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 hurdles as she attempts to seek justice as a victim of sexual violence. When both her family and the justice system fails her - she has to take matters into her own hand.

When a recent study from Pakistan showed that movies depicting r*pe will almost always kill off the victims of sexual violence, it is no surprise that Verna drew so much uproar. This is a story of a survivor.

Survivors in South Asia often have no institutional or social support available to them. Neither do their cinematic counterparts. Verna does an amazing job of exploring these challenges with an empathetic lens. It also highlights the anger that society feels towards survivors who have the audacity to seek justice. It is truly a grueling watch.

In this episode, we discuss the limitations of movies depicting r*pe revenge fantasies, the recurring issue of ableism in South Asian films, and the lack of intersectionality in discussions about sexual violence.

While it is absolutely an accomplishment that this movie even exists, it is also important to ask how well it presents the issues it hopes to shed a light on. 
To know more about our thoughts and see how Verna fared on the Sauce Meter (our in-house feminist film rating system), check out the extended show notes on our website. 
 More available on SareesOnScreen.com
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[Music Prod. By LuKremBo] 


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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 often a reflection of a reality far worse.

In this conversation, we explored the idea of purity culture and how it often goes hand in hand with r*pe culture in perpetuating this culture of control and violence. We also talked about the disparity in the consequences of purity/r*pe culture, the idea of model victims, and the failures of both "conservative" and "liberal" talking points on this matter.

For this episode, it was important for us to explore documentaries instead of fictional media (not that documentaries can't come without their own biases!) In choosing to do so, we came across some great (and free!) documentaries on the topic that helped to frame our discussion.
 
We watched A Crime Unpunished in Bangladesh, Rape is Consensual: Inside Haryana’s R*pe Culture, Outlawed in Pakistan, and Boys who like Girls. If you can, we recommend you watch all of the documentaries linked here (some of them are pretty short too.)

These movies spanning across South Asia, highlight the horrible repercussions of prioritizing purity and honor over the lives and wellbeing of women and marginalized people.

Our next episode is a Saucy Deep Dive on Verna.
More available on SareesOnScreen.com

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[Music Prod. By LuKremBo]

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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 critique and discussion of our media.

If Keeping Up With The Kardashians can help us understand Baudrillard, then why can’t Kuch Kuch Hota Hain help us learn some queer theory?
This podcast is the culmination of years of conversations that we’ve had. It is our attempt to create a framework through which to analyze our media and recognize its roles in our own ideas and those of people around us.
Our podcast has definitely been a labor of love and learning throughout this journey and we’ve both been thankful to have this space to grow and evolve as we try to bring our idea to life.

This was us! Stay tuned for our next episode, out in two weeks!


More available on SareesOnScreen.com
 
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[Music Prod. By LuKremBo] 
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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 Hansraj to fight for their love. Which ala Bollywood includes eve-teasing, relentless stalking, and coercive behavior disguised as romance. 

This fan-favorite has not aged well and actively perpetuated problematic ideas about romance, love, and consent. It objectified the women on screen and robbed them of their agencies. 

Was it just a product of its time or did it have a much more adverse and continuing effect on the cultural and media landscape of South Asia?
To know more about our discussion and to find out how Mohabbatein fared on the Sauce Meter (our in-house feminist film rating system), read the extended show notes on our website with additional resources and content!
 More available on SareesOnScreen.com
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[Music Prod. By LuKremBo] 


Advisory

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 would not be complete without an episode dedicated to the media’s role in perpetuating the r*pe culture in South Asia. We are all familiar with these narratives that often disregard women’s autonomy and their agency as fully-fleshed human beings.

Consent and the overarching media landscape around it were vital to this analysis. So this will be the first of a two-part conversation on r*pe and purity culture.

Beyond discussing the movies in our lineup, Sitara, LOEV, and Raanjhanaa, we decided to take on a more general discussion on film culture in South Asia. We particularly address the ubiquitous "item numbers," which have been a staple in problematic media portrayals of women and the disheartening normalization of voyeuristic shots in our films.

These movies served as a frame of reference to discuss the collective narratives about romance, sexuality, agency, and (non)consent that our media normalizes. This glorification of violations of consent make such behavior easier to get away with in reality. 

We hope that collectively critiquing these portrayals in our media and around us can help to start discussions around consent and r*pe culture, as well as lead to more well-rounded and humanized portrayals of women and marginalized characters in our cinema.

To know more about our discussion, read the extended show notes on our website with additional resources and content!


More available on SareesOnScreen.com
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[Music Prod. By LuKremBo]
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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 and queerness often felt like an afterthought to the plot. We also felt that as a movie intended for non-Sri Lankan audiences, it could have done a much better job of contextualizing the conflict and presenting it as a whole. In its current form, the movie left us perplexed about whether it was a historical queer movie or a historical movie with a queer character?
We also talked about how it fared on our very own film rating system - the Sauce Meter.

To know more about our discussion, read the extended show notes on our website with additional resources and content!
 More available on SareesOnScreen.com
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[Music Prod. By LuKremBo]


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