Between Lipstick and Widow’s White

Female desire and gendered ageism in contemporary Bollywood

Datos Bibliográficos

ID24138709
AutoresSushree Routray (0000-0002-9131-2063, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, autor de correspondencia)
Año2026
Páginas1-21
Fecha de publicación2026-08-27
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of Women & Aging (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0895-2841 • E-ISSN: 1540-7322
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/08952841.2026.2716047
PMID42657962
OpenAlexW7204437793
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas27

Aging women in Bollywood have long been confined within a narrow repertoire of archetypes, among them the suffering widow, the stern matriarch, and the self-effacing grandmother, figures defined not by individuality or desire but by moral authority, self-sacrifice, and patriarchal function. Shaped by what Susan Sontag termed the ‘double standard of aging’ and intensified by the social economy of Brahminical patriarchy, these representational conventions have historically rendered older women’s sexuality, reproductive agency, and social presence cinematically inconceivable. When older women assert agency, express desire, or transgress the boundaries of respectability, they risk social ridicule, pity, or pathologisation, their erotic subjectivity systematically erased through what feminist gerontologists theorise as sexageism, the compounded oppression of ageism and sexism. This article examines three recent films, Lipstick Under My Burkha (dir. Alankrita Shrivastava, Citation2017), Badhaai Ho (dir. Amit Ravindernath Sharma, Citation2018), and The Last Color (dir. Vikas Khanna, Citation2019), as exemplary interventions in this evolving discourse. Each film confronts a distinct dimension of gendered ageism: the suppression of erotic subjectivity and later-life desire, the pathologisation of late-life reproductive agency, and the institutionalised erasure of widows from public and social life. Through close textual analysis, the article traces how each film negotiates the representational conventions it contests. It argues that these films constitute an emergent and still fragile reimagining of aging femininity in South Asian popular culture, one that moves beyond deficit-oriented frameworks to offer new vocabularies of desire, agency, and visibility for older women on screen.

Femininity · Human sexuality · Invisibility · Masculinity · Oppression · Power (physics) · Social constructionism · Subjectivity · Aging and Gerontology Research · Cinema and Media Studies · South Asian Cinema and Culture