Gentrified fantasies
Women singers on the gramophone in late colonial India
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4837802 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Meenal Tula (Gender Studies, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 30 |
| Issue | 7 |
| Pages | 1119-1140 |
| Publication date | 2021-11-10 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Women s History Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0961-2025 • E-ISSN: 1747-583X |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/09612025.2020.1825170 |
| OpenAlex | W3088499273 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
In late colonial India, the bourgeoning middle class was getting increasingly invested in gendered notions of respectable behaviour and morality which ostensibly framed not only the national community but its culture as well. In this discourse, it was women singers and actresses—euphemistically, ‘public women’—who became the embodiment of obscenity and moral corruption. Concurrently, the middle class also became the biggest consumers of new cultural technologies, such as the gramophone, which prominently featured these ‘public women’. This paper seeks to explore how the ‘publicness’ of these singers and the connotations attached to the same were tied up in the early growth of this form of popular culture. The ambiguities of eroticism and desire mapped onto the disembodied voice of the ‘public woman’ went a long way in shaping the tastes, habits and conventions that structured the early relations of consumption of these technologies. I argue that these new conditions opened up a cultural space that female singers negotiated by cultivating distinct public personas
Aesthetics · Art · Colonialism · Eroticism · Human sexuality · Language change · Literature · Media studies · Middle class · Morality · Political science · Popular culture · Public space · Sociology · Cinema and Media Studies · Gender Studies · History · Law · Music History and Culture · South Asian Cinema and Culture
| Citations per year | 0.75 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2022 - 2025 (4) |
| Highly cited | No |