Weepies Going Dirty and Machos Doing Masti: Unveiling the Female Chauvinist Pigs in Indian Cinema

This paper aims to examine Raunch culture, a strand of post-feminism in the recent Bollywood movies, The Dirty Picture and Grand Masti. Both these movies critique the perception that the investment in raunch feminine sexuality empowers female characters, but if observed profoundly, they celebrate the commodification of women’s body. Frequently revolving around sex and consumption, it celebrates female agency through its discernment that women in such movies are provided the capacity to “have it all” (Genz, 98). Drawing upon Levy’s notion of “Female Chauvinistic Pigs” and McRobbie’s notion of “double entanglement”, the focus is that this apparent empowerment is hollow for celluloid females; their actions incite cultural anxieties about the ways women are to be represented and simply reinforce the patriarchal norms that envisage women as objects