https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i3.096
The Laughing Medusa: Representation of Monstrosity in Bulbul
PRIYANKA PANWAR
Assistant Professor of English
Motilal Nehru College (Evening)
University of Delhi, India
Abstract: Anything which deviates from the norms is seen as monstrous. A study dealing with the idea of monstrosity or shape-shifting in women becomes a way to challenge the dominant narratives and carve possibilities of alternative narratives. The narratives tend to challenge traditional ideas of femininity and also relook at the ways in which women who deviate from the stereotypical construction of womanhood are seen as monstrous or dangerous. Cinema provides a more enhanced continuity to the idea by touching upon the issues of bodily metamorphosis through its focused capturing of the nuances.
Helene Cixous’ The Laugh of the Medusa talks about the connection between women’s writing and body-politics. A woman’s body, according to Cixous, is representative of multiple meanings. “A woman’s body, with its thousand and one thresholds of ardor-once, by smashing yokes and censors, she lets it articulate the profusion of meanings that run through it in every direction-will make the old single-grooved mother tongue reverberate with more than one language.” (Cixous 885)
Anvita Dutt’s Bulbul uses the aesthetics of monstrous-feminine to construct a counter-discourse and make way for alternative histories and narratives that tend to demystify the stereotypical representation of monstrosity associated with a female body. In my proposed study, I intend to understand how monstrosity becomes an interesting trope of analysis to study the politics of gender and the aesthetics of representation.
Keywords: Monstrosity, body, femininity, gender, Indian Cinema
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