‘Breaking’ the Silence and ‘Fighting’ Back: Changing Representations of Female Response to Gender-Based Violence in Select Malayalam Films

Abstract Representation, particularly mediated forms such as cinema, has always been a powerful tool to enable social change. On the one hand, cinema functions as an instrument that reinstates hegemonic patriarchy, but on the other, it also becomes “a tool for political resistance and subversion” (Lauret, 1991, p. 66). Recently, South Asian cinema and, more specifically, the corpora of Malayalam cinema 1 has emerged as an empowering platform that addresses structural and institutionalised inequalities of gender. Broadly, the paper discusses the shift in the representational praxis of gender-based violence in Malayalam cinema, more specifically, the female protagonists’ responses to violence. Specifically, the paper focuses on two recent Malayalam films, Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey (2022) and The Teacher (2022). The films present vigilantism as a means of female empowerment, offering an alternative narrative to traditional portrayals of victimhood, and how it can resist feelings of powerlessness in the face of gender-based violence. Therefore, anchoring on Laura Mattoon D’Amore’s theoretical framework of vigilante feminism (2017), the study examines the intersection of vigilantism, gender-based violence, and cinematic representation, in an attempt to locate both the covert and overt forms and responses surrounding violence against women.