Feeling like a feminist: star text and mediation of gendered aspirations in neoliberal India

Over the last three decades, there has been a proliferation of ‘women-centric’ narratives in Indian film and media where tropes like empowerment, freedom and choice are foregrounded. This paper critically analyses how these tropes are entangled with market-led ideals of self-making by exploring the role that the intersection of neoliberalism, affect and popular culture plays in shaping female subjectivities in contemporary India. Treating neoliberalism as a rationality that permeates all spheres of contemporary life we explore how aspiration has become a structure of feeling that constructs female subjectivities. Through an analysis of the construction and circulation of Taapsee Pannu’s star text, an Indian actor known for women-centric roles and celebrated as a feminist icon, the article conceptualises the figuration of the ‘Aspirational Woman,’ a neoliberal feminist archetype prominent in post-2010 Indian film and media. Through a close reading of Pannu’s films, brand endorsements, and media image we argue how narratives of self, love, and imaginaries of collective belonging mould this figuration. Drawing on scholarship on the relationship between neoliberalism, gender, and popular culture, we examine this figure’s contradictory nature, reading Pannu’s star text as symptomatic of the current conjuncture where gender is articulated in instrumental and ambivalent ways.