#ImNotAChickFlick: Neoliberalism and Post-feminism in Veere Di Wedding (My Friend’s Wedding,2018)

Neoliberal Feminism and Post-feminism: Contextualising the Economic and Cultural Milieu Of Veere Di Wedding

While neoliberalism is a macroeconomic doctrine, that entails deregulation, dismantling of social welfare programmes and the privatisation of public services, scholars such as Wendy Brown, Wendy Larner and Catherine Rottenberg, among others, have argued that, as a set of practices, neoliberalism extends its grasp upon facets of life that are not overtly economic or related to state policies (Brown, 2015; Rottenberg, 2014). In fact, neoliberalism’s impulse is to usurp all spheres of life, to become a central organising ethic of society that shapes the way we live, think and feel about ourselves and each other. As neoliberal rationality becomes the dominant mode of governance, it ‘produces subjects, forms of citizenship and behavior, and a new organization of the social’ (Brown, 2015, p. 37). In this new regime of morality, collective forms of action or well-being are eroded, and emphasis is placed on self-reliance, efficiency and the individual’s capacity to exercise his or her own autonomous choices (Larner, quoted in Rottenberg, 2014, p. 421).

Rottenberg, Nancy Fraser and Elisabeth Prugl note that, with neoliberalism, feminism too undergoes an important transformation (Fraser, 2009; Prugl, 2015). Most crucially, the neoliberal feminist subject distances herself from the political ideals associated with feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, to celebrate the wider range of choices, in women’s personal and professional lives, that were now available to them. This disidentification with Second-Wave/liberal feminism is borne out of a discourse that, on the one hand, relegates the feminist revolution to the past, because it is assumed to have fulfilled its mission, and, on the other hand, the neoliberal feminist discourse holds individualised women responsible for whatever inequalities that do continue to persist. Instead of challenging the social, cultural and economic forces that produce gendered inequality, neoliberal feminism turns the addressal of structural inequalities into an individual affair through the personal choices that women make (Rottenberg, 2014, p. 20). A valorisation of the expanded choices available to women, even if they reconfirm patriarchal hegemony, and an encouragement of the maximal articulation of these choices through ‘consumer sovereignty’, are thus the founding principles of a postfeminist regime. It is choice per se, rather than the type of choice, or the constraints under which choices are made, that is read as a sign of women’s agency. Women’s liberation is reduced to individual women’s economic success and their ability to freely participate in cultures that previously excluded them—from pornography consumption to attendance at corporate executive board meetings.

In the Indian context, a host of scholars such as Rupal Oza, Leela Fernandes, Maitreyee Chaudhuri and Inderpal Grewal, among others, have examined the emergence and spread of neoliberal feminist ideas since the 1990s (Chaudhuri, 2014; Fernandes, 2018; Grewal, 2005; Oza, 2006). Grewal writes, ‘the current phase of capitalism in India is producing a new kind of popular, cosmopolitan feminism that seems to operate differently than the feminism that many have come to associate with women’s movements in India’ (Grewal, 2005, p. 31). Chaudhuri notes that it is not that the issues raised by the women’s movement recede entirely. Instead, ‘what happens is that … collective ideas of women’s liberation and freedom become reconfigured as essentially individual desires and goals, which the new opportunities that the growing market offered could gratify’ (Chaudhuri, 2014, p. 146). Some of the features of neoliberal feminism in India include the use of the vocabulary of, and the emphasis on, individualism, subjective desires, choice, agency, empowerment, self-monitoring/surveillance, consumerist desires and sexual pleasure.

Interestingly, these scholars rarely use the language or framework of ‘postfeminism’ to examine gender in liberalised India. Likewise, scholars who study postfeminism in the Global North have not taken into account the ways in which the ideological imperatives of postfeminism are relevant to the Global South. And, yet, for our purposes, postfeminism’s individualising logic, which downplays and depoliticises the continuance of gendered inequality, and its constitutive imbrication with consumerist notions of ‘choice’, make it a markedly useful lens with which to think about India’s first chick flick (Gill, 2016, 2017). In doing so, our article takes seriously Simidele Dosekun’s contention that although postfeminism is under-theorised in non-Western contexts, it, nevertheless, circulates as a transnational culture and sensibility through the mediated circuits of consumer culture. Dosekun identifies postfeminism as ‘a neoliberal, individualistic, and consumerist discourse’ that is very much pervasive in the Global South, and it is ‘potentially and variously available to globally “scattered” feminine subjects who have the material, discursive, and imaginative capital to access and to buy into it’ (Dosekun, 2015, p. 966).

