Alka Kurian – författare

This book is a study of the resurgence and re-imagination of feminist discourse on gender and sexuality in South Asia as told through its cinematic, literary, and social media narratives. It brings incisive and expert analyses of emerging disruptive articulations that represent an unprecedented surge of feminist response to the culture of sexual violence in South Asia. Here scholars across disciplines and international borders chronicle the expressions of a disruptive feminist solidarity in contemporary South Asia. They offer critical investigations of these newly complicated discourses across narrative forms – hashtag activism on Facebook and Twitter, the writings of diasporic writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Bollywood films like Mardaani, feminist Dalit narratives in the fiction of Bama Faustina, social media activism against rape culture, journalistic and cinematic articulations on queer rights, state censorship of "India’s Daughter", and feminist film activism in Bangladesh, Kashmir, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.

This book conducts a post-colonial, gendered investigation of women-centred South Asian films. In these films, the narrative becomes an act of political engagement and a site of feminist struggle: a map that weaves together multiple strands of subjectivity—gender, caste, race, class, religion, and colonialism. The book explores the cinematic construction of an oppositional narrative of feminist dissent with a view to elaborate a historical understanding and theorisation of the ‘materiality and politics’ of the everyday struggle of Indian women. The book analyzes the ways that ‘cultural workers’ have tended to use subversive narratives as a tool of resistance. Narratives that are political, ideological, classed, raced and gendered offer the focus of this exploration. Through strategies of disclosure and documentation of memory, personal experiences, and imaginary events shaped by the larger historical, political, and cultural contexts, these discursive texts engage in the processes of struggle against a plethora of oppression: caste, class, religion, patriarchal, sexual, and (neo)colonial. The study looks at the manner in which, through their creative and aesthetic interventions, South Asian film makers enable the articulation of an alternative gendered subjectivity as well as constitute the ground for personal and collective empowerment. Films discussed include Shyam Benegal’s Nishaant, Nandita Das’ Firaaq, Beate Arnestad’s My Daughter the Terrorist, and Sarah Gavron’s Brick Lane.

This book is a study of the resurgence and re-imagination of feminist discourse on gender and sexuality in South Asia as told through its cinematic, literary, and social media narratives. It brings incisive and expert analyses of emerging disruptive articulations that represent an unprecedented surge of feminist response to the culture of sexual violence in South Asia. Here scholars across disciplines and international borders chronicle the expressions of a disruptive feminist solidarity in contemporary South Asia. They offer critical investigations of these newly complicated discourses across narrative forms – hashtag activism on Facebook and Twitter, the writings of diasporic writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Bollywood films like Mardaani, feminist Dalit narratives in the fiction of Bama Faustina, social media activism against rape culture, journalistic and cinematic articulations on queer rights, state censorship of "India’s Daughter", and feminist film activism in Bangladesh, Kashmir, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.