Locating epistemic (dis)privilege of female fans in select Indian narratives

ABSTRACT

As a relatively new category in academia, discourses on Indian Fan culture, both digital and non-digital, are filled with apprehensive perforations. Rapid globalization and the digitization of media have enabled western fan practices as well as a scholarship to permeate into Indian culture but with a twist of patriarchy fused into it. Despite the involvement of female fans in the first wave of western fan practices, feminist cultural studies rarely found a place within fan studies. This article analyses two films Fan (2016) and Mohanlal (2018), set against the backdrop of culturally diverse regional fandoms to critique the gendered heterogeneity within Indian fandom. While the films selected for analysis ostensibly seem to celebrate the rich culture of media fans in India, nonetheless, they also serve as controlling images that reinstate the hermeneutical injustice perpetrated on female fans, thus marginalizing them. This article aims to tease out the epistemic injustice embedded in the gendered space of Indian fandom and calls attention to the need of establishing a feminist standpoint in the discourse.

KEYWORDS:

• Female fans
• Indian fandom
• epistemic injustice
• feminist standpoint
• regional

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. With Raja Harishchandra (1913) India saw its first motion picture, which was introduced by the legendary Dada Saheb Phalke. It marked the rise of the Indian Cinema Industry, which continues to produce a massive number of films in regional languages like Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, etc.

2. Bhakt/Bhakta (the devotee) is an etymological derivative of Bhakti, a practice of “emotional devotionalism” (Hans G. Kippenberg, Yme B. Kuiper, and Andy F. Sanders 1990, 295) in India. According to Prasad (2009), fanatical devotion to celebrities is akin to an “unmediated” (Gerritson 2019, 45) devotion to a deity. It can be argued that the introduction of mythological films wherein the spectator (bhakt) extends the same devotion to the on-screen deity as he or she would to the real one had been an antecedent to the parallel. Fans in India began to “borrow” from religious practices, such as pouring milk and hanging garlands on the cut-outs of the stars.

3. Refers to the people from Kerala (India).

4. https://twitter.com/aishuvjaddict/status/634996170260025344?lang=en.