As in most parts of glamorized and consumerist societies of the world, so in India, body shaming and colorist biases are an unfortunate and recurrent reality. This reality is truer for girls and women than for most other gendered identities. Given the predominance of Eurocentric beauty standards, women’s ideal bodies need to be tall, slim, athletic yet curvaceous, light skinned, young, and able bodied with lustrous hair. If this hegemonic ideal caters to industries such as fashion, fitness, and medical aesthetics, it leaves millions of women anxious and insecure owing to their natural body types. Women struggling with body image issues experience self-doubt and choose to stay away from leadership roles because of their non-normative bodies. Under these social conditions, a number of cultural artefacts including postmillennial Indian cinema have attempted to question the oppression of an ideal female body image. Especially mentionable are some of the postmillennial mainstream Hindi films that have portrayed women struggling with body shaming and overcoming it to take up strong professional or familial roles, thereby emerging as leaders. Notable names in this context are Dum Laga Ke Haisha (2015) and Bala (2019) in which the actor Bhumi Pednekar plays an overweight and a dark-skinned woman, respectively. I examine both films with the help of fat feminism and anti-colorist discourses to highlight how women with non-normative body identities experience much social ostracism and yet negotiate their ways into successful careers to exhibit micro-leadership.

Authors:
Srirupa Chatterjee, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, India

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Srirupa Chatterjee is Associate Professor of Critical Body Studies, English, Gender, and Body Studies in the Department of Liberal Arts at IIT Hyderabad, India.

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