention. While she navigates her life in a position of literal service and subservience to the passengers of the train, she holds that place metaphorically as an Indian woman. In vocalizing her desire to escape the confines of the train, she negates a racially-inbred sense of second-class status as an Indian woman. While she is wholly defined by her race and gender in Darjeeling, she is imbued with a defiance as only modern women seem to possess. Jack is allowed to ply her with sex and cigarettes because he can temporarily indulge in the local fare; Rita, however, is living in a very real and very traditional Indian society, unable to escape or completely negotiate her duty with her desire.

It is perplexing to see that both films seem set on giving the impression that Indian society is ultimately restrictive and patriarchal to women. In reading these films (one made by an Indian woman born in Nairobi and raised in England, the other made by a white man from Texas), both exude the confinement of Indian women and their struggle to navigate a modern (read: white, Eurocentric) world amidst such strong ties to their racial background. It would be the hope that when Chadha placed Jess in the white world of suburban London and Anderson wrote Rita into her native India, we would see some characters reflective of these different but ultimately Western perspectives. Instead, both directors have unwittingly constructed their Indian women to abide by an implied universal gendered and racial code. As such, these cinematic Indian women are painted into a corner in juggling their race with their ambition and most importantly, their romantic desires.

Allie Gemmill is a film journalist based in Tampa, FL. She is the founder and creative director of The Filmme Guild, a feminist film salon dedicated to examining the intersections of women and film. Follow her on Twitter and Medium.

‘It’s A Girl’: The Importance of the Reproductive Justice Framework

The framework of reproductive justice was conceptualized by Black women to be a much broader, more sophisticated analysis of the various factors beyond individual choice, encompassing race, socioeconomic status, disability, and other intersections of oppression and marginalization. A very clear illustration of the necessity for replacing the choice framework with the reproductive justice framework lies in the issue of sex-selective abortions.

Written by Max Thornton.

It’s easy to be seduced by the rhetoric of choice. We all want to believe we’re free agents, exercising our will with maximum autonomy. Who wants to be the product of social forces and discursive systems that circumscribe the very possibilities of your existence before you’re even born?

The reality is, though, as much as we’d like to think otherwise, every choice a person makes is radically delineated by a vast web of socioeconomic, political, cultural, and material influences. Systemic change, then, isn’t simply a matter of individuals making different choices; nuanced, contextually-sensitive analysis of the many forces at play is crucial.

Reproductive justice isn’t as simple as choice and can’t be reduced to being “pro-choice.” The framework of reproductive justice was conceptualized by Black women to be a much broader, more sophisticated analysis of the various factors beyond individual choice, encompassing race, socioeconomic status, disability, and other intersections of oppression and marginalization. A very clear illustration of the necessity for replacing the choice framework with the reproductive justice framework lies in the issue of sex-selective abortions.

Evan Grae Davis’ 2012 documentary, It’s A Girl, attempts to analyze some of the factors at work in the issue of sex-selective abortions in India and China. The film’s great strength is its clear divide of focus, to examine in turn the different contexts of India and China, showing how the same issue in both countries has a quite distinct matrix of causes.

Fun fact: if you google this movie, you find pro-life websites love it. Sigh. — Fun fact: if you Google this movie, you find pro-life websites love it. Sigh.

In India, a heteropatriarchal tradition has united with rampant capitalism to produce a context in which sons are financially valuable while daughters are an economic drain. The payment of dowries is technically illegal, but that hasn’t put an end to the cultural practice of the bride’s family paying the groom’s, sometimes quite extravagantly. Consequently there is immense social, cultural, and economic pressure on women to provide sons.

The limitations of the choice framework are abundantly clear when the film shows a rural Indian woman talking openly and unrepentantly about killing her own female newborns: it’s a choice she made, sure, but this choice was circumscribed by so many discursive and material circumstances, the combination of poverty and patriarchy that keeps women wholly dependent on their husbands, the entrenched devaluing of female life, the failure of law and government authorities to enforce the laws that exist… I can’t help comparing the many women in the US who abort fetuses because they would be born with disabilities. Again, this is a choice they make, and it is (or should be) absolutely the pregnant person’s decision whether or not to continue being pregnant; however, it is a choice enacted in a cultural milieu that considers disabled lives not worth living, an economic milieu that treats disabled lives as a burden, a political milieu in which healthcare is so precarious that many families lack the resources to care for children with disabilities.

Similarly, in India there are very many factors at play, and the film might have benefited from engaging a critique of a few more of them, such as the compulsory heterosexuality and cissexism of treating every infant as though its birth-assigned sex will dictate its entire life course, and the unchecked capitalism that exacerbates the issue.

In China, the situation is quite different. The end result – sons are valuable, daughters are a drain – is the same, but the equation that leads to this result is not heteropatriarchal tradition plus capitalism, but heteropatriarchal tradition plus government control of reproduction. The one-child policy has been in place since 1979, with an exception for rural families whose first child is female – they can try again for a boy. Women who are found to be pregnant illegally face forced abortion and forced sterilization. (Again, I found myself irresistibly drawing comparisons closer to home, this time to the anti-abortion lobby in the US and its campaign to recriminalize abortion, perhaps willfully ignorant of the fact that forced birth is just as dystopian a violation as forced abortion.)

It’s A Girl is particularly strong in its analysis of China’s situation, both its roots and its ramifications. For example, the “gendercide” against female infants has resulted in a generation whose males vastly outnumber its women, and this has led to a spike in sex trafficking and the kidnapping of child brides. Concurrently, there is a young sub-society of undocumented children, who were born illegally and have no official existence and thus no access to healthcare, schooling, passports, and other benefits of citizenship.

Special mention of this supercool woman, who rescued an abandoned infant and who I want to be friends with.

A perfect film would perhaps have committed to a fuller analysis. At 64 minutes, this documentary runs a little short, and could easily have found time for a discussion of, say, the impact of globalization – which might have mitigated the occasional moment of awful hypocrisy and paternalism, such as the one interviewee who outright indicts these countries by comparison with (I paraphrase slightly) “countries where women are fully equal.” (Tell us more, Sam Harris.) Nonetheless, overall It’s A Girl is a solid popular introduction to a fraught topic, and not a bad entrypoint into thinking through reproductive justice issues with nuance and complexity.

