Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow, February - April 2021
Navaneetha Mokkil teaches at Center for Women’s Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her areas of research and teaching include feminist theory and methodology, print and visual culture, and public formations of sexuality. She is the author of Unruly Figures: Queerness, Sex Work and the Politics of Sexuality in Kerala (2019) and the co-editor of Thinking Women: A Feminist Reader (2019). Her articles on the non-linear imaginations of sexuality have appeared in the journals Studies in European Cinema, Inter Asia Cultural Studies, South Asian Popular Culture, and BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies.
Project Abstract
Encountering the Body: Cinematic Practices and the Scenography of Protests in India
In my research project I analyze how shifting modalities of public protests and new forms of cinema in India make us meet with the body differently through individual and collective encounters. Since the 2000s, in multiple global contexts, we see the emergence of embodied protests and cinematic practices that create affective public networks. I unpack how and why these protests and films insist on the materiality of the body in a time period when proliferating digital media practices render bodies mobile, virtual and duplicable. Through an engagement with visceral and edgy cinematic forms and bodily practices I examine how the political is being globally recast in the last two decades.