Sarees on Screen

Trigger Warning: Discussions of sexual assault, r*pe, victim shaming, honor killing, and other forms of sexual violence and abuse. For anyone who may find these topics unsettling, we recommend prioritizing your mental health and not engaging with the following content.In this Saucy Deep Dive, we tackle Shoaib Mansoor's Verna, a controversial release from Pakistan dealing with themes of r*pe and sexual violence. Verna tells the story of a woman navigating societal and institutional hurdl...

Trigger Warning: Discussions of sexual assault, r*pe, victim shaming, honor killing, and other forms of sexual violence and abuse. For anyone who may find these topics unsettling, we recommend prioritizing your mental health and not engaging with the following content. This episode continues our conversation on South Asian r*pe culture, picking up from where we left off. Nonconsent in the media is often an unpleasant and inescapable staple, but this doesn't occur in a vacuum. It is ofte...

On our very first “behind-the-screen” bonus episode, we talk movies, podcasting, and how we became friends in the first place despite hating almost everything at first sight.Jokes aside, we really did want to take a chance to reflect on our podcasting journey so far, re-introduce ourselves to our audience as well as dig into why we started this podcast and its origins. As two queer brown feminists from different South Asian countries, we hoped to bring an intersectional lens to our criti...

For our latest Saucy Deep Dive, we chose the early 2000s classic Mohabbatein starring Amitabh Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan, and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan. In Mohabbatein, Shahrukh Khan comes to Gurukul to teach music and bring “love” into Amitabh Bachchan’s overly strict and bizarrely religious school...college...university? It's never really made clear. Shah Rukh Khan’s plan to bring love to the school revolves around teaching three students - played by Uday Chopra, Jimmy Shergill, and Jugal H...

Trigger warning: In this episode, we will be discussing issues such as stalking, voyeurism, r*pe, sexual harassment, assault, self-harm, and Islamophobia. For anyone who may find these topics unsettling, we recommend prioritizing your mental health and not engaging with the following content. Our latest topic-based episode is tackling collective ideas of consent in South Asia, as well as the glorification of non-consent in our media. We knew that a feminist analysis of South Asian cinema...

For our latest Saucy Deep Dive, we picked Funny Boy, a movie adapted by Deepa Mehta (an Indo-Canadian director) based on Shyam Selvadurai's 1994 novel of the same name. Funny Boy is a coming-of-age story about a boy called Arjie from an affluent Sri Lankan Tamil family. It chronicles his journey from childhood to adolescence and early adulthood amidst the ethnic tensions and the divisive Sri Lankan Civil War.While we loved the queer coming-of-age aspect of this movie, Arjie's exploration...

It’s been really encouraging to see increasing representations of queerness in our mainstream media. As grateful as we are as queer folk to have queer stories in our own languages, it's important to admit that some stories have been told with more consideration than others.As queerness becomes more marketable, it becomes even more necessary to not just celebrate the movies that come out but also question them. Is it a culturally sensitive portrayal? Is it a nuanced representation? Is it simpl...

In this episode, we are thrilled to be watching and discussing a Bangladeshi favorite Third Person Singular Number made by Mostofa Sarwar Farooki - one of the most famous contemporary directors from Bangladesh.We’ve also had the pleasure of having Raidah of raidahcal on this episode. She does wonderful work addressing contemporary feminist issues in Dhaka, Bangladesh. While we all had different takes on the movie, it was wonderful to have Raidah’s unique insights and perspectives.The movie is...

Open conversations around sex and sexuality continue to be taboo in our society, but it’s been great to see a segment of people start to chip away at that reluctance to talk about such a fundamental part of all our lives.While we absolutely value the importance of sharing lived experiences, in this episode, we specifically looked at the media we consume - how it portrays sex and sexualities of women and marginalized people, and how it shapes the greater societal conversations around these iss...

For this episode, we watched Khabi Khushi Khabie Gham, the iconic Karan Johar movie that shaped Y2K culture in South Asia. It has a special place in our hearts, but how does it fare on an intersectional feminist film rating system? Listen to find out.- - -Once every month, we host our “Saucy Deep Dive” episodes. On these, we do a more casual breakdown of classics we all love and love-to-hate. And sometimes we’ll have guests join in on the fun. Our framework for these discussions is ...

In our first ever episode, we tackle how pop culture and mainstream media in Bollywood portray women and marginalized characters. To contextualize our discussion, we took note of the male and feminine gazes in cinema and art, and how they uphold (or subvert) traditional ideas of gender roles, social and power dynamics, and other forms of identity privilege. For this episode, we specifically chose some recent films and shows coming out of Bollywood that marketed themselves as feminis...

Discussions about social issues in South Asia are often limited by stigmatization and the lack of accessible vocabulary, especially, when tackling prominent feminist topics.This forced us to think about the media we consume and how it is succeeding (or failing) to help further conversations around patriarchy, class, caste, and capitalism in our countries.Join us as we bring queer brown feminist perspectives to all of our favorite films and shows to tackle these difficult topics.- - -Check out...