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and tweets at @RainicornMax. The event where he saw this film was kind of weird, but he made a cool new friend. Hi, Lillian!

When Biopics Go Awry: ‘Bandit Queen’ as Rape Revenge

When considering female agents of violence in a film, there is a troublesome tendency that plays to the audience’s anxiety about a women disrupting the essentialist notion that women are naturally gentle and nurturing: the tendency to have the woman acting in response to sexual violence, that only after a woman is overpowered and assaulted can she find a place of violence in her. Once the naturalness of a woman is disrupted by an outside force—a (usually male) perpetrator—she is no longer required to be viewed as “womanly.”

This guest post by Colleen Lutz Clemens appears as part of our theme week on Rape Revenge Fantasies.

When reading articles about the rape revenge genre, one sees cited I Spit On Your Grave, Teeth and other western films. But I would like to put forth that Shekhar Kapur’s 1994 film Bandit Queen should be considered a rape revenge film, even if the film that is supposedly putting forth the “truth” exploits the rape of the main character Phoolan Devi, an Indian gang leader who was murdered in 2001, to drive the plot of the “biopic.”

Phoolan Devi herself did not authorize the making of the film depicting her life and filed a lawsuit against the filmmakers. In a 1999 interview with AkasaMedia, she bemoaned the fact that more people talked about the mythology of Phoolan Devi than of Phoolan herself: “It’s unfortunate that they don’t talk much about me, they don’t write much about me, the real Phoolan Devi. Of course the movie is also a part of the story of my life, but it’s not the real thing. I wish they could have done it more realistically. I also wonder why they focus so much on the movie, instead of on the real person.” When explaining why she filed the lawsuit, she explained, “The case is over, I’ve withdrawn it. What I wanted was that, in India, they shouldn’t show four scenes of the movie. One was the rape scene. They should not show that, because people feel very disturbed about it–society can’t take it.” Devi herself did not want the rape scene shown. This scene (and other shorter scenes of brutality against the character of Phoolan) works to transform the film from a biopic to a rape-revenge film; the protagonist’s actions are motivated by a desire to make her rapists suffer, leading to the climax of the film.

Halfway through the film, Phoolan is captured, thrown on a boat, and taken to an enemy’s hideout where her bloodied body is tossed into an outbuilding. The first man enters the building (1:14) and the viewer is on the floor with Phoolan as she watches him approach. A beam splitting the screen makes us feel trapped with her. Her feet are untied so her legs can be splayed. Her cries continue as the other men come to watch her being raped. The camera lingers on rusty debris between the rapists’ entrances and exits. The light softens on her battered face while the rest of the room is dark and dusty.

Man after man enters the building during the three-minute scene pierced by her cries and their grunts. The audience is to assume that the assaults last for another three days until the bloodied, naked Phoolan is forced to walk in front of the village, arriving at the well where she must fill the urn thrown at her feet.

Her main perpetrator, Thakur Shri Ram, grabs her by the hair and drags her through the square while young girls watch and receive the message that no woman should ever dare to desire a position of power in a gang.

From this point in the film, Phoolan becomes larger than life. As her body heals, her desire for revenge grows. She cultivates a new gang. She collects weapons. She earns the moniker of the hero, “The Bandit Queen.” When she arrives at a wedding attended by Shri Ram (1:37), she exacts her revenge. She has her gang line the men up so she can harass and beat them.

The sound of a girl child’s screaming permeates the scene. As Phoolan shoots the men, the camera cuts to the naked child wandering the scene. She and Phoolan are the only females present. The audience sees Phoolan’s intense desire for revenge in her eyes as she punches and kicks the men who raped her or stood by as she was raped. As the child screams, Phoolan’s gang shoots the men dressed in white, pulverizing them into bloody mounds. Gunshots are juxtaposed with the toddler’s cries. The camera follows Phoolan’s eyes as she watches the men being executed. The naked child stands at the well, an empty bucket behind her, forcing the viewer to connect the screams of Phoolan to the screams of the child, linking this scene to Phoolan’s rape earlier in the film. The scene ends as the child walks alone across puddles of blood.

Again, Phoolan Devi herself did not want the rape scene in the film. Yet the final rape scene becomes the defining moment in the film, the turning point when the character Phoolan begins her trajectory to becoming the legendary Bandit Queen. In the film’s depiction of Phoolan, she acts out of revenge and also helps other lower caste people along the way. Her motivating desire is to gun down those who raped her, who demeaned her, who humiliated her. Arundhati Roy, an Indian writer and activist, wrote a scathing piece in which she claims those responsible for the film silenced their subject and disallowed Devi from even having a claim to her own life story. In “The Great Indian Rape Trick,” she says the film should be entitled Phoolan Devi’s Rape and Abject Humiliation: The True half-Truth?, arguing that the “centerpiece” of the film—the rape scene—is exploitative and not “tasteful” as the critics have said. Mala Sen, the film’s screenwriter, told The Independent in a reply that Phoolan did give consent for the film and signed the contract willingly and argues that Roy herself is using Phoolan as a pawn in another ideological debate.

All of the debates leave me with the same questions: Why does Phoolan Devi need to be repeatedly raped in the film? Why does the film shift into the rape revenge genre instead of acting as the biopic that the filmmakers claimed it to be?

Is it so “unnatural” to see a woman leading a violent gang that we require a monstrous reason to allow us to rationalize her existence? Would audiences be unable or unwilling to go along with the narrative if there weren’t some reason, some thing we could all point to and say “Aha! That is why she isn’t acting like a woman anymore. Because the thing that made her a woman was taken away from her,” as if a woman cannot have access to violence as a form of resistance?

I teach The Bandit Queen along with Teeth and ask students to consider both as rape revenge films. While the latter is a little easier for students to connect with contextually, they are able to see the former for what it is: a rape revenge film. While not a successful biopic, as a rape revenge film The Bandit Queen offers the audience a satisfying conclusion following the genre’s plot and character development. Phoolan finds agency in violence and is able to make those who wronged her regret their actions.

Colleen Lutz Clemens is assistant professor of non-Western literatures at Kutztown University. She blogs about gender issues and postcolonial theory and literature at http://kupoco.wordpress.com/. When she isn’t reading, writing, or grading, she is wrangling her two-year old daughter, two dogs, and on occasion her partner.

