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ABSTRACT
This article examines the ways in which YouTube’s comedy-driven drama, Ladies Room, set in six women-only toilet sanctuaries across Mumbai, mines the semiotics of unruliness to push against the boundaries of upper-caste Indian feminine respectability. Drawing upon comedy studies and feminist theory, we deconstruct the two millennial protagonists Dingo & Khanna’s transgressive behaviors, body politics, and charged conversations about the sexist and cutthroat environments of corporate and new media branding careers. In conclusion, while Ladies Room’s cultural politics disrupt the agendas of conservative Hindu nationalism and Bollywood’s neoliberal feminism, we also point to the show’s collusion with caste and class hierarchies.
Acknowledgements
All three authors, who have contributed equally to this article, are grateful to Sriram Mohan, Anushka Sen, and Sangeet Kumar for their comments and support. We also thank Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies editor Greg Dickinson for his encouragement and the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback.
Notes
1 Ladies Room, Episode Three, “Dingo & Khanna Take a Pregnant Pause,” directed by Ashima Chibber, aired June 7, 2016, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88Juygfho5o&list=PLEDnP0ud0ZBiS2kgW9-MKKnzZclgDpzgK&index=4&ab_channel=YFilms.
2 For details about India’s youth bulge, see Somini Sengupta, The End of Karma: Hope and Fury Among India’s Young (London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016), 10; for details on mobile phone usage, see Anke Schwittay, “New Media Practices in India: Bridging Past and Future, Markets and Development,” International Journal of Communication 5 (2011): 349–79.
3 Bridgette Glover, “Alternative Pathway to Television: Negotiating Female Representation in Broad City’s Transition from YouTube to Cable,” M/C Journal 20, no. 1 (2017), http://www.journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1208.
4 Kathleen Rowe, The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011).
5 Limor Shifman and Dafna Lemish, “‘Mars and Venus’ in Virtual Space: Post-Feminist Humor and the Internet,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 28, no. 3 (2011): 255; Joanne Gallivan, “Group Differences in Appreciation of Feminist Humor,” Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 5, no. 4 (1992): 373.
6 Ralph M. Rosen and Donald R. Marks, “Comedies of Transgression in Gangsta Rap and Ancient Classical Poetry,” New Literary History 30, no. 4 (1999): 901–2.
7 Michael Billig, Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour (New York: SAGE, 2005), 208.
8 Lisa Bhungalia, “Laughing at Power: Humor, Transgression, and the Politics of Refusal in Palestine,” Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 38, no. 3 (2020): 389.
9 Jonathan Rossing, “Emancipatory Racial Humor as Critical Public Pedagogy: Subverting Hegemonic Racism,” Communication, Culture and Critique 9, no. 4 (2016): 614–32; J. David Thomas, “Jeff Foxworthy’s Redneck Humor and the Boundaries of Middle-Class American Whiteness,” Sage Open 6, no. 2 (2016): 1–15; Kylo-Patrick R. Hart, “We’re Here, We’re Queer—and We’re Better Than You: The Representational Superiority of Gay Men to Heterosexuals on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” The Journal of Men’s Studies 12, no. 3 (2004): 241–53; Sabrina Fuchs Abrams, ed., Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
10 Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. John Storey (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 487.
11 Fuchs Abrams, Transgressive Humor, 9.
12 Lisa Merrill, “Feminist Humor: Rebellious and Self-Affirming,” Women’s Studies 15, no. 1–3 (1988): 279.
13 Joanne R. Gilbert, Performing Marginality: Humor, Gender, and Cultural Critique (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004), 156–7.
14 Kathy Davis, “Intersectionality as Buzzword: A Sociology of Science Perspective on What Makes a Feminist Theory Successful,” Feminist Theory 9, no. 1 (2008): 67–85; Smitha Radhakrishnan, “Professional Women, Good Families: Respectable Femininity and the Cultural Politics of a ‘New’ India,” Qualitative Sociology 32, no. 2 (2009): 198.
15 Eleanor Patterson, “Fracturing Tina Fey: A Critical Analysis of Postfeminist Television Comedy Stardom,” The Communication Review 15, no. 3 (2012): 232–51; Anne Graefer, Allaina Kilby, and Inger-Lise Kalviknes Bore, “Unruly Women and Carnivalesque Countercontrol: Offensive Humor in Mediated Social Protest,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 43, no. 2 (2019): 171–93; Michelle Colpean and Meg Tully, “Not Just a Joke: Tina Fey, Amy Schumer, and the Weak Reflexivity of White Feminist Comedy,” Women’s Studies in Communication 42, no. 2 (2019): 161–80.
