Graduate Seminar Series 2025/26 - Session 3
Third Seminar
Visibility of Queer Women in International Visual Media
February 18, 2026
The link to join the seminar will be published closer to the date.
Sushree Routray
Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee
Queering the Rom-Com: The Rise of Same-Sex Love in Bollywood
This paper examines the ways in which same-sex love reconfigures the narrative and ideological structures of Bollywood romantic comedies, foregrounding the strategic function of humour as both a protective mechanism and a mediating device between cultural conservatism and anxieties around Western influence. Within a social world where queer desire is often cast as a threat to the moral structure of the Hindu household, humour provides a way to broach the subject without rupturing norms. Bollywood romantic comedies have historically functioned as tools of moral instruction, perpetuating dominant hierarchies, even as they intermittently gesture toward alternative possibilities. Its staying power lies in its malleability; a form built on repetition yet responsive to change. Since the decriminalisation of homosexuality in India in 2018, mainstream cinema has begun to offer more central, affirmative depictions of queer lives. This study focuses on Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga (2019), Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan (2020), and Badhaai Do (2022) to show how they depart from the solitary arc of coming out and turn instead to themes of family, negotiation, and shared emotional work. By adapting familiar tropes of the romantic narrative, including the accidental meeting, the delayed understanding, and the emotional reckoning, these films challenge the normative scripts of heteronormative kinship and the fantasy of the ideal Indian family. Drawing on popular culture studies and queer theory, the paper analysis reveals how these cinematic texts reflect broader concerns with national belonging, gendered duty, and social legitimacy. In doing so, it reflects a gradual reorientation of the genre, one that permits more emotionally textured and politically conscious portrayals of queer relationships within the evolving landscape of Indian cinema.
Shivani Krishnakumar
University of Hyderabad
Neoliberalism and Networked Self Hoods: Analysing the Digital Lives of Lesbian Bigg Boss Malayalam Participants.
Ramsha Aveen
Jamia Millia Islamia
Reclaiming the Haunted Space: Feminist Interventions in the Representation of Women in Contemporary Indian Horror Cinema
This paper examines the evolving portrayal of women in Hindi-language horror cinema, focusing on how supernatural female figures—such as witches and ghosts—have transformed from symbols of fear into empowered agents of resistance. Traditionally, figures like the ‘chudail’ reinforced patriarchal norms by portraying women who defied gender roles as monstrous or dangerous. However, recent films reframe these characters as complex figures of justice and social critique. Through a sociological and intersectional feminist lens, this paper analyses five films—Stree (2018), Stree 2 (2024), Bulbul (2020), Chhorii (2021), and Pari (2018)—to explore how horror addresses gender inequality, caste oppression, sexual violence, and class hierarchies. These films position haunted women not as irrational or evil but as voices of trauma, memory, and agency. For instance, Bulbul reimagines the witch as a protector of abused women, Chhorii critiques rural patriarchy and female infanticide, while Pari unpacks inherited trauma and purity politics. Stree and Stree 2 use satire to expose male complicity in misogyny. These supernatural women do not haunt without purpose—they demand change and justice. Ultimately, this paper argues that Hindi horror cinema is undergoing a feminist transformation, where the ghost becomes a figure of protest, challenging oppressive systems and reclaiming female agency.
Polina Zelmanova
University of Warwick
The Disruptive Body of Poor Things
Poor Things (2023) emerged to polarising reviews, torn between praise for its depiction of female sexual liberation and criticism for objectifying and sexually exploiting its female protagonist. The film centres Bella who, in an ode to Frankenstein, is brought back to life through a scientific experiment that replaces her brain with that of her unborn child. The story follows Bella on a sexual expedition around the steampunk world of the Victorian era, that facilitates her discovery and knowledge of the world and the workings of ‘polite society’. Both the film and its popular and critical reception raise questions about Bella’s agency, empowerment and consent that have become particularly pertinent points of discussion in the #MeToo era. Challenging a binary reading of the film as either feminist or misogynist, this paper explores Poor Things through the Frankenstein palimpsest, where “earlier versions [of the text] are obscured but never completely erased” (Lopez Szwydky 2023, 198; Genette 1997). Drawing on this visual and representational history facilitates my reading of Bella’s body as a site of disruption. Importantly, the film’s use of sex and pleasure become crucial for the subversion of the Cartesian masculinisation of knowledge that relies on the rejection of the body (Bordo 1999), reanimating Shelley’s critique in a new way.