Dosekun’s discussion provides an important context for a film such as VDW. The film’s central protagonists are four young women (Kalindi, played by Kareena Kapoor; Avni, played by Sonam Kapoor; Meera, played by Shikha Talsania; and Sakshi, played by Swara Bhaskar) whose lives are fully and successfully embedded in India’s neoliberal universe. The casual ease with which the film is able to give us the transatlantic hypermobility of these women, and without judgement depict a live-in relationship, an interracial marriage, and premarital sex, even as it locates a ‘big wedding’ at the heart of its plot, are testament the film’s comfort with its own neoliberal, globalised milieu. At the same time, its decidedly depoliticised engagement with these women’s lives, outside the concerns of heterosexual matrimony, the sexual and consumer privileges that women enjoy, combined with the utter disparagement of, and lack of solidarity with, any other women besides each other, is symptomatic of the film’s predominantly postfeminist rationale.

It is important to consider VDW’s place within the genre of ‘women-centred’ films that have proliferated in the aftermath of the 2012 Delhi gang rape. In the past decade, Bollywood has demonstrated a decided investment in constructing new cinematic modalities within which to explore and experiment with women’s stories and voices. A slew of mainstream and ‘hatke’ films—such as English Vinglish (Shinde, 2012), Queen (Bahl, 2014), Parched (Yadav, 2015), Pink (Chowdhury, 2016), Anarkali of Aarah (Das, 2017) and Lipstick under my Burkha (2017)—have tracked women’s journeys of self-discovery, focusing, in particular, on issues of autonomy, consent and sexual harassment. Films, such as Dum Laga Ke Haisha (Katariya, 2015) or Shuddh Desi Romance (Sharma, 2013), forefront women’s narratives within couple-formation in middle-class contexts. Significantly, a new kind of female star has emerged in conjunction with these films. Actors such as Kangana Ranaut, Taapsee Punnu, Radhika Apte and Swara Bhasker, to name a few, occupy a newly opened terrain in the Hindi film industry, and they predominantly play the strong ‘new women’ roles in such films. ⁴

VDW is both a part of, and yet apart from, these films. To different degrees, most of these post-millennial films, VDW included, not only highlight the pluralisation of women’s stories but also, unwittingly articulate the extent to which feminism has been co-opted within neoliberalism in contemporary India and Bollywood’s cosy alignment with discourses of globalisation. Where VDW stands apart from these films is the confident ease with which it embraces its postfeminist stance. Star practices too reflect on formations of ‘postfeminism’, and it is telling that the film’s main characters are played by female actors such as Kareena Kapoor-Khan and Sonam Kapoor-Ahuja—Bollywood royalty with an established reputation as glamour queens and social media savvy fashionistas who often espouse easy mantras of postfeminism. The film locates these characters within an abundant, affluent, hyperconsumerist and elite milieu, and, as we suggest in our introduction, in its embrace of consumerism, the idea of the self as enterprise, presenting of sexual expression as agency, and its impatience with any need for institutional or structural social change, VDW occupies a central place in thinking about the new modes in which feminism is reinvented in India today.

Neoliberal Genres in Post-colonial Contexts: Veere Di Wedding’s Self-Posturing As #imnotaCHICKflick

Indian chick lit emerged as a highly successful commercial genre in the post-1990s publishing boom in India. Interestingly, though, the cinematic equivalent of the genre—the Indian chick flick—has been far more reticent in its emergence. It was only with VDW that we witnessed Bollywood’s explicit venture into the chick flick, although one can trace a genealogy of the genre in films such as Aisha (Ojha, 2010; a remake of Clueless) and Turning 30 (Shrivastava, 2011). Like any good chick flick, in the course of the film, VDW’s protagonist(s) come to terms with their life choices, overcome their psychological hurdles and self-imposed sexual embargos, and take charge of their personal relationships, as they journey towards self-knowledge and self-actualisation. The film raises questions about prescribed gender and sexual roles for women; it plays out the difficulties of negotiating expectations and achieving independence; emphasises the role of female friendship; embraces consumerism; and hyperventilates about matrimonial travails (right from the decision to marry to the disappointments that accompany post-married life). The film’s posters (see Figure 1) too are replete with traditional chick-flick paraphernalia: they all feature the female leads in settings and sartorial styles associated with weddings, beaches and bedrooms. In these regards, VDW’s chick flick status is unmistakable.

