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Reimagining Representations: Transformative Genderness and LGBTQ+ Visibility in Contemporary Bollywood

Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Indian popular cinema has long been critiqued for advancing a postcolonial bourgeois nationalism through its moral and affective regimes. In the current political climate, where an emerging Hindu nationalist state increasingly tightens control over narratives, new forms of socially engaged and entrepreneurial efforts in filmmaking have begun to emerge. Enabled by global over-the-top (OTT) platforms like Netflix and Prime Video, this wave of films invests in inclusive representations and socially relevant storytelling that challenge hegemonic discourses on gender, sexuality, and nationhood. Through close readings of popular hits such as Bala (2019), Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan (2020), Badhaai Do (2022), and Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga (2019), this article examines how contemporary Hindi films act as cultural entrepreneurial efforts, negotiating aesthetic, political, and market risk. It argues that these films employ humor, genre hybridity, and melodrama to radically queer traditional institutions such as marriage and family, foregrounding emotional vulnerability, female agency, and LGBTQ+ visibility within the mainstream. While these films remain entangled within neoliberal circuits of production and consumption, they nonetheless produce counter-hegemonic imaginaries that unsettle both patriarchal and nationalist orthodoxy. Ultimately, the article situates this emergent cinematic practice as a form of visual entrepreneurship, where storytelling becomes a site of speculative politics, enabling new ways of imagining social change and representations in contemporary India.
DOI: 10.3998/gs.7692
Author: Rajat Sharma
Language: English
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7083681332
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