‘Salma’: The Poetry of Repression and Seclusion

Salmai movie poster.

Written by Leigh Kolb

In the village of Thuvarankurichi in rural India, young Muslim girls are locked away once they start their periods. While their early years are filled with school and play, once puberty hits, they are taken away from the outside world and relegated to the confines of their family homes until they are married (which often happens soon after menses).

Salma was one of those girls. The internationally acclaimed documentary Salma explores her return back to the village after she has, despite innumerable odds, become an accomplished poet and politician.

Her determination is highlighted throughout the film, and no amount of dramatization is needed to convey the depths of despair for the women in this culture and the odds that were–and still are–against Salma.

Interviews with family members show how conflicted many of them are about Salma’s success. Her father says, “She’s a good girl, but she’s too clever.” Her aunt says also that Salma has always been “clever,” although she was also always “disobedient.” The women around her have poignant observations on what it means to be a woman in their society, but are unsure how to change it.

When Salma was removed from the outside world, relegated to a basement room with a small grate for a window, she was still desperate to learn and read. Groceries came wrapped in old newspapers, and she would dig them out of the trash so she had something to read. She was in despair over her situation, and she says the “anger was boiling inside me”–so she started writing poetry. Her poetry grew out of the intensity of the realization that her life was to “get married, have kids and die.”

Salma, a Tamil poet and politician.

She finally was forced to marry the man who had been chosen for her, and she tried to continue writing. She would keep a journal, and the journal would disappear. She would write on torn-up bits of paper and hide the paper and pens in boxes of sanitary napkins and under blouses–they would still disappear any time her husband found them. She finally discovered a place that she could hide her writing, and would smuggle it out to her mother, who would send them to a publisher.

We are able to follow Salma’s rise to power through a window of her world, which still isn’t perfect. Her husband says that he’s accepted her gift, but he clearly harbors a great deal of anger and resentment–their relationship appears cold and distant. Salma seems exhausted and tired of fighting in many scenes, except when she has the opportunity to talk to young girls about their plans and futures.

Salma consistently encourages girls to stay in school, and is most alive and exuberant when speaking to young women about their educations. Her heart clearly breaks as she watches other young girls get whisked out of school and into arranged marriages. She is working through her writing and through her leadership to empower and educate young women and has success in preventing child brides, but all too often, the traditional culture wins.

One of the most poignant and difficult aspects of this film is the complexity of Salma’s family members. Her mother was both her captor and her rescuer–she took her out of school and locked her up, but also helped her get her poetry published. Salma’s husband is angry and for years destroyed her work, but he now supports her political and writing careers. It was difficult as a viewer to try and condemn her family, because each of them is portrayed as a complex human being with clear motivations. It’s incredibly powerful when, as a viewer, you are left with the heaviness of a complex reality.

Perhaps the most disturbing part of the film is hearing the next generation of men speak. Salma’s nephew doesn’t want his mother (Salma’s sister) going to the movies, and he’s critical of Salma’s choice not to wear a head scarf. He goes on and on about how burkas are women’s rights, and they should wear them for “men and society.” He doesn’t want his mother going to the cinema “for her own good,” and expresses disappointment in Salma. Salma’s sons, too, seem to disapprove of her and she says that being in the village turned them against her.

While Salma’s successes and continued influences on women’s lives are powerful forces, the battle is not won. The film does a beautiful job showing that.

Salma still must confront resistance from her family and the next generation.

It’s also important to note that the practice of shutting girls away–literally and figuratively–upon puberty is not relegated to conservative Muslim cultures. In Salma, a young Hindu girl is shown getting married, stunned and sick-looking. In America, there is the Christian Patriarchy movement, which keeps girls in the home and away from higher education. While Salma captures the devastation of patriarchy in one little corner of the world, the ideals and practices are not confined to India by any stretch of the imagination.

Filmmaker Kim Longinotto has spent her career highlighting the plight of oppressed women, and she does so in Salma with grace and precision. Salma doesn’t simply present the life of a Tamil poet; instead, it is a suspenseful unfolding of a complicated story without a wholly happy ending. Salma–the film and the poet–shows the great power and limitations of one woman who takes a stand against the confines of her environment. It’s a reminder of the great strides that still must be taken around the world for women’s equality. As Salma tirelessly points out, education is where it all must begin. And in a larger culture that has a history of keeping women from literacy and silencing their voices, this is an imperative step.

Salma is a selection from Women Make Movies, an organization that “facilitates the production, promotion, distribution and exhibition of independent films and videotapes by and about women.”

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

Women of Color In Film and TV: Conflicting Thoughts On ‘Sita Sings The Blues’

By Myrna Waldron

In the film’s opening sequence, Sita rubs Rama’s leg.

So before I start, let’s address the elephant in the room. This film is about The Ramayana, an important text in Hindu mythology, and primarily focuses on Sita, an avatar of the goddess Lakshmi, who is married to Rama, an avatar of Vishnu. But the film was written and directed by a white animator, Nina Paley. There is some effort to represent the story and Indian culture faithfully (and the only non-Indian members of the cast play white characters), but the sense of humour and deliberate contrasting between ancient tragedy and modern comedy leaves an undeniably western perspective on this legend. So, yes, this film counts as cultural appropriation. That is not exactly what I’m going to be talking about today, since I am frankly unqualified to do so. I have read objections to the film by Indians, and they naturally are far more knowledgable about the Ramayana and Hinduism in general. I’m just a white atheist who went to Catholic school, and my only previous knowledge of the Ramayana is from a very shortened version I read in a fairy tale collection as a child.

But even considering the cultural appropriation problem, I still like this film. There is no media which is not problematic in some fashion. You can still like problematic things provided you recognize and understand what the problematic elements of the film are. Sita Sings the Blues is beautifully animated, quite funny, entertaining, and introduced me to the music of Annette Hanshaw. But the concerns that Indians have brought up about the film’s depiction of the Ramayana are valid. Therefore I am going to try to approach this film in the most balanced way I can – I want to focus on the things that are great about it, but also criticize the parts that are problematic. If you are unfamiliar with the film, or have not seen it in a while, it has been released under a Creative Commons licence and is available to watch for free on the film’s official website, YouTube, and Hulu.

