Women’s Action Cinema in Pakistan

This article examines the ambivalent aesthetics of Urdu action heroine films directed and produced by the female star, Shamim Ara, and promoted in their day (1980s) as a cinema for women. Released under the Islamist military regime of Zia-ul-Haq, these films draw on action genres from elsewhere, thanks to rampant video trade/piracy. Historians dismiss such films as exploitative and escapist. A close look at the arts of depicting fights and choreographing female movement on screen reveals, instead, a tendency to arrest the exploitative sexualisation typical to action heroine cinema worldwide. I argue that these female-focused arts were pleasurable to a non-liberal Pakistani women’s culture riddled, at this time, with violent censorship. The female and male bodies on the Ara action screen interact in paradoxical ways both with the masculinist Pakistani state, and with global genres that fetishise the aggressive female body and sexual violence

Action (physics · Aesthetics · Ambivalence · Art · Censorship · Literature · Media studies · Movie theater · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · The arts · Visual arts · Cinema and Media Studies · Gender Studies · Law · Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East · Psychology · South Asian Cinema and Culture