Desi Girl, Mother India: Gender, Sexuality, and History in Hindi Cinema

How do representations of men and women, past and present, intersect with popular memories of and attitudes towards gender and sexuality? Thinking through this question with reference to India, this course will entail a close reading of one Bollywood film (with English subtitles) each week alongside an engagement with scholarly studies of the histories of gender and sexuality and of film in South Asia. Students will learn to be critical and historically sensitive viewers of film. They will also reflect critically on the crafting and re-crafting of popular memory, placing remembered pasts in dialog with scholarly approaches.