“Choice” and Feminist Praxis in Neoliberal Times

Abstract

This article addresses the visual debate around a new image of the autonomous woman emerging on satellite television in West Bengal, India, a region rapidly changing under the influx of multinational finance. While this image appears to promote a revolutionary vision of choice opposing gender stratifications, it responds to the sexual anxieties of a shifting postcolonial context by reconciling women's choices with patriarchal and communalist values. To justify its ostensible “feminist” revolution, the imagery draws upon indigenous oppositional traditions of gender portrayal while flexibly utilizing opposition in the services of an inequitable market. Even as the neoliberal canon of (free) women and (unfree) labor is narrowcast on regional-language satellite channels throughout Bengal and its diasporas, this canon is being debated through critical embodiments of women, work, and choice in oppositional-feminist cinema. I look, on the one hand, at televisual adaptations of woman-centered works by a foremost gender-activist of the anti-colonial era, Rabindranath Tagore. The adaptive canon is read in tandem with a widely popular game show on Bengali satellite television called The Earning Homemaker. On the other hand, I consider how oppositional-feminist filmmaker Aparna Sen is undoing the prevalent canon of woman's autonomy in her recent films. My point overall is to explore how we could disentangle the oppositional from dominant neo-humanist communication patterns. I argue that we must situate various depictions of women's “choice” within specific relations of power, distribution, and technologies of persuasion—considering what differs and why the differences tend to be elided.