20/03/2025
Centre for Women Studies, JNU
Invites you to a talk on:
Operating Together: Reflections on Policewomen, Cinematic Representations, and Indian Feminism through Soni
Pooja Satyogi
Pooja Satyogi teaches at the School of Legal and Socio-Political Studies, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar University. She is an anthropologist and a political scientist with research interest in policing and urban governance, histories of jurisdiction, and security and surveillance studies.
Date: March 26, 2025
Time: 11 am - 1:00 pm
Venue: Room 401, School of Social Science I, JNU.
Abstract:
The presence of an external threat, a sexual harasser, attempting harassment in a public space, becomes central to the plot of the film Soni (2018)—a recent Hindi film about two women police officials that was released on Netflix. The film focuses on “anti-eve teasing” (sic) drives in Delhi, in which undercover women cops look for sexual harassers. Soni is part of a new genre of films and TV series in India where we see women working together as part of a single workspace. Women working together, the paper argues, has been an uninterrogated terrain in Hindi cinema, with singularity being the hallmark of the post-liberalisation cinema as well. In the genre of Indian women cop films as well Soni marks an important point of departure because it allows us to see the work-relationship between women, who are deployed as public women to protect other women. These, ostensibly, force-wielding labouring bodies, the paper argues, are the untheorized bodies of Indian feminism, with the policing question in the sub-continent settled with its always-already imbrication with violence. The figure of the policewoman poses challenges for Indian feminism that desires women’s protection and safety, but without interrogating its entanglements with the world of bodies that work as shock absorbers.