The Good Wife and the Goddess
The Good Wife and the Goddess
Scripting Roles for the Female Citizen in the Devotional Film
Chapter 3 examines the question of gender in the cinematic conceptions of the citizen–devotee. The contradictions that traverse the nationalist ideal of femininity manifest themselves in the cinema of the 1950s and 1960s in the form of a conflict between two figures which have been central to the Telugu devotional genre—the sati and sakti—the good wife and the goddess. Hindu mythic characters of ideal wives provided the role models for imagining the ethics of good wifehood. In many of these films the goddess in her fierce and terrifying aspects, whose worship is usually associated with the superstitious lower castes, is dismissed as a sign of primitive nature. In later decades, however, there are perceptible shifts and lower caste village goddesses begin to make an appearance. Drawing on feminist film theory and anthropology of embodiment, I examine the implications of these thematic and generic shifts.
Keywords: women’s films, goddess films, sati films, feminist film theory, horror cinema, devotional cinema, gender and cinema, embodiment, affect, caste and cinema
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