“Big, round, firm, juicy…LOTUSES!”

The Good:

I love that this is a successful indie film written, directed, edited and produced by a single woman, Nina Paley, and the film is about a woman of colour. You can really tell this was a labour of love for her, and it’s an incredible achievement that one animator was able to do a feature length film on her own. The film is also explicitly meant to be feminist – in a long summary of the film that she released to the press, she described Sita Sings the Blues as “a tale of truth, justice, and a woman’s cry for equal treatment.” I hope to see more films helmed by women, and not just independent ones. I know that women of colour have an even harder time getting recognized as filmmakers, and I would like to see this same story retold from someone who grew up in Hindu culture, as opposed to a westerner. WOC filmmakers often do not get given a chance to succeed, as they are never given funding nor marketing, and naturally blamed for their films’ financial failure. Quite a vicious cycle. I would love to see more ways for feminist film lovers to discover films made by women and women of colour.

One of my favourite things in the world is animation, so this film’s widely varying animation styles (and narrative styles that change with the visuals) was such eye candy for me. If I’m counting correctly, there are 6 styles of animation used in this film. The film starts with a stylized Sita rubbing Rama’s leg (depicted in the animated gif at the top), led by stylized and symbolic depictions of the gods. It then rotates into other animation styles. Nina Paley’s autobiographical portions are done in a scribbly, loose style. The 3 Indians who narrate the story are represented as shadow puppets. The Ramayana characters’ dialogue is shown through two different forms of Indian-style artwork – one with lots of detail and bright colours, one with wide, expressive eyes and simple use of colour. The bulk of the film is devoted to Annette Hanshaw jazz songs as “performed” by Sita to complement the narrative. The sequences are presented in a modern vector graphic style, with lots of circles used in the character designs, and is even more stylized in presentation than the introductory sequence. Finally, one scene depicts an Indian woman drawn in white stencil dancing in flames and singing to Rama (it’s kind of hard to describe). Because the visual and narrative styles rotate so quickly (no portion is over 5 minutes) the story keeps you interested and you never stay in one style long enough to get bored.

I love the Annette Hanshaw sequences, but I have to say, my favourite parts of the film are when three English-speaking Indians from various parts of the country, Aseem Chhabra, Bhavana Nagulapally, and Manish Acharya, narrate the story of The Ramayana and are represented as shadow puppets. I love listening to the very subtle differences in their accents, and how the oral tradition of the story has subtle variations depending on cultural location. I’m just sorry they weren’t identified by name (I had to use the Wiki to credit them) so I could tell them apart beyond “Two males, one female.” Because their discussions are unscripted and they are reciting the story from memory, they make lighthearted jokes about the story, modernize some of the language (one describes Sita telling her kidnapper Ravana that his “ass is grass.”), argue mildly about details and names, and point out some of the plot holes. I laughed out loud when the three agreed that Sita left a trail of jewelry for Rama to follow, then one wondered how much jewelry Sita was wearing to be able to drop jewels for that long a distance. In response, another one says, “Don’t challenge these stories!” I also found it interesting that as they told the story, they questioned some of its details. Ravana is supposedly unquestionably the villain, yet had a past of being learned and a noble warrior. They wondered why he would be so out of character as to kidnap another man’s wife. One also marvelled that the supposed villain did not do the cliche thing and force himself upon Sita. I think questioning and analysis of one’s own culture is a good thing, so I really ate up the shadow puppets’ discourse on The Ramayana.

Probably the most popular sequences of the film are the stylized vector graphics of an impossibly curvy (she’s all boobs and hips and almost no waist) Sita “singing” jazz and blues songs performed by 1920s singer Annette Hanshaw. Hanshaw has this incredible ability to filter deep emotion through her voice, and having Sita perform these songs gives her a necessary amount of emotional depth. All we know of Sita via the narration is that she is absolutely devoted to her husband, no matter what. The Hanshaw songs thus have Sita expressing joy, adoration, heartbreak, hope, and acceptance, while still maintaining that necessary devotion to Rama. This is important since, no matter how you approach the story, Sita has a very tough time and is treated unfairly – we know that Ravana never touched her and Sita has only ever been with Rama, but she is still punished for even the possibility that another man touched her. The woman whose agency was taken from her should be given a way to express herself, so the blues sequences are a nice compromise.

Finally, the gif above depicts another one of the better points of the film, which is its sense of humour. In this scene, Ravana’s sister is trying to tempt him to kidnap Sita by describing her beauty. She says, “Her skin is fair like the lotus blossom. Her eyes are like lotus pools. Her hands are like, um, lotuses. Her breasts are like big, round, firm, juicy…LOTUSES!” Sita’s story is unquestionably a tragedy, so the little sprinklings of humour here and there keep the movie from being emotionally draining. I like the use of deliberate anachronisms to emphasize the differences between the ancient Indian setting, and the modern culture of today. Annette Hanshaw’s songs reference technologies that naturally wouldn’t have existed in ancient times, so Paley instead has Sita humorously hold a banana next to her ear when Annette sings about using a phone. And as I mentioned before, the little jokes that the shadow puppet narrators make (and their disagreements on plot details and names) help to make the narrative as lighthearted as possible. I admit I really dislike films that depress me, so this narrative decision appealed to me.

Sita sings “Mean To Me” while going through her trial by fire

The Problematic:

Okay, now for the flaws. The autobiographical bits retelling the end of Nina Paley’s marriage are terrible. They drag the story to a screeching halt, the loose, drab and scribbly animation style contrasts far too much with the sumptuous and colourful styles used in the other animation sequences, and the story seems far too biased towards Nina’s perspective. I naturally don’t know the details of what really happened, but I have trouble believing that Nina’s former husband Dave is as selfish, heartless, sexless and aloof as she depicts him as being. There had to have been a reason he suddenly lost interest in her beyond their being separated by his job for some months. And I feel so uncomfortable discussing a woman’s personal life, and yet she put this stuff right in her movie, so I can’t help but talk about it! I really think that the autobiographical portions should not have been in the film. It might have been cathartic for her, but it’s awkward for everyone else.

