Trolled, body-shamed and slut-shamed: the desecration of the contemporary Bollywood female star on social media

ABSTRACT

For connoisseurs of popular Hindi cinema, or Bollywood as it is more commonly known, the star is the focal point of their cinematic experience. Despite recent changes in the Indian mediascape, the Bollywood stars’ centrality remains undiminished. With the increasing synergy between film, television and digital media, the Hindi film star now straddles multiple platforms, effortlessly essaying the varied roles of a movie idol, a television personality, a social media participant and a transmedia celebrity. However, as the stars engage with social media, often conflating their ‘reel’ and ‘real’ personas, discourses of both stardom and fandom become complicated. No longer regarded as simply objects of adulation and veneration, stars are now often chastised and publicly ridiculed for their actions on social media. This shift in the star-fan dynamics becomes even more problematic in the case of the female star, who is often body-shamed and trolled on social media platforms. This paper examines the changing notions of contemporary Bollywood stardom, particularly with respect to female stars’ engagement with social media and their subsequent desecration. As the female star attempts to navigate her resignification as a transmedia celebrity, her public humiliation reveals the problematic underpinnings and fissures of contemporary Bollywood stardom.

KEYWORDS:

• Bollywood
• Hindi film heroine
• female stardom
• Twitter
• Internet trolls
• social media

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

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Sreya Mitra

Sreya Mitra is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Mass Communication at the American University of Sharjah, UAE. Her research focuses on South Asian media, popular culture, stardom, globalisation, diaspora and culture industries. She has presented her research at various international conferences and her work been published in the edited collections, Reorienting Global Communication (2010) and Transnational Stardom (2013), and in peer-reviewed journals like Journal of South Asian History and Culture (2012) and Celebrity Studies Journal (2018).