16 Rebecca Krefting, “Hannah Gadsby Stands Down: Feminist Comedy Studies,” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 58, no. 3 (2019): 165–70.
17 Sharmista Chaudhury, “We Don’t Need Cinderella: Changing Gender Identities on YouTube Comedy in India” (master’s thesis, University of Oregon, 2017); Kavyta Kay, New Indian Nuttahs: Comedy and Cultural Critique in Millennial India (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Subin Paul, “A New Public Sphere? English-Language Stand-up Comedy in India,” Contemporary South Asia 25, no. 2 (2017): 121–35; Sangeet Kumar, “Contagious Memes, Viral Videos and Subversive Parody: The Grammar of Contention on the Indian Web,” International Communication Gazette 77, no. 3 (2015): 232–47; Vijay Parthasarathy, “Birth of the Cool: Global Flows and the Growth of English Language Stand-up Comedy in Mumbai” (PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2017).
18 Shifman and Lemish, “‘Mars and Venus’ in Virtual Space,” 257; Chaudhury, “We Don’t Need Cinderella”; Kay, New Indian Nuttahs.
19 Molly Bandonis and Namrata Rele Sathe, “Romantic Female Friendships as Resistance: Subversive Web Series in the United States and India,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 18, no. 1 (January 2, 2020): 65.
20 Amrita Goswami, “‘New Bollywood’ and the Emergence of a ‘Production House’ Culture,” South Asian Popular Culture 14, no. 3 (2016): 190–1.
21 “Y-Films,” Yash Raj Films, https://www.yashrajfilms.com/divisions/y-films (accessed November 20, 2020).
22 Sriparna Ray, “Niche Cinema: Negotiating Cultural Identities of the New Indian Middle Classes,” Studies in South Asian Film & Media 6, no. 1 (2014): 33.
23 Sangeet Kumar, “YouTube Nation: Precarity and Agency in India’s Online Video Scene,” International Journal of Communication 10 (2016): 5610.
24 Chaudhury, “We Don’t Need Cinderella,” 44.
25 Karuna E. Parikh, “YRF’s ‘Ladies Room’ is a Refreshingly Real Show about Women, Starring Women,” Firstpost, July 15, 2016, https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/yrfs-ladies-room-is-a-refreshingly-real-show-about-women-starring-women-2895110.html.
26 By early 2019, several online content providers volunteered to create self-regulatory codes after being pressured by public criticism to reduce vulgarity. Rejecting this code, the Indian government announced in November 2020 that online content providers will now come under the ambit of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and may be subject to new forms of control. See “Government to Govern Netflix, Amazon Prime and Other OTT Platforms,” The Hindu, November 11, 2020, https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/netflix-amazon-prime-other-ott-platforms-now-under-govt-regulation/article33072710.ece and Kumar, “YouTube Nation,” 5608.
27 Ravi Agrawal, India Connected: How the Smartphone Is Transforming the World’s Largest Democracy (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018); Ananya Bhattacharya, “The Number of Smartphone Users in India Will More than Double in Four Years,” Quartz India, December 4, 2018, https://qz.com/india/1483368/indias-smartphone-internet-usage-will-surge-by-2022-cisco-says/.
28 Delshad Irani, “How Y-Films Is Changing the Way the World Sees Content Led Marketing,” The Economic Times, February 25, 2017, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/marketing-branding/marketing/page-152-business-of-content/articleshow/57343506.cms.
29 Deepa Tanksale, Netra Neelam, and Rama Venkatachalam, “Consumer Decision Making Styles of Young Adult Consumers in India,” Procedia—Social and Behavioral Sciences 133 (2014): 211–18; Arpita Mukherjee et al., “Are Indian Consumers Brand Conscious? Insights for Global Retailers,” Asia Pacific Journal of Marketing and Logistics 24, no. 3 (2012): 482–99.
30 Priyanka Matanhelia, “Mobile Phone Usage among Youth in India: A Case Study” (PhD dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, 2010), 202–4; Roshni Susana Verghese, “Streaming Culture, (Re)Viewing Femininity: Youth, Nation and Popular Entertainment Shows in Hyderabad, India” (PhD dissertation, Indiana University, Bloomington, 2019).
31 Parikh, “YRF’s ‘Ladies Room’ is a Refreshingly Real Show.”
32 Radhakrishnan, “Professional Women, Good Families.”
33 Ravichandran Bathran, founder of Dalit Camera, argues that the caste system’s architectural binary contrasts the toilet with the temple, with the toilet marked as ritually impure and the temple as ritually pure. See Ravichandran Bathran, “Hinduism’s Apartheid: Caste(in)g Space,” Round Table India, June 11, 2019, http://roundtableindia.co.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=9662&catid=129&Itemid=195.