Another big problem with the autobiographical portions is that I think it’s going too far for Ms. Paley to directly identify herself and the end of her marriage with Sita and her marital problems. Sita and Rama are more-or-less Hindu gods, so for a mortal white woman to compare herself with them has to come off as kind of blasphemous and egotistical. I’m glad she found comfort and inspiration in reading The Ramayana, but I would have left that revelation as perhaps a footnote or just a single scene. The autobiographical bits are interspersed throughout the film to contrast/compare directly to the chapters of Sita’s story, so you’re quite obviously supposed to identify the two women together. There are lots of western films where a character is meant to be a Jesus analogue or is Messianic in some way, but it is almost always a symbolic comparison, not an overt one. There’s no attempt at symbolism here, and I have to wonder if it would still be acceptable even if it was purely symbolic.

Ms. Paley is also unfortunately channelling her grief and anger over the end of her marriage through her depiction of Rama. This is supposed to be the most virtuous and wise man living, and yet the film depicts him as cruel, cold, weak-willed and stubborn. I, too, would question his supposed perfection after he continued to doubt Sita after she already passed his trial by fire (depicted in the gif above). But I think his character has to have been exaggerated somewhat in this film. Some of the people writing objections have argued that in The Ramayana, Rama was extremely broken-hearted and reluctant to banish Sita, but she loved him so much she persuaded him to send her away so that he could be an effective ruler for his people. That’s some extraordinarily self-sacrificing behaviour on Sita’s part, but it seems much more plausible considering the first half of the story is emphasizing how much they absolutely love each other.

This negative depiction of Rama goes as far as to basically make him the real villain of the story instead of Ravana. He is even shown kicking, pushing and walking over Sita while she is heavily pregnant. WHOA. It’s really going way too far to depict a man of being a domestic abuser if there isn’t any evidence for it. Again, this is an avatar of a god, and even though he has made a mistake in doubting Sita and sending her away (putting his own reputation amongst his people above the love of his wife), this exaggeration of his character is offensive. When Sita bears Rama’s twin sons and they are raised to praise him, they even sing a sarcastic song about how great and wonderful Rama is and that his word should never be questioned. I get the feminist attempt to question why the man’s judgement is always accepted above the rights of the woman, but the questioning should be directed at their own culture, not someone else’s. Just like we don’t like it when other cultures judge us by their standards, we don’t have the right to judge them by ours either.

The film’s biggest problem is that it is judging ancient Hindu mythology and custom by modern western feminist standards. If a modern western story came out where a wife is kidnapped, her kidnapper demands to marry her but does not rape her, she is rescued, her husband fears that she has been “tainted,” she proves she hasn’t, and yet is still suspected by others, and is ultimately banished while pregnant with her husband’s sons, and the husband is still depicted as the hero of the story, I would understand the virulent criticism. But because this is the story of the Ramayana, it’s not fair for a white feminist to start complaining about it, and then create a film which reflects mostly her views without making it clear she’s taking liberties with the story. Yes, it’s obvious that Sita never sang jazz songs, but it’s not so obvious that Rama wasn’t actually as cold and cruel to her as he is depicted in this film.

This unfortunately reeks of the cliche where white feminists go to women of colour and start telling them that they are oppressed by their culture and condescendingly try to “free” them from it. Women of colour can speak for themselves and make up their own minds. That’s what intersectionality is all about – we do not tell people of other cultures (and gender identities, and sexualities, etc etc) how they’re supposed to act and think. The first time I saw this film a few years ago, I was just as angry at Rama as Ms. Paley wants me to be, because I was completely ignorant of the story. It wasn’t until I started researching for this review that I found out that, wait a sec, she’s not depicting him accurately or fairly. When you have the influence to present another religion’s story to an audience that is likely going to be unfamiliar with it, the responsible thing to do is to either depict it accurately, or make it clear that it is an exaggeration. Sita Sings the Blues’ messages have unfortunately been diluted because of this strongly problematic element.

So while my feelings on Sita Sings the Blues are conflicted, I still think that it is a well made film despite its flaws. I encourage people to make up their own minds about it. If nothing else, the film gets us to consider differences in cultures and religions, and white women’s feminism vs the feminism/womanism of women of colour.

I don’t think Nina Paley is intentionally racist, she’s just fallen victim to one of the big problems of western culture where the white person forgets that their perspective and opinion is not the only valid one. The vast majority of people won’t think about this sort of thing unless they immerse themselves into social justice culture, and even then it’s quite difficult to adjust your way of looking at the world. As one poignant Tumblr post said (and I’m paraphrasing), in social justice spaces we try to explore deep intersectional concepts like the erasure of trans* people of colour. In the “real” world we struggle to explain to people that ‘feminism’ is not a bad word.

I also do not think that the film should be banned or censored like some right-wing groups have demanded, but I do think Paley should have made it more clear that she was taking some really strong liberties with the story. I have struggled for weeks trying to figure out how I was going to approach this film, so I hope I have been as fair as possible in my review. If nothing else, I have gained yet another new perspective and understanding of this film via my research on it, and that’s the best I can hope for.

P.S. I am trying a new experiment where I decorate the review with custom-made animated gifs of the film/show I’m reviewing, rather than just grabbing stuff off of Google Images. Please let me know if you like this new format, or whether you’d prefer static screenshots instead.

Myrna Waldron is a feminist writer/blogger with a particular emphasis on all things nerdy. She lives in Toronto and has studied English and Film at York University. Myrna has a particular interest in the animation medium, having written extensively on American, Canadian and Japanese animation. She also has a passion for Sci-Fi & Fantasy literature, pop culture literature such as cartoons/comics, and the gaming subculture. She maintains a personal collection of blog posts, rants, essays and musings at The Soapboxing Geek, and tweets with reckless pottymouthed abandon at @SoapboxingGeek.

Women of Color in Film and TV: Thoughts on ‘The Mindy Project’ and Other Screen Depictions of Indian Women

The Mindy Project

Guest post written by Martyna Przybysz.

I was born and bred in Poland, a country that has for years struggled to embrace foreign cultures, and despite its growing tolerance and diversity across all aspects of society, including mainstream media, you wouldn’t quite describe it as multicultural. Having gotten the film bug at a young age, and having a film buff for a father, I have been exposed to the World and European cinemas early. Yet the topic of cultural diversity never as much as brushed upon the surface of mine and my peers’ discussions on film. Yes, there was Almodovar, and… there was Almodovar. It wasn’t until I have moved to the UK, back in 2005 that the term “ethnic minority” was first made known to me. Few years on, and I started flirting with the idea of joining the media industry. And this is when I realised that – despite an ever-present and rather obvious diversity of women in the world as such, as well as the labor market – the lack of women of varied ethnic backgrounds in the media, be it on screen or behind it, was striking. The Asian women being one of the under-represented groups.

