Femininity Through the Lens: Narrating Sexual Politics and Women’s Emancipation in Parched and Lipstick Under my Burkha

Storytelling is an effective art of forging new ideas and cultural practices.Cinema, being a story teller through visual narrative plays significant role in representing social norms and thoughts.It mirrors the socio-cultural and political issues in conscious or unconscious ways.Cinema as a part of popular cultures, not only entertains the spectators but narrates the rising social problems, injustices, discriminations and projects solutions to the problems by instilling new ideas and thoughts in the minds of the mass.Apart from Bollywood and Tollywood, India have many regional film industries where woman film makers attempt to map the position of women and their psychology through the Lens.The main objective of this research paper is to study the oppression of women and their resistances in their subaltern condition with special reference to the two-woman film maker's film Parched and Lipstick Under My Burkha.Women in these films protest against the patriarchal dominance and gender inequality.They rise from their adverse positions and discover a path of emancipation by fighting the prevailing patriarchal hegemony.The result of the study shows that the women reject their subalternity by creating their own discourse and resolve a new purpose in life.The study asserts that being mistreated and discriminated in a phallocentric society; women should not think themselves as subaltern.Women have to rise above the hegemonic discourse by asserting their self-identity.The analysis is made through the lens of Gayatri Chakravorty's Can the Subaltern Speak? and Kate Millet's Sexual Politics along with the other feminist's perspectives.