Faculty Research Fellows Lunch with Usha Iyer

Usha Iyer:  "The Dancing Heroine: Narrating a Corporeal History of Indian Cinema"

Drawing from her book project on dancer-actresses in Indian cinema, Professor Iyer discusses how the dancing woman, considered marginal to the history of South Asian and indeed most cinemas, is actually a central figure in articulating South Asian cultural modernity. Through their cultural labor, their resistance to contemporary gender norms, their negotiation of prevailing moral attitudes to women’s visibility and participation in the public sphere, these pioneers of popular entertainment help us advance new histories of the female body in South Asian film and dance, corporeal histories forged relationally across axes of caste, class, religion, and region.

Visit Professor Iyer's webpage.