Sex Appeal and Cultural Liberty: A Feminist Inquiry into MTV India

Frontiers, 2004 by Cullity, Jocelyn, Younger, Prakash

In our reading of Chatterjee's model, the constraints of maintaining this balance function to keep women bound to the ideological construct of the "Home" even as they actually move into the sphere of the "World" through work, education, and other activities. Without denying the important historical differences that distinguish competing versions of this model (that is, those associated with the Congress party, the Hindu right, the Marxist left, etc.) and the stages in its evolution from the nineteenth century to the present, one can nonetheless recognize a generally pervasive ideological identification of "Woman" and "Home" to which middle-class Indian women are still subject today.

In contrast to the restrictions implicit in this model, the new pop-cultural nationalism manifest in the production and reception of MTV India images seems to provide a strategic rhetorical means for middle-class women to assert their independence by participating in the patriotically inflected project of globalizing the local and localizing the global. Strongly evident as we pursued our inquiry was that informants perceived the images of women on channels like MTV India as a challenge to the discourses of purity, patrilineality, and authenticity that characterize older nationalist constructions of the "Home." By providing images of "worldly" women who are at the same time understood to be fully "Indian," MTV India is understood to help legitimate women's claims to equal participation in realms beyond the domestic.14

In what follows, we will first examine the images themselves, assessing how their formal and semiotic designs might function to reproduce or challenge existing gender relations. We will then proceed to consider how middle-class young women engage with these images.

FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF MTV IMAGES IN THE U.S.A.

To create a point of departure, it is useful to look at studies already done on MTV content in the West, to see if Indian MTV content differs at all. Although MTV in the United States does have a department that views videos for objectionable content, targeting drug use, excessive alcohol consumption, and sex,15 female images depicted on the channel in the United States show that MTV is far from achieving a "gender-balanced communication," where representations of the female are not vastly diminished beings. Though male rap artists have helped to lessen the domination by white men, historically MTV in the United States has foregrounded white male characters at the expense of women and minorities.16

In music video narratives, women are consistently "put down" and "kept in place," and caricatures of traditional personality attributes for gender are employed-for example, men are more aggressive and violent; women are more affectionate and fearful.17 Stereotypes of gender occupations distort reality, with women portrayed as cheerleaders, secretaries, fashion models, and telephone operators. In most cases women are not portrayed as involved in the production of music but are frequently positioned as dancers, sometimes as back-up singers, or as simply present, surrounding the male artist.18 The constant repetition of these roles means that women accept that success or stardom comes from being models or dancers,19 or more generally, objects for male entertainment.