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The Unsafe Spaces of Theatre and Feminism in India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2012

Extract

In April 2011, after thirty-five years in power, the left-oriented progressive rule in Bengal, India, was brought down. Masterminding the overthrow was Mamata Banerjee. Banerjee has enjoyed a political career spanning over twenty years, during which time she has succeeded in maintaining a high public profile in the media and public sphere to become Bengal's first ‘woman’ chief minister. Surprisingly, during her campaign Banerjee neither asserted her identity as a woman nor as the non-feminine, monstrous presence of the public woman (à la Indira Ghandi's media presence in the 1970s), but rather performed a non-threatening, gender-neutral didi (elder sister in Bengali). I attribute this ‘smooth’ identity construction to a comfortable entente between a Western globalized visual culture, indigenous images commodified and circulating on the periphery, and the sudden expansion of electronic media. The convergence of all these factors served to create a non-dialectical identity construction which stood against all feminist politics or, as I would call it, feminism with a political imagination.

Type
Identity Politics Forum
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2012

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References

NOTES

1 Amal Allana, a prominent theatre director in India, staged Nati Binodini in 2006 as a feminist treatment of Binodini's rise to stardom.

2 The global slut walk movement was sparked by an incident in Toronto in April 2011 when a police officer addressing students at York University claimed that if women wanted to avoid rape then they should ‘avoid dressing like sluts’. This has triggered protests in cities around the world. New Delhi was the first Asian city to host a slut walk protest.