Gurinder Chadha’s It’s a Wonderful Afterlife

The first year of my film studies was also the time of assimilation into a multiracial society, and the time when I was introduced to the insightful work of Gurinder Chadha, a British director of Indian-Kenyan origin. Chadha is known for her work depicting the lives of Indians, and more specifically, Indian women residing in the UK. Her films – such as my absolute favourite Bhaji on the Beach, and widely recognized Bend it Like Beckham – have not only focused on young South Asian women and the dilemmas they faced, confronted with what is expected of them by their community, but most importantly, they explored the topic of female bonding and intergenerational ties.

The women of Monsoon Wedding, directed by Mira Nair

The above topics were also being discussed in parallel by Indian director Mira Nair. There was the exploration of the implications that being in an interracial relationship in the ’90s America comes with, in Mississippi Masala, as well as that of secrets and conflict in a multigenerational Indian family in Monsoon Wedding. Nair and Chadha offered me a unique opportunity to explore their amazing and colorful culture, that I have otherwise wouldn’t be able to get to know so closely. But what I most liked about the work of these two women of South Asian origin, was the very first thing I appreciate in female-directed films in general: the fact that they focus on female characters and do not shy away from exposing and exploring their flaws.

Fast forward to 2012 and along came Mindy Lahiri. Or rather Vera Chokalingam, known to all by her stage name, Mindy Kaling. I know that Mindy was widely recognized way before The Mindy Project from The Office and I know that its devotees will want to assail me for this, but… I haven’t seen a single episode! But judging by her excellent writing and acting in her auteur project – I am sure that she was flawless.

Truth be told, I only discovered Kaling last year, upon my first trip to the U.S. in Autumn 2012. Hoping for an easy plane read, I bought her book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (and other concerns) and I was not disappointed. Mindy’s writing is light, funny, and with just the right amount of self-deprecation. And so is her show.

#themindyproject

Having gotten to know Mindy ‘the creator’, Mindy ‘the product of thus creation’ didn’t come as a surprise to me. She’s quirky, a bit ditzy, could easily pass as innocent, and definitely as naïve, and she is not particularly self-critical (take the latest episode’s taxi cab commercial featuring Dr Lahiri dressed in a dog’s costume and conversing with a puppet named Erica, the same commercial that gets her the highest ‘P’ rating, meaning ‘pity rating’).

“I just need to ride out this minor humiliation until I find my Kanye.”

Most of all of – Mindy is an extremely likable character. Despite her naivety, she is a smart and ambitious woman, finding fulfillment in her career, and yes, despite occasional bumps here and there in relation to men, she does value herself, which is a very powerful message on its own.

“It’s so weird being my own role model.”

Mindy’s career is not a topic yet discussed in depth – much of the in-work plot evolves around her competing with the two male doctors at her practice, or more recently, two male midwives from a rival practice – but her love life can be summarised in one phrase, that goes something like “the endless pursuit of romance.” As the show progresses, we discover that this is not all that Mindy is about. She values friendships, and yes, to our awe, she does value her patients in a completely selfless way (take episode 15 “Mindy’s Minute” as an example of her good-doctor attitude).

A majority of feminist statements made in the show have nothing to do with race. Similarly to Hannah from Girls, she is a full-figured lady, unobnoxiously proud of it (she wears dresses that accentuate her figure but rarely reveals her cleavage), and very much aware of it. She refers to herself in a belittling manner on a number of occasions, such as in episode one when she answers her phone on a date saying, “Do you know how difficult it is for a chubby 31-year-old woman to go on a legit date with a guy who majored in economics at Duke?.” So, there is a healthy dose of self-awareness. Or is there? I forever struggle with the concept of weight and bodily image of women on screen – the general consensus, according to the media, is that thin equals beautiful. Therefore it is always so ‘refreshing’ and ‘bold’ to see a ‘bigger’ female character on screen. I simply find those statements annoying. I dream of a day when any woman on screen will be considered beautiful for her individual qualities and features, rather than being seen and described as ‘something’ in comparison to ‘something else’.

Going back to the Indian culture – as already established, Mindy approaches everything with self-deprecating humour, like in the latest episode, when offered an opportunity to present medical news in her new pitiful persona (see: paragraph six), she fatastises of this being the beginning of her celebrity doctor dream coming true, and says to her co-workers “can you guys believe it… me, the child of immigrants…”. I mean, you gotta laugh. There is, however, a thin line between mocking one’s own culture and playing on the well-known stereotypes like Kaling, and overdoing it, like in New Girl, where Schmidt’s obsession for Cece’s ethnicity goes beyond tasteful at times. Mindy’s ethnicity does not really matter to her or the viewer, unless it is convenient for her to play with it in a stereotypical way (like when she makes authoritative statements about how Black guys love Indian women), which in my opinion, she does with a comedic grace.

Nonetheless, the former show touches upon such issues as arranged marriage and the compromises that Asian women must make in order to remain in good graces of their family. With Mindy, on the other hand, we never really learn much about her family, or what was expected of her, but the sole fact that she is a doctor, and expects her brother to become an educated professional himself, brings us back to the “child of immigrants” syndrome. Maybe because she is already so Westernised there is nothing to really rebel against, and the cultural aspect falls to the background. Nothing that Mindy does bends the rules quite as much as what Jesminder did in Bend it Like Beckham, but then, the times have changed.

Mindy Kaling as Mindy Lahiri

Mindy Kaling is the creator of The Mindy Project, as well as the main writer on the show. There is no question that she’s witty, talented, utterly adorable, and challenges, however subtly, some most common cultural stereotypes ingrained in the audiences’ minds by the media. It is not a show for everyone, for sure. But it is an entertaining show, that can find its audience amongst both, men and women.

