Sex appeal and cultural liberty: A feminist inquiry into MTV India

Frontiers

Volumn 25, Issue 2, 2004, Pages

  Cullity, Jocelyn ^a   Younger, Prakash ^b  

^a FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 7644241529     PISSN: 01609009     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/fro.2004.0049     Document Type: Review

References (90)

1. Jack Banks, Monopoly Television: MTVs Quest to Control the Music (Colorado: Westview Press, 1996),1.
2. Ibid., 34.
3. I b i d.
4. Throughout this study, we use the adjective "Western" to designate those forms of culture that are perceived to be Eurocentric or nonindigenous; we do not mean to suggest that an East-West binary is in any sense natural or absolute.
5. Banks, Monopoly Television, 2.
6. David Page and William Crawley, Satellites over South Asia: Broadcasting, Culture, and the Public Interest (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2001), 149.
7. Natasha Malhotra, interview by author, tape recording, Mumbai, Maharashtra, July 28, 2000.
8. Page and Crawley, Satellites over South Asia, 149.
9. Cyrus Oshidar, interview by author, tape recording, Mumbai, Maharashtra, July 28, 2000; Malhotra, interview.
10. Cyrus Oshidar, interview by author, tape recording, Mumbai, Maharashtra, July 28, 2000; Malhotra, interview.
11. I b i d.
12. Nina Laurie, Claire Dwyer, Sarah L. Holloway, and Fiona M. Smith, Geographies of New Femininities (New York: Pearson Education, 1999), 3.
13. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 116-34.
14. Ibid., 126.
15. Purnima Mankekar's valuable study of women's reception of television programming during the 19805 and early 1990s provides us with a relatively immediate context that helps explain the valorization of the new images that began to emerge in the mid-1990s. As her ethnography of women's responses to Doordarshan demonstrates, programming during the period typically situated the historical dilemmas of Indian women, (that is, being placed in a double bind regarding tradition and modernity) within a nationalist framework; though there were many other ways in which the representation of women on television engaged the experience of female viewers, the basic tendency of "women-oriented" narratives during this period was to legitimate the reconfiguration of traditional and modern values with reference to the nationalist Home/World formula outlined earlier in this essay. In the epilogue to this study, Mankekar discusses the extent to which the transnational quality of images such as those of MTV India have displaced and posed a challenge to the ideology that has been hegemonic for most of India's history as an independent nation, shifting the focus from the politics of nation and community to the politics of family, sexuality, and intimacy. While the new images and narratives generally register for her informants as having less of an immediate relation to their own lives, she suggests (following the work of anthropologist Anne Allison) that the images articulate a. fantasy of liberation that has important effects on the lives of Indian women, establishing a basis for frustration in some cases, creating forms of pleasure and possibility in others. (Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.)
16. Banks, Monopoly Television, 175.
17. Ibid., 2-3.
18. Ibid., 3.
19. Dreamworlds 2: Desire/Sex/Power in Music Video, VHS, written, edited, narrated by Sut Jhally (Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation, 1995).
20. I b i d.
21. I b i d.
22. I b i d.
23. Banks, Monopoly Television, 3.
24. Dreamworlds 2.
25. I b i d.
26. I b i d.
27. I b i d.
28. Monika Mehta, "What Is Behind Film Censorship?" (paper presented at "Gender, Globalization, and Representation in South Asia" conference, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, March 31, 2001).
29. Cath Sluggett, interview by author, tape recording, New Delhi, Delhi, June 29, 2000.
30. Ranjan Bakshi, interview by author, tape recording, New Delhi, Delhi, July 20, 2000.
31. Women students at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and Saint Xavier's College, Mumbai, surveys by author, July to October, 2000.
32. Rahul Roy, interview by author, tape recording, New Delhi, Delhi, June 29, 2000.
33. I b i d.
34. Women students at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and Saint Xavier's College, Mumbai, surveys.
35. Oshidar, interview.
36. Maitrayee Chaudhuri, interview by author, tape recording, New Delhi, Delhi, July 6, 2000.
37. Vijaya Nidadavolu, interview by author, tape recording, New Delhi, Delhi, July 6, 2000.
38. Women students at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and Saint Xavier's College, Mumbai, surveys; Shilpa Phadke, St. Xavier's College, Mumbai, July 2000.
