Sarees on Screen Usha and Rekha

Trigger Warning: Discussions of sexual assault, r*pe, victim shaming, honor killing, and other forms of sexual violence and abuse. For anyone who may find these topics unsettling, we recommend prioritizing your mental health and not engaging with the following content.In this Saucy Deep Dive, we tackle Shoaib Mansoor's Verna, a controversial release from Pakistan dealing with themes of r*pe and sexual violence. Verna tells the story of a woman navigating societal and institutional hurdl...

Trigger Warning: Discussions of sexual assault, r*pe, victim shaming, honor killing, and other forms of sexual violence and abuse. For anyone who may find these topics unsettling, we recommend prioritizing your mental health and not engaging with the following content. This episode continues our conversation on South Asian r*pe culture, picking up from where we left off. Nonconsent in the media is often an unpleasant and inescapable staple, but this doesn't occur in a vacuum. It is ofte...

On our very first “behind-the-screen” bonus episode, we talk movies, podcasting, and how we became friends in the first place despite hating almost everything at first sight.Jokes aside, we really did want to take a chance to reflect on our podcasting journey so far, re-introduce ourselves to our audience as well as dig into why we started this podcast and its origins. As two queer brown feminists from different South Asian countries, we hoped to bring an intersectional lens to our criti...

For our latest Saucy Deep Dive, we chose the early 2000s classic Mohabbatein starring Amitabh Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan, and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan. In Mohabbatein, Shahrukh Khan comes to Gurukul to teach music and bring “love” into Amitabh Bachchan’s overly strict and bizarrely religious school...college...university? It's never really made clear. Shah Rukh Khan’s plan to bring love to the school revolves around teaching three students - played by Uday Chopra, Jimmy Shergill, and Jugal H...

Trigger warning: In this episode, we will be discussing issues such as stalking, voyeurism, r*pe, sexual harassment, assault, self-harm, and Islamophobia. For anyone who may find these topics unsettling, we recommend prioritizing your mental health and not engaging with the following content. Our latest topic-based episode is tackling collective ideas of consent in South Asia, as well as the glorification of non-consent in our media. We knew that a feminist analysis of South Asian cinema...

For our latest Saucy Deep Dive, we picked Funny Boy, a movie adapted by Deepa Mehta (an Indo-Canadian director) based on Shyam Selvadurai's 1994 novel of the same name. Funny Boy is a coming-of-age story about a boy called Arjie from an affluent Sri Lankan Tamil family. It chronicles his journey from childhood to adolescence and early adulthood amidst the ethnic tensions and the divisive Sri Lankan Civil War.While we loved the queer coming-of-age aspect of this movie, Arjie's exploration...