Shuhita Bhattacharjee
Personal Website: shuhitabhattacharjee.com
Across my years of research and teaching in USA and India, my interests have been in the areas of Victorian Literature and Culture, Postsecular Theory, Studies on Religion and Secularism, Gender, Sexuality and Queer Theory, Postcolonial Studies, Posthuman Theory, Cultural Studies, Thing Theory, Literature and Cinema of the Diaspora, Graphic Novels, Popular Literature and Culture, New Woman Literature, Discourses of the Hijab, and Anglo-Indian Literature. A significant aim of my first monograph is to complicate the predominant geopolitical assumption of a modern 'crisis of faith' and 'decline' of religiosity. I am currently at work on my second monograph in which I examine the representations of colonial idols in fin-de-siècle literature and culture. Several concurrent projects on graphic novels and on diasporic literature and cinema continue to engage me. Alongside my academic interests, I have worked extensively in the social sector at national and international levels in areas such as violence against HIV-positive women, sex education, and workplace anti- sexual harassment laws in educational institutions. This has in many ways shaped the core of my identity as a socially conscious academic and has contributed both to the pedagogical and the administrative techniques that I employ in institutions of higher learning. An active classroom, dedicated to changing delimiting socio-cultural narratives, and a program of scholarly training, invested in the joys of the archive, form the centrepiece of my pedagogical and supervisory approach.
Address: Email:
[email protected]
[email protected]
Office:
Room 541, Academic Building C,
IIT Hyderabad
Across my years of research and teaching in USA and India, my interests have been in the areas of Victorian Literature and Culture, Postsecular Theory, Studies on Religion and Secularism, Gender, Sexuality and Queer Theory, Postcolonial Studies, Posthuman Theory, Cultural Studies, Thing Theory, Literature and Cinema of the Diaspora, Graphic Novels, Popular Literature and Culture, New Woman Literature, Discourses of the Hijab, and Anglo-Indian Literature. A significant aim of my first monograph is to complicate the predominant geopolitical assumption of a modern 'crisis of faith' and 'decline' of religiosity. I am currently at work on my second monograph in which I examine the representations of colonial idols in fin-de-siècle literature and culture. Several concurrent projects on graphic novels and on diasporic literature and cinema continue to engage me. Alongside my academic interests, I have worked extensively in the social sector at national and international levels in areas such as violence against HIV-positive women, sex education, and workplace anti- sexual harassment laws in educational institutions. This has in many ways shaped the core of my identity as a socially conscious academic and has contributed both to the pedagogical and the administrative techniques that I employ in institutions of higher learning. An active classroom, dedicated to changing delimiting socio-cultural narratives, and a program of scholarly training, invested in the joys of the archive, form the centrepiece of my pedagogical and supervisory approach.
Address: Email:
[email protected]
[email protected]
Office:
Room 541, Academic Building C,
IIT Hyderabad
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Papers by Shuhita Bhattacharjee
Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare (2020), and Bombay Begums (2021), to understand how her
cultural productions explode the politics behind the scopophilic representation of female
sexual desire by invoking certain widely marketed and frequently censored genres of erotic expression (erotic novels and telephone sex catered through dating apps) and then exposing their disturbing social underbelly where sexual violence resides. Shrivastava’s agentive female characters rupture these commercialized pulp sexual narratives and the fetishized figures of their heroines, replacing them with a far more problematic female voice of desire that speaks the truth about acquaintance sexual violence—subject to legal challenges and the result of our misogynist sexual culture (Francis 1996; Pineau 1989; Fraser 2015; Viki et al. 2004; Kahan 2021)—in all its various (unregulated/unrecognized) formats, whether marital rape, intimate partner sexual violence, sexual harassment, or intrafamilial sexual abuse. With reference to sociological and legal scholarship (McGregor 2005; Santhya et al. 2007; Anderson 2010; Conly 2004), I discuss how these works portray the distressing and unlegislated reality of acquaintance sexual violence—revealing the complex nature of sexual consent (which can be partial, subjective, and temporary), the varieties of nonconsensual sex (which can be unwanted/unwelcome even when not forced, and psychologically coercive even when not physically forced), and the grimmer impact of acquaintance assault as compared to stranger rapes (Drakulich 2015). I will argue that this mordant critique is lodged in the new Indian Indie current—-which, as critics have noted, spells the demise of the archvillain and transformation of the familiar ‘heroine’—and that it consequently stages socio-political intervention by demolishing the stereotypical ‘romantic hero’ and subversively projecting the figures of the sexually desirous woman and the acquaintance rapist.