Let’s face it, we love quirky and goofy characters. Deep down we all hope we are more adorable than pitiful when we find ourselves in embarrassing situations. Does it matter then what colour/ethinicty/gender the characters are? And if we say that it doesn’t, why aren’t there more female Indian protagonists like Mindy Lahiri on the big and small screen? And how is this astounding imbalance a reflection of the melting pot that our society is today? That is beyond me. And so the debate continues.

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Martyna is a Pole living in London, UK. She works in media and the arts. A sucker for portrait photography and a salted caramel cheesecake. This is her blog: http://martynaprzybysz.tumblr.com.

LGBTQI Week: ‘Fire’: Part One of Deepa Mehta’s ‘Elements Trilogy’

This review by Editor and Co-Founder Amber Leab previously appeared at Bitch Flicks on November 21, 2011.

Fire (1996)

Fire is the first film in Deepa Mehta’s Elements Trilogy (Earth and Water follow). Made in 1996, it focuses on a middle-class family in present-day (funny how I still think of the 1990s as “present day,” despite the global changes of the past fifteen years) India.

The film centers around two married couples–Ashok (Kulbhushan Kharbanda) and his wife Radha (Shabana Azmi), and Ashok’s brother Jatin (Javed Jaffrey) and his wife Sita (Nandita Das)–who run a carryout restaurant and video store, and who share a home with the brothers’ mother, Biji (Kushal Rekhi), and their employee, Mundu (Ranjit Chowdhry). Jatin and Sita are newlyweds, but we quickly learn that Jatin loves another woman (Julie, a Chinese-Indian woman who has perfected an American accent and dreams of returning to Hong Kong), and married a “traditional Indian woman” out of pressure from his brother and mother.

The film offers the womens’ perspectives on the conflicts between desire and duty, and between tradition and the realities of a modern India.

As with almost any film centering on family drama and dynamics, we see the tensions simmering beneath the surface as the film focuses on the two women and their lack of fulfillment from their marriages. Mehta, in the DVD’s Director’s Notes for Fire, states,

I wanted to make a film about contemporary, middle-class India, with all its vulnerabilities, foibles and the incredible extremely dramatic battle that is waged daily between the forces of tradition and the desire for an independent, individual voice.

More than 350 million Indians belong to the burgeoning middle-class and lead lives not unlike the Kapur family in Fire. They might not experience exactly the same angst or choices as these particular characters, but the confusions they share are very similar–the ambiguity surrounding sexuality and its manifestation and the incredible weight of figures (especially female ones) from ancient scriptures which define Indian women as pious, dutiful, self-sacrificing, while Indian popular cinema, a.k.a. “Bollywood”, portrays women as sex objects (Mundu’s fantasy).

To capture all this on celluloid was, to a large part, the reason I wanted to do Fire. Even though Fire is very particular in its time and space and setting, I wanted its emotional content to be universal.

Sita learns very early in her marriage that her husband is in love with Julie–he doesn’t hide the relationship from her–and she seeks solace and comfort from Radha. Radha hasn’t been intimate with her husband in 13 years; when Ashok learned she was unable to conceive, he sublimated his desires (and began channeling a good bit of their income) into religious study with his swami. The friendship between Sita and Radha soon evolves into a sexual relationship, and when the women are found out by their family, they must decide whether to obey tradition or follow their hearts.

Radha and Sita

The film explores what traditional marriage has done to alienate these women–particularly Radha–from their own desires. The desire for intimacy and sex, sure, but also the desire to live their lives for themselves, rather than for their husbands. My reading of the film is certainly from a Western perspective, however, and you could argue that the film is about discovering desire (rather than reconnecting to it after a period of alienation), since the traditional, conservative Hindu/Indian culture didn’t allow much–if any–space for individual desire for women. Sita embodies changes in the society, as she comes from a traditional family, but is more critical of the traditional rituals and more in touch with her body and her desires. (When we first meet her, for example, she playfully tries on her new husband’s pants and dances around their bedroom, unashamed of her body.) Sita is also the one who initiates a physical relationship with Radha.

Depicting a lesbian relationship on film fifteen years ago proved hugely controversial, and Fire was immediately banned in Pakistan, and soon after pulled from Indian cinemas for religious insensitivity. Although the film twice passed the Indian censor board–they requested no editing, and no scenes removed–violent protests caused movie houses to stop showing the film. In “Burning Love,” Gary Morris writes,

The reaction of some male members of the audience was so violent that the police had to be called. “I’m going to shoot you, madam!” was one response. According to Mehta, the men who objected couldn’t articulate the word “lesbian” — “this is not in our Indian culture!” was as much as they could bring themselves to say.

It isn’t only the tangible pleasures of a lesbian relationship that created such heated reactions, though that’s certainly the most obvious reason. This beautifully shot, well-acted film is a powerful, sometimes hypnotic critique of the rigid norms of a patriarchal, post-colonial society that keeps both sexes down.

The controversy surrounding the film may have superseded the film itself–which is beautifully shot, heartbreaking, and even darkly comedic at times. Fire contains so many elements that I love in film: strong female characters, an exploration of complex issues that is never oversimplified and that never leads to individuals being labeled good or evil (although they certainly behave in good and/or evil ways), and immersion into a culture that isn’t entirely familiar to me. Speaking to a Western audience, Mehta has stated that one of her goals in filmmaking is to “demystify India,” its culture and its traditions. Fire complicates our understanding of a traditional patriarchal culture, and throws into sharp relief the ways these traditions impact women in particular.

Again, here’s Mehta on Fire:

We women, especially Indian women, constantly have to go through a metaphorical test of purity in order to be validated as human beings, not unlike Sita’s trial by fire.

I’ve seen most of the women in my family go through this, in one form or another. Do we, as women, have choices? And, if we make choices, what is the price we pay for them?

***

There is a ton of information online about Fire. Here are some selected articles for further reading:

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Amber Leab is a writer living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds a Master’s degree in English & Comparative Literature from the University of Cincinnati and a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature & Creative Writing from Miami University. Outside of Bitch Flicks, her work has appeared in The Georgetown Review, on the blogs Shakesville, Opinioness of the World, and I Will Not Diet, and at True Theatre.

LGBTQI Week: The Good, the Bad, and the Other in Lesbian RomComs

This is a guest post by Gwendolyn Beetham.

I have a confession: I love bad lesbian romantic comedies. I once had a summer where I watched little else, delighting in the bad hair, worse puns, and silly sex scenes.

