Abstract
Urmimala Sarkar Munsi’s chapter discusses the complex permutations of Indian dance in the neoliberal Indian economy of accumulation. In global Bollywood and Indian television reality shows, Sarkar Munsi argues, beauty and labour are bought and sold as commodities. Unlike the life-long commitment demanded by classical Indian dance, performers for these new media acquire skills that are transient and have only short-term utility. While Sarkar Munsi contrasts the ‘hidden body’ of the woman dancer in the sanitized realm of Indian classical dance to the ‘hyper-commoditized’ body of the woman dancer from Bollywood, she also observes that in both contexts the sexualized female subject is responsible for creating an aesthetic/market product while being controlled by the normative values of a hegemonic patriarchal society.
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Munsi, U.S. (2017). Buy One, Get One Free: The Dance Body for the Indian Film and Television Industry. In: Diamond, E., Varney, D., Amich, C. (eds) Performance, Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times. Contemporary Performance InterActions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59810-3_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59810-3_14
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