92 – Gender Question: Ideology and Politics of Representation in South Asian Audiovisual Cultures

October 3, 2025

8:30 am

H08

The aim of this panel is to evaluate the impact of socio-political and cultural transformations on gender representations in diverse media forms in South Asia - from celluloid to digital cinema and from television to streaming platforms. Since the 20th century, the audiovisual cultures in South Asia have undergone massive changes in response to political, religious and cultural shifts as well as technological transformations. For instance, cross-currents of increasingly dominant right-wing ideologies and radical protests are reflected in the prevailing audiovisual culture in India (Gehlawat 2024; Paunksnis 2023). Similarly, the onset of a neoliberal postfeminist culture, which has altered the rhetoric of women’s empowerment (Gill 2007), has pervaded the Indian media ecosystem (Chakraborty Paunksnis 2023). This demands painstaking appraisals of mediated representations employing a critical cultural studies framework. Such local examples must be analyzed vis-à-vis technological changes as the pervasive nature of mediatization has strong impact on society (Hepp 2020). Besides interrogating the myriad representations of gender in various South Asian media forms, the papers in this panel will also consider the following questions: How are media’s representations of gender influenced by the ideologies of the political establishments? Does globalization and neoliberal postfeminist culture contribute to the discourse of women’s empowerment? What impact of shifting patriarchal power dynamics is visible on the representation of masculinity? How do the mediated representations respond to the questions of intersectionality and Queer subjectivity? In which way can the gender question be positioned vis-à-vis the interplay between modernity and indigenous knowledge systems? How is gender’s negotiation with technology represented in media? Is the language of gender-based movements re-formulated in continually transforming media ecosystems? The panel seeks to create a discursive space for facilitating contesting arguments on the proposed theme. It welcomes contributions interrogating the varied representations of gender dynamics in South Asian media.

Convenors

Dr. Runa Chakraborty Paunksnis
Dr. Šarūnas Paunksnis

Presentations

Transforming Masculinities: Media and Social Change in 21st Century India

Paunksnis Sarunas - Faculty of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities, Kaunas University of Technology, Kaunas, Lithuania

“Apna Time Aayega” (“Our Time Will Come”): Post-Crisis Masculinity and the Rags-to-Riches Hero in New Hindi Cinema

Pande Aishani - Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India

Bodies Unseen: Gendered Exclusion and Activism in Contemporary Pakistan

Junik Kamila - Dept. of South Asia and South-East Asia, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland

Menstrual Visibility in Mumbai: A Participatory Visual Approach

Giampietri Valeria - Sapienza University of Rome, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

Mis/representation: Hindi SVOD Platforms and the Construction of New Dalit Woman

Chakraborty Paunksnis Runa - Faculty of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities, Kaunas University of Technology, Kaunas, Lithuania

By the Men, For the Men: Online user-generated content and gender attitudes among young men from underprivileged backgrounds in Kolkata (India)

Basak Subham - Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom