Mapping the networks of gendered performance, labor, and mobility: Decentering an Auteurist Historiography of Indian cinema 

ConTrust Research seminar „India as Method: Challenges and Perspectives in the Study of Media and Politics in Contemporary South Asia“

With Priyadarshini Shanker

This paper intervenes in three prevailing frameworks of Indian film and media studies —auteurist approaches, history of film movements, and digital media studies—through three case studies that centralize the optics of feminist performances. I propose a corporeal intervention that potentially recasts the historiography of Indian cinema as a network of gender, performance, labor, and mobility. In decentering the cult of the auteur, by shifting the attention from the filmmaker to a set of creative skills, practices, and knowledge, as performed by female actors, engaged in the artistic production of Indian cinema, the aspiration is to move away from ideological readings of Indian cinema to push for a history and theorization of gendered performance. The idea is to pay a close attention to the production of performance and in doing so to explore the network of bodies, surfaces, spaces, and temporalities that inform the invisible cultures and economies of production which include a study of formal and informal networks between the onscreen performer and the offscreen personnel.

Dr. Priyadarshini Shanker is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and her research, teaching, and curatorial work focus on the intersection of gender, labor, and performance. She has a PhD in Cinema Studies from New York University and has published peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and photo essays on Indian film and media.

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