34 Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, “Toilet Architecture: An Essay about the Most Psychosexually Charged Room in a Building,” PIN–UP 23, Fall Winter 2017/2018, https://pinupmagazine.org/articles/toilet-modern-architecture.
35 Several regions in India still require dry latrines to be emptied by hand using manual scavenging labor, a practice that has been prohibited by law but that nonetheless persists in multiple sectors. Dalit women form a bulk of this workforce. Ladies Room’s disavowals of this caste oppression are aligned with the statist-Brahminical development campaigns to eradicate open defecation. For more, see Bhasha Singh, Unseen: The Truth about India’s Manual Scavengers, trans. Meenu Talwar (London: Penguin UK, 2014); Shubhojit Goswami, “Manual Scavenging: A Stinking Legacy of Suffocation and Stigma,” Down to Earth. September 11, 2018, https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/waste/manual-scavenging-a-stinking-legacy-of-suffocation-and-stigma-61586; Subhash Gatade, “Silencing Caste, Sanitising Oppression,” Economic and Political Weekly 50, no. 44 (2015): 29–35; Pallavi Rao, “Soch Aur Shauch: Reading Brahminism and Patriarchy in Toilet: Ek Prem Katha,” Studies in South Asian Film & Media 9, no. 2 (2019): 79–96.
36 Charu Gupta, “‘Fashioning’ Swadeshi: Clothing Women in Colonial North India,” Economic and Political Weekly 47, no. 42 (2012): 76–84; Geetanjali Gangoli, “Sexuality, Sensuality and Belonging: Representations of the ‘Anglo-Indian’ and the ‘Western’ Woman in Hindi Cinema,” in Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema Through A Transnational Lens, ed. Raminder Kaur and Ajay J. Sinha (New Delhi: SAGE India, 2005), 143–62.
37 Gupta, “‘Fashioning’ Swadeshi,” 77.
38 Ibid., 76.
39 Shilpa Phadke, “Dangerous Liaisons: Women and Men: Risk and Reputation in Mumbai,” Economic and Political Weekly 42, no. 17 (2007): 1517.
40 Amanda Gilbertson, “A Fine Balance: Negotiating Fashion and Respectable Femininity in Middle-Class Hyderabad, India,” Modern Asian Studies 48, no. 1 (2014): 120–58.
41 Ilya Parkins, “Texturing Visibility: Opaque Femininities and Feminist Modernist Studies,” Feminist Review 107, no. 1 (2014): 57–74.
42 Yamuna Kachru, “Mixers Lyricing in Hinglish: Blending and Fusion in Indian Pop Culture,” World Englishes 25, no. 2 (2006): 223–33; Rita Kothari and Rupert Snell, eds., Chutnefying English: The Phenomenon of Hinglish (New Delhi: Penguin Global, 2012); Francesca Orsini, “Dil Maange More: Cultural Contexts of Hinglish in Contemporary India,” African Studies 74, no. 2 (2015): 199–220.
43 Rowe, The Unruly Woman, 118.
44 Karyn Stapleton, “Gender and Swearing: A Community Practice,” Women and Language 26, no. 2 (Fall 2003): 23.
45 Rowe, The Unruly Woman, 37.
46 Hannah Ballou, “Pretty Funny: Manifesting a Normatively Sexy Female Comic Body,” Comedy Studies 4, no. 2 (2013): 185. Furthermore, such a subversion also indexes the boisterous folk traditions of Hindi-language mediated comedy on television. See Akshaya Kumar, “Laughter and Liberalization: Cultural Economy of TV Humor in India,” South Asian Review 35, no. 2 (2014): 195–212.
47 Mike Thelwall, “Fk Yea I Swear: Cursing and Gender in MySpace,” Corpora 3, no. 1 (2008): 86.
48 Ladies Room, “Dingo & Khanna Take a Pregnant Pause.”
49 Gilbert, Performing Marginality, 91.
50 Some prototypical examples of Hindi films on the stigmas of premarital pregnancy are Aradhana (1969), Julie (1975), and Kya Kehna (2000).
51 Rebecca Krefting, All Joking Aside: American Humor and Its Discontents (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 2.
52 Nandini Oomman and Bela R. Ganatra, “Sex Selection: The Systematic Elimination of Girls,” Reproductive Health Matters 10, no. 19 (2002): 184–88; Maya Unnithan-Kumar, “Female Selective Abortion—Beyond ‘Culture’: Family Making and Gender Inequality in a Globalising India,” Culture, Health & Sexuality 12, no. 2 (2010): 153–66.