Before I begin, I want to offer a point of clarification. When I say that I enjoy “bad” lesbian romantic comedies, I do so because the unfortunate truth is that there is little else (see here). But it is also true that, until we have a bigger pot to choose from, we can’t be too picky.

The bone I’d like to pick here is not regarding bad dialogue or unrealistic sex scenes, but with the depiction of race, religion, and culture in lesbian romcoms to date. And with that, another disclosure: I am not a film critic or scholar. What I am is a queer feminist academic (and self-disclosed lover of bad lesbian film). And what I’ve observed in lesbian romcoms is a noticeable pattern of “othering” when it comes to the acceptance of homosexuality.

There has been a lot of work in feminist and queer theory lately on the concept of “othering,” most prominently with the work on homonationalism, a concept first coined by Jaspir Puar. Without getting too academicy, the concept describes the way in which Western-based understandings of homosexual rights and acceptance are pitted against “other” cultures’ lack of rights/acceptance. It goes without saying that many of these countries themselves (the US is at the top of this list) do not extend full rights to the queer community. However, in positioning themselves against “others,” (white) Western cultures try to promote a more “liberal” and “democractic” showing of acceptance that proves that they are more “advanced” than “other” cultures. I think that this concept has great relevance for the way that lesbian films deal with race, class, religion, and culture.

Movie poster for Chutney Popcorn

The first example I’ll use to illustrate this phenomenon is the 1999 film Chutney Popcorn, set in New York, and centered around the Indian-American Reena and her white girlfriend Lisa. Although Reena’s sister is married to a white man, which their mother accepts, she “draws the line” at Reena’s lesbianism. Lisa’s mother is completely supportive – in a role almost as annoying in its supportiveness as Reena’s mother’s is in its disproval. The dualistic division of acceptance – white = accepting/brown = disproving – is clear.

In the hopes of gaining her mother’s acceptance, Reena offers to be the surrogate mother for her sister’s child. High jinx ensue. I won’t ruin the ending here (honestly it might be worth watching if you haven’t), but let’s just say that the more traditional characters in the film “evolve” towards the “right” way of thinking by the conclusion.

Shelley Conn as Nina and Laura Fraser as Lisa in Nina’s Heavenly Delights

Another example of the “othering” phenomenon is found in the 2006 Nina’s Heavenly Delights. While set in Glasgow instead of New York, Nina’s Heavenly Delights also features an Indian/white lesbian couple. Nina, the Scottish-Indian half of the couple, has returned to Glasgow from London, where she ran away to avoid an arranged marriage. She promptly falls for the white Scottish Lisa (apparently the name “Lisa” is code for white lesbian…), under the disapproving eyes of her family. Again, not to give away the ending, but you might guess that there is an “evolving” understanding of sexuality by the film’s end here as well.

The us/them othering and ethnic stereotyping in this film is all the more disappointing as it is directed and co-written by Pratibha Parmar. Parmar is a documentarian primarily known – in feminist circles at least! – for the 1993 film Warrior Marks, produced by and featuring Alice Walker. (If you haven’t seen that one, you should check it out as well – and watch for the cameo by Tracy Chapman, Walker’s partner at the time.)

The films Saving Face (2004)  and I Can’t Think Straight (2008; and, yes, that really is the title) also feature disapproval from “traditional” families – Chinese-American in Saving Face, and Jordanian and British-Indian in I Can’t Think Straight. Although the films do not feature white partners with which to contrast the lack of acceptance from their families, cultural stereotypes and the process of othering nevertheless abound in both films.

In offering this critique, I do not want to suggest that cultural, regional, religious, class, and racial nuances in understandings of sexuality do not exist, nor do I think that directors/writers should start to gloss over these elements in their films. What I want to stress is that these nuances are not so black and white (no pun intended). The reality is that, sometimes, white lesbians are shunned from their families of birth, and black lesbians are embraced. And some brown lesbians are not rejected from their religious communities, but quite the opposite. These alternative narratives are not reflected in lesbian film.

It is refreshing then, that the pot of lesbian films to choose from is growing. For example, though technically not a romcom, the recent, and critically-acclaimed, film Pariah is a good example of how racial nuances can be dealt with on screen, showing that lesbians do not live in the “all or nothing” world that previous films suggest. We can only hope that the future of lesbian film will offer more realistic depictions of race, culture, and sexuality.

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Gwendolyn Beetham is an independent scholar, the editor of The Academic Feminist, and a semi-professional lesbian film watcher. She lives in Brooklyn. Follow her on twitter: @gwendolynb

Reproduction & Abortion Week: Undesired

This piece on Undesired, by Martyna Przybysz, originally appeared at Bitch Flicks on March 26, 2012 as part of our Biopic and Documentary Series.

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It was a simple coincidence that led me to discovering this short film that you are about to watch. I was looking for a powerful story about women, in which their success or status would not be defined by their womanhood or the men in their lives. Instead, I have found exactly that, but in the worst possible scenario – a real life story of how India’s women are facing a slow extermination of the entire sex. Because in some families – especially the ones that cannot afford to pay the old-fashioned, dowry – women’s husbands, and their respective families are driven by the belief that the sole purpose of being a woman is to bring a son into the world. From the moment they are capable of bearing a child, those females are under threat of extreme violence and death if their duty is not fulfilled.

Undesired, with interviews and images shot by Walter Astrada, whom I believe to be a very courageous photojournalist, brings to light this painful and current social issue still faced by many. According to Reuters, modern day India is the fourth most dangerous place in the world for women to live, but it seems like it is also one of the most difficult ones for a female life to even begin. Gender inequality and the desire to rectify it, let alone feminism, seem like completely foreign concepts for certain classes. There is also a seeming contradiction in this entire predicament – if a woman is to be perceived as the bearer of life, how can she be made to bring about this life’s actual end?

Read more about the issue and Astrada’s project. Watch it, share it, spread the awareness.

In India, all women must confront the cultural pressure to bear a son. The consequences of this preference is a disregard for the lives of women and girls. From birth until death they face a constant threat of violence. See the project at http://mediastorm.com/publication/undesired

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Martyna Przybysz is a Pole who resides in London, UK. She works in film production. This is her blog: http://martynaprzybysz.tumblr.com.