39. Women students at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and Saint Xavier's College, Mumbai, surveys; Shilpa Phadke, St. Xavier's College, Mumbai, July 2000.
40. Roy, interview, and Madhu Kishwar, interview by author, tape recording, New Delhi, Delhi, June 30, 2000.
41. Anita Anand, interview by author, tape recording, New Delhi, Delhi, June 28 and July 4, 2000.
42. Rachel Dwyer, "Bombay Ishtyle," in Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis, ed. Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson (New York: Routledge, 2000); Sumita Chakravarty, National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947-1987 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993).
43. Rachel Dwyer, "Bombay Ishtyle," in Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis, ed. Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson (New York: Routledge, 2000); Sumita Chakravarty, National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947-1987 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993).
44. Chakravarty, National Identity, 7-9.
45. Dwyer, "Bombay Ishtyle," 182-86.
46. Shilpa Phadke, interview by author, tape recording, Mumbai, Maharashtra, July 28, 2000. Geetanjali Misra also commented on the fact that a sexual revolution like that in the West in the 1960s was taking place in India today, except that now of course it carries the threat of AIDS (interview by author, July 3, 2000).
47. Discussion group led by Shilpa Phadke.
48. Sandeep Bindra, interview by author, tape recording, New Delhi, Delhi, July 20, 2000.
49. Women students at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and Saint Xavier's College, Mumbai, surveys.
50. Oshidar, interview.
51. Nidadavolu, interview.
52. I b i d.
53. Women students at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and Saint Xavier's College, Mumbai, surveys.
54. Kishwar, interview.
55. I b i d.
56. Misra, interview.
57. Chaudhuri, interview.
58. Phadke, interview.
59. Gargi Sen, interview by author, tape recording, New Delhi, Delhi, July 1, 2000.
60. Nidadavolu, interview.
61. Ananya Bannerjee, interview by author, tape recording, New Delhi, Delhi, July 4, 2000.
62. Sharika Sharma, interview by author, tape recording, New Delhi, Delhi, June 20, 2000.
63. Sluggett, interview.
64. I b i d.
65. Shilpa Phadke, discussion group; women students at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and Saint Xavier's College, Mumbai, surveys.
66. Akhila Sivadas, interview by author, tape recording, New Delhi, Delhi, July 3, 2000. Perhaps we can see a reaction to this sort of traditional role in a comparison of matrimonial sections in the Hindustan Times (May 1990 and July 2000). The most striking difference in descriptions was the number of grooms in 2000 who advertised stating they had their own houses.
67. Nidadavolu, interview.
68. Phadke, interview.
69. Oshidar, interview.
70. Bannerjee, interview.
71. Chaudhuri, interview.
72. Some informants complained that female image content was the same as it always had been, but was now dressed up in a new form: "Same content, different form." Women said that, in images of women, the woman had the license to be independent and to wear what she wanted until she got married. Then the clothes would change, and the husband automatically became the head of the household. However, emphasis still remained on extending these images, not on spending time attacking them.
73. Sen, interview.
74. Phadke, interview; Brinda Karat, interview by author, tape recording, New Delhi, Delhi, June and July 2000.
75. An excellent overview of the controversy can be found in Sujata Moorti, "Inflamed Passions: Fire, the Woman Question, and the Policing of Cultural Borders," Genders 32 (2000), http://www.genders.org/g32/g32_moorti.html.
76. Sivadas, interview.
77. Shohini Ghosh, interview by author, tape recording, New Delhi, Delhi, July 7, 2000.
78. Leek Rao, "Facets of Media and Gender Studies in India," Feminist Media Studies 1, no. 1 (2001): 46.
79. Karat, interview.
80. Misra, interview.
81. Karat, interview.
82. Phadke, interview.
83. Rishma Malik, phone interview by author, Toronto, Ontario, April 5, 2001.
84. Homi Bhabha, "Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences" in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (New York: Routeledge, 1995), 208.
85. Ien Ang, Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World (New York: Routeledge, 1996), 153.
86. Ibid., 9, 137.
87. Sangeeta Gupta, interview by author, tape recording, Mumbai, Maharashtra, July 28, 2000.
88. Dwyer, "Bombay Ishtyle," 185.
89. Amos Owen Thomas, "Global-diasporic and Subnational-ethnic Audiences for Satellite Television in South Asia," Journal of International Communication 3, no. 2 (1996): 73.
90. Herbert Schiller, Communication and Cultural Domination (New York: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1976), 45.