53 Oomman and Ganatra, “Sex Selection.”
54 Ladies Room, “Dingo & Khanna Take a Pregnant Pause.”
55 Suchitra Shenoy-Packer, India’s Working Women and Career Discourses: Society, Socialization, and Agency (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 161.
56 Ladies Room, Episode One, “Dingo & Khanna Discover Where the Grass is Greener,” directed by Ashima Chibber, aired May 31, 2016, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT5S-axdp9k&list=PLEDnP0ud0ZBiS2kgW9-MKKnzZclgDpzgK&index=2&ab_channel=YFilms.
57 Radhakrishnan, “Professional Women, Good Families,” 208.
58 Premilla D’Cruz, Ernesto Noronha, and Avina Mendonca, “‘Varieties of Workplace Bullying’ in India: Towards a Contextualized Understanding,” in Indian Perspectives on Workplace Bullying: A Decade of Insights, ed. Nidhi Mishra et al. (Singapore: Springer, 2018), 4–5.
59 Ibid.
60 Shifman and Lemish, “‘Mars and Venus’ in Virtual Space,” 254.
61 Patricia Yancey Martin, “‘Mobilizing Masculinities’: Women’s Experiences of Men at Work,” Organization 8, no. 4 (2001): 588; Sharon R. Bird, “Welcome to The Men’s Club: Homosociality and the Maintenance of Hegemonic Masculinity,” Gender & Society 10, no. 2 (1996): 120–32; Michael Flood, “Men, Sex, and Homosociality: How Bonds between Men Shape Their Sexual Relations with Women,” Men and Masculinities 10, no. 3 (2008): 339–59.
62 Flood, “Men, Sex, and Homosociality,” 341.
63 Ramaswami Mahalingam, Jana Haritatos, and Benita Jackson, “Essentialism and the Cultural Psychology of Gender in Extreme Son Preference Communities in India,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 77, no. 4 (2007): 598–609.
64 J. Dan Rothwell, “Verbal Obscenity: Time for Second Thoughts,” Western Speech 35, no. 4 (1971): 233–34.
65 Vindu Goel, Ayesha Venkataraman, and Kai Schultz, “After a Long Wait, India’s #MeToo Movement Suddenly Takes Off,” The New York Times, October 9, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/09/world/asia/india-sexual-harassment-me-too-bollywood.html.
66 Surabhi Kanga, Bhanuj Kappal, and Arnav Das Sharma, “Facing the Music,” The Caravan, November 1, 2018, https://caravanmagazine.in/gender/how-oml-failed-women-ranks; Samina Shaikh, “#MeToo: YRF’s Business Head, Ashish Patil Sacked Following Sexual Exploitation Accusation,” The Times of India, October 17, 2018, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/hindi/bollywood/news/metoo-yrfs-business-head-ashish-patil-sacked-following-sexual-exploitation-accusation-read-details/articleshow/66257864.cms.
67 Kathleen Kuehn and Thomas F. Corrigan, “Hope Labor: The Role of Employment Prospects in Online Social Production,” The Political Economy of Communication 1, no. 1 (2013): 21.
68 Jodi Dean, “Whatever Blogging,” in Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory, ed. Trebor Scholz (New York: Routledge, 2013), 135–36.
69 Ilona Mikkonen and Domen Bajde, “Happy Festivus! Parody as Playful Consumer Resistance,” Consumption Markets & Culture 16, no. 4 (2013): 315.
70 Linda Mizejewski, Pretty/Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 24.
71 Merrill, “Feminist Humor.”
72 Graefer, Kilby, and Bore, “Unruly Women and Carnivalesque Countercontrol,” 189.
73 Bhungalia, “Laughing at Power.”
74 Sujatha Subramanian, “Is Hindutva Masculinity on Social Media Producing A Culture of Violence against Women and Muslims?” Economic and Political Weekly 54, no. 15 (2019), https://www.epw.in/engage/article/hindutva-masculinity-social-media-producing-violence-against-women-muslims.
75 Sujatha Subramanian, “(Dis)Respectable Selfies: Honour, Surveillance and the Undisciplined Girl,” in Women’s and Gender Studies in India: Crossings, ed. Anu Aneja (New Delhi: Routledge India, 2019), 255.
76 Mallika Khanna, “The Neoliberal Feminist Gaze: Contesting ‘Female Empowerment’ Narratives in Contemporary Bollywood Films,” Jump Cut, no. 59 (2019), http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/KhannaNeolibFemGaze/index.html.