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Figure 1.

Source: Figure provided by the author.

Genres, as Tejaswini Ganti reminds us, are infinitely dynamic, and every culture and historical moment produce their own genres (Ganti, 2013). While popular Hindi cinema has genres that are specific to it (for instance—mythologicals, lost and found, courtesan and dacoit films), Hindi films also participate in renditions of global genres. This is particularly true of ‘New Bollywood’ and a part of the ‘gentrification’ (Ganti, 2012, p. 4) and ‘process of Hollywoodization’ that the Hindi film industry has undergone, making Hindi cinema’s taxonomy much more in tune with cinema elsewhere (Gopal, 2011, p. 91). As a result, new global genres such as romantic comedies, science fiction superhero films, and action-adventure plots have emerged as crucial generic developments to accompany industrial ones in the past two decades, shifts that have also been accompanied by changes in representations of female desire and sexuality. With VDW, we can now add the chick flick to this list of global genres that Bollywood has adopted/adapted.

And yet, somewhat ironically, VDW directly invokes its generic ‘chick lit’ antecedents precisely to deny them: the twitter hashtag #ImNotAChickFlick was aggressively fore-fronted in the film’s promotional material (and in a lot of its paratextual paraphernalia). What is doubly ironic and telling is how, while no one remembers if, where or who first referred to VDW as a ‘chick flick’, it was the film’s team that hitched its wagon to the label, latching on to the hashtag #ImNotAChickFlick to market itself. As Shilpa Jamkhandikar (2018) put it in her review, while VDW ‘might scream itself hoarse that it is “not a chick flick”, it is obvious from the beginning that it draws inspiration from one of the biggest chick flicks of our times—Darren Star’s Sex and the City. In one poster, we literally see the women in a bedroom with chic vintage wallpaper, dressed in hair curlers, flowery, satin negligees and pajamas. And still, at the bottom of the poster, we distinctly see the hashtag that decries our assumptions. Almost unsustainably, the poster’s urban, ‘girly’ global chic aesthetic and its content stand incongruously in tension with the film’s self-taxonomising. While we might even argue that, paradoxically, VDW’s hashtag only goes onto reveal how the film, as a product of twentieth-century Bollywood, is attuned to and self-aware of its relationship to global genres and discourses, it is, nevertheless, a curious rhetorical genre-distancing manoeuvre that the film’s publicity undertakes.

All four of the female leads, as well as Rhea Kapoor—one of the film’s producers—vehemently rejected the film’s labelling as a chick flick, focusing their critique both on the appellation ‘chick’ and on the ways in which the gendered label restrict the film’s marketability. Sonam Kapoor, for instance, decried the derogatory implications of the nomenclature: ‘Are we chicks?’ (‘If not a chick flick’), and she asks quizzically in one of her interviews before the film’s release (Anon, 2018d, n. pag.). Kapoor’s response highlights the traditionally derisive associations with the term ‘chick’, which, as Suzanne Ferris and Mallory Young suggest, is considered an insult, ‘a demeaning diminutive’ that casts ‘women as child-like, delicate, fluffy creatures in need of protection and guidance’ (Ferris & Young, 2008, p. 3). In their interviews, Swara Bhaskar and Rhea Kapoor suggested that the label ‘chick flick’ works as a mechanism whereby a male-dominated industry pigeonholes ‘heroine-oriented’ films. ⁵ Bhaskar challenged the supposedly universal appeal of mainstream films that are ‘about men’—those, she argues, are never called ‘male-centric films or dude-flicks’ (Ravi, 2018). Rhea Kapoor insisted that the hashtag #IAmNotACHICKFlick came into being as a ‘revolt against labels’ (Mathur, 2018), an objection to the automatic correlation that audiences make, and the film industry encourages, between women-centred films and the ‘chick-flick’ genre.

What is important to remember, however, is that ‘chick lit’ is far from