At the Crossroads of Gender and Cinema: The Films of Shyamaprasad

Abstract

This thesis examines how Shyamaprasad’s films challenge and reinforce the ways in which the intersections of gender with sexuality, diaspora, class, and caste are represented in Malayalam cinema. The thesis shows how Shyamaprasad’s films offer a critique of normative and ideological practices as well as the constitution and negotiation of male and female subjectivities in Kerala society. Using narrative analysis, I argue that Shyamaprasad’s films both contest and conform to hierarchical gender relations and upper-caste, middle-class, and diasporic values and practices and show how Malayali women become victims of sexual division of labour and dominant cultural ideologies.

The thesis employs a cultural studies methodology and proposes a context-centred approach to study films: situating the films within specific historical and cultural contexts rather than merely interpreting texts or examining how audiences receive them. I conclude that these films ascertain the patriarchal pressures imposed on Malayali women to be moral subjects, particularly in the intersections of gender with sexuality, diaspora, class and caste. The thesis also employs Michel Foucault’s notions of disciplinary power, biopower, and pastoral power and Doreen Massey’s idea of space being gendered, relational, and dynamic to determine how power shapes subjectivities and the ways in which subjects are disciplined and controlled in specific spatial conditions. I adopt intersectionality as a key theoretical framework and show how the analysis of the intersection of multiple social identities is crucial to understand the representational politics of gender in Malayalam cinema.