Papers by Aparna Nandakumar
Studies in South Asian Film and Media, 2023
In this article, I attempt to understand the global K-pop fandom among young women, from the pers... more In this article, I attempt to understand the global K-pop fandom among young women, from the perspective of non-metropolitan locations like the state of Kerala in southern India. I examine the 'sub-visible' nature of K-pop fandom and situate it in relation to existing discourses surrounding visibility in youth subcultures and fan cultures, both in India and the West. I argue that the key to understanding this fandom is in the cultural process of feminization that it produces-a feminization of male K-pop idols through the 'free labour' (to use a concept by Tiziana Terranova) that K-pop fans engage in on digital spaces-labour that has the structure of work and the function of enjoyment and enthusiasm. Drawing on existing discourses on the 'feminine', I analyse the peculiar mode of feminization in K-pop fandom as a response to the precarity and vulnerability experienced by young people in the contemporary world.
Dialogist: International Journal of Literary Studies and Interdisciplinary Research, 2021
This paper aims to demonstrate the complex interrelations between the concepts of androgyny, neol... more This paper aims to demonstrate the complex interrelations between the concepts of androgyny, neoliberalism, modernity, and idealism in relation to how youth is imagined in non-metropolitan regions of the world-regions where neoliberal economic processes need to negotiate with existing feudal power structures. For this purpose, I intend to focus on a particular form of androgyny which I shall designate by the term "cuteness", as deployed in certain youth films in Malayalam cinema, with special emphasis on the youth film Niram (dir. Kamal, 1999). I argue that the androgynous style designated as "cute" is derived precisely by feminising certain sartorial styles and terms of addressed otherwise coded as masculine, even culminating in feminising the male protagonist. Through the analysis of this film, I shall delineate how the modern, neoliberal aesthetic of "cuteness" and androgyny serves to re-legitimise the conservative social structure of the family and to give it a renewed social purpose.
South Asian Popular Culture, 2021
Anchored on the figure of the young Malayalam film actor Rahman and his mercurial rise to popular... more Anchored on the figure of the young Malayalam film actor Rahman and his mercurial rise to popularity in the 1980s, this paper argues that ‘youth’ bears within itself the desire to transcend the gender barrier and fashion a shared sensibility and subjectivity that reaches its peak in the neoliberal moment, thus signifying a new metrosexual, even androgynous, subject who is able to speak for the aspiring global citizens of the region. Rahman signifies a break in the traditional, hegemonic imagination of South Indian masculinity that is rooted in the region, and instead stands for the new configuration of cosmopolitan youth that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as a result of the migration to the Persian Gulf and the inflow of money and consumer goods from there – a category of youth whose self-fashioning was inflected in a significant way by their consumption practices. Certain representational techniques also resulted in a queering or androgyny of the youthful figure that he personified, suggesting the liminality of gendered identity in youth. Apart from textual analyses of a selection of his films, I also draw on popular reportage around his stardom in the form of news reports and gossip columns published in the leading Malayalam film weekly, Naana, in the 1980s. While the former helps to outline the representational function of Rahman’s body in film narratives, the latter supplements this with data on how the ways in which his figure was imagined and received, both within the industry and among fans, contributes to fashioning a new youth subjectivity.
Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies, 2020
The history of the cultural study of 'youth' as a discursively formed category is intertwined wit... more The history of the cultural study of 'youth' as a discursively formed category is intertwined with the history of British Cultural Studies. The Birmingham Centre's deployment of concepts like 'counter-school culture,' 'subculture,' and 'style' gave rise to a redefinition of youth as agents of resistance and social transformation, in opposition to earlier sociological and psychological studies that analysed youth as vulnerable to social evils. Later, the valorisation of youth subcultures as sites of pure resistance was problematised by cultural theorists such as Angela McRobbie. In postcolonial societies like India, attempts at studying youth as a cultural category also have to grapple with the peculiar relationship between youth, modernity, and colonialism. In such a context,I would like to examine how 'youth' functions as a signifier in contemporary times, a signifier that is constantly reinvented, reinvested with new meanings, and re-deployed in new contexts of political self-formation. For this purpose, I focus on two recent developments in the sphere of popular culture in Kerala1 that show the ways in which youth participate in cultural meaning-making through the appropriation of existing sartorial trends for new purposes. In the first instance, I analyse a recent music video, "Native Bapa" (dir. Muhsin Parari, 2012), produced and circulated by the self-defined music movement Mappila Lahala on social media websites and online media-sharing platforms. I look at how this video, with its fusion of hip-hop and the colloquial Mappila Malayalam dialect as well as its appropriation of traditional Mappila attire and accessories, imagines a new mode of figuring/signifying youth – one that is cosmopolitan in outlook, yet rooted in the social and political culture of the region. In the second instance, I examine how young people refashion the traditional sartorial code of shirt and mundu associated with hegemonic masculinity in Kerala, as a result of the popularisation of this style in the popular Malayalam film Premam (dir. Alphonse Puthren, 2015). I choose these two instances from a range of creative youth cultural practices in the region, mostly expressed through digital platforms, since both exemplify spectacular ways of resignifying existing sartorial conventions. Discussing these two cases, I try to tease out the ways in which youth redefines itself in the contemporary moment, the cultural resonances they draw on, and their continuing engagement with the public sphere.
Studies in South Asian Film and Media, 2020
The processes of globalization and liberalization currently underway in most parts of the world a... more The processes of globalization and liberalization currently underway in most parts of the world address young people as agential subjects, even as a primordial fear of the raw, uncontained, chaotic force symbolized by unrestrained youth persists. In such a context, I argue that youth becomes an aspirational subject position signifying different things to various social actors. Drawing upon Roland Barthes’ notion of ‘myth’ as a sign in a second-order semiotic system (<i>Mythologies</i>, 1993), I examine various popular cultural texts of the mid-2000s such as the popular Hindi film <i>Rang De Basanti</i> (‘Paint me the colour of spring’, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra 2006), as well as select advertisements, music videos and public service campaigns in order to unravel the ‘mythologies’ converging in the figure of youth in contemporary India.
Chalachitra Sameeksha, 2019
In this paper, I attempt to analyse two well-worn tropes from the Malayalam film Chemmeen (Prawns... more In this paper, I attempt to analyse two well-worn tropes from the Malayalam film Chemmeen (Prawns, directed by Ramu Karyat, 1965)—the ‘fidelity myth’ of the fisher community around which the narrative revolves, and the figure of the ‘disillusioned lover’ embodied by Pareekkutty, one of the film’s protagonists. The aim here is to understand the film as offering a new ideological resolution to the struggle between the individual self and a communitarian social order.
Chalachitra Sameeksha, 2019
This paper studies the Malayalam film Lal Salaam (Red Salute, dir. Venu Nagavally, 1990) to locat... more This paper studies the Malayalam film Lal Salaam (Red Salute, dir. Venu Nagavally, 1990) to locate within its narrative the elaboration of a rupture in the flow or circulation of enthusiasm in the region of Kerala, a rupture that figuratively depicts a momentous transition in the socio-political or ideological history of the region.
Anveshi Broadsheet on Contemporary Politics, 2013
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Papers by Aparna Nandakumar