Keywords: New Indian Independent Cinema, Cinema on Sexual Violence, Acquaintance
Rape, Female Desire
Keywords: Gurinder Chadha, South Asian diasporic cinema, dark humour, humour from below, gendered performance, postcolonial cultural critique
Book Chapters by Shuhita Bhattacharjee
Sharma, Pari (2018) and Bulbbul (2020), to understand how they stage the afterlife of the nineteenth-century trope of vampirism through the blood-sucking forms of the female protagonists, Rukhsana and Bulbbul, in order to metaphorically represent contemporary anxieties surrounding sexual violence in South Asia. Produced by Anushka Sharma’s Clean Slate Filmz founded in 2013—the year of the Mumbai Shakti Mills gangrape and one year after the Nirbhaya rape case—and mobilizing the figure of the vampire that has historically represented fears of immigration, sexual promiscuity, and moral degeneration, these films by a South Asian female producer draw on the power of the Victorian vampiric metaphor and portray the vampiric protagonists as tormented survivors of rape to dramatize the fears of and protest against sexual violence.
Books by Shuhita Bhattacharjee
Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare (2020), and Bombay Begums (2021), to understand how her
cultural productions explode the politics behind the scopophilic representation of female
sexual desire by invoking certain widely marketed and frequently censored genres of erotic expression (erotic novels and telephone sex catered through dating apps) and then exposing their disturbing social underbelly where sexual violence resides. Shrivastava’s agentive female characters rupture these commercialized pulp sexual narratives and the fetishized figures of their heroines, replacing them with a far more problematic female voice of desire that speaks the truth about acquaintance sexual violence—subject to legal challenges and the result of our misogynist sexual culture (Francis 1996; Pineau 1989; Fraser 2015; Viki et al. 2004; Kahan 2021)—in all its various (unregulated/unrecognized) formats, whether marital rape, intimate partner sexual violence, sexual harassment, or intrafamilial sexual abuse. With reference to sociological and legal scholarship (McGregor 2005; Santhya et al. 2007; Anderson 2010; Conly 2004), I discuss how these works portray the distressing and unlegislated reality of acquaintance sexual violence—revealing the complex nature of sexual consent (which can be partial, subjective, and temporary), the varieties of nonconsensual sex (which can be unwanted/unwelcome even when not forced, and psychologically coercive even when not physically forced), and the grimmer impact of acquaintance assault as compared to stranger rapes (Drakulich 2015). I will argue that this mordant critique is lodged in the new Indian Indie current—-which, as critics have noted, spells the demise of the archvillain and transformation of the familiar ‘heroine’—and that it consequently stages socio-political intervention by demolishing the stereotypical ‘romantic hero’ and subversively projecting the figures of the sexually desirous woman and the acquaintance rapist.
Keywords: New Indian Independent Cinema, Cinema on Sexual Violence, Acquaintance
Rape, Female Desire
Keywords: Gurinder Chadha, South Asian diasporic cinema, dark humour, humour from below, gendered performance, postcolonial cultural critique
Sharma, Pari (2018) and Bulbbul (2020), to understand how they stage the afterlife of the nineteenth-century trope of vampirism through the blood-sucking forms of the female protagonists, Rukhsana and Bulbbul, in order to metaphorically represent contemporary anxieties surrounding sexual violence in South Asia. Produced by Anushka Sharma’s Clean Slate Filmz founded in 2013—the year of the Mumbai Shakti Mills gangrape and one year after the Nirbhaya rape case—and mobilizing the figure of the vampire that has historically represented fears of immigration, sexual promiscuity, and moral degeneration, these films by a South Asian female producer draw on the power of the Victorian vampiric metaphor and portray the vampiric protagonists as tormented survivors of rape to dramatize the fears of and protest against sexual violence.