Transgression and transcendence in Shoaib Mansoor’s feminist trilogy

ABSTRACT

This article examines Shoaib Mansoor’s cult feminist trilogy—Khuda Kay Liye (2007), Bol (2011), Verna (2017)—to demonstrate how his transgressive heroines transgress myths of femininity, for example, those pertaining to Otherness, division, and the eternal feminine. Mansoor features transgressive heroines who transcend the patriarchal boundaries structured to contain them and challenge the voice of male authority. His heroines’ transgressions thus take agency as the driving force for pursuing self-fulfilment in transcendence, undermining the domineering traits of patriarchy embedded in the status quo and herd values. The article adumbrates Pakistani cinema’s transitional odyssey from women as docile bodies to transcendent agents by analyzing heroines’ portrayals in traditional Pakistani cinema. I argue that Mansoor’s feminist trilogy significantly contributes to women’s cinema by addressing the audience as a woman and concerning with women. As Mansoor persuasively features transgressive heroines, watching the feminist trilogy as counter-narrative provides us with the representation of women as social subjects whose transformative actions destabilize discursive formations, accomplish transcendence, and create a space of woman empowerment.

KEYWORDS:

• Transgression
• transcendence
• Pakistani cinema
• women’s cinema
• feminism
• Shoaib Mansoor

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the Feminist Media Studies’ anonymous reviewers for their critical and comprehensive comments, which helped me strengthen my arguments and organize them more logically.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This section offers a decade-wise analysis of Pakistani cinema. My decade-wise study of the women’s portrayal does not follow a strict pattern in choosing films from each decade. I draw on the previous scholarly literature and support my comparative placement of the films in Pakistani cinema.

2. Pakistani cinema is home to four regional cinemas—Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto, and Balochi—and one national cinema—Urdu. But this article mainly focuses on Punjabi and Urdu cinemas.

3. Docile girl who is supposed to safeguard her virginity, sexuality, social and cultural ethics, and family honour.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Azam Sarwar

Azam Sarwar is a Ph.D. student at the School of Foreign Languages at Southwest Jiaotong University. He has published in the Asian Journal of Women’s Studies (Routledge) and Critical Sociology (SAGE). His research interests focus on feminism, film-philosophy, Pakistani Cinema, Post-Conflict Literature and Cinema, and South Asian literature and cinema.