Same shame: national, regional, and international discourses surrounding Shoaib Mansoor’s cinematic portrayal of gender oppression

ABSTRACT

This article explores the essential role feminist media texts play in fostering global connections and disconnections by centering on contemporary Pakistani cinema, an understudied segment of South Asian film. Through an analysis of the discourse surrounding the filmography of the Pakistani director Shoaib Mansoor within Pakistani, Indian, British, and American publications, I argue that Mansoor’s three films, Khuda Kay Liye, Bol, and Verna, have moved across borders due to their feminist critique of sexual violence in Pakistan. Breaking into foreign markets that have previously ignored or banned Pakistani cinema, these films have been able to travel by relying on a media discourse that positions portrayals of female subjugation as stories that expose such a common societal shame that they must not be bound by political, financial, or geographical limitations. Yet, this reception is not border-less, marked at times by anti-Muslim sentiments that divide India and Pakistan, and occasionally characterized by Westernized narratives that centralize the American based #MeToo movement. By tracing the complex processes of reception, this article helps us to look beyond the media’s role in constructing homogeneous and orientalist images of “third world” women, and consider opportunities for movement, agency, and transnational feminist dialogue.

KEYWORDS:

• Transnational feminism
• South Asian cinema
• gender violence
• #MeToo
• Pakistan

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The term “third gender” broadly refers to those with gender identities that extend beyond the dominant two-gender framework. In South Asia, it can pertain to individuals who identify with a gender that differs from the one they were assigned at birth, those who have been castrated, who experience same sex attraction, those born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that cannot be defined as wholly male or female (intersex people), etc. (Shahnaz Khan 2016). Mansoor tackles the marginalization and oppression of those who are of liminal sex and gender within Pakistani society in his second feature Bol (2011). The film depicts the coming of age of Saifi, an intersex character, who though beloved, is also shunned, abused, raped, and eventually murdered.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daphne Gershon

Daphne Gershon is a PhD student in the Media and Cultural Studies program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests center around the representation of gender, sexuality and ethnicity in the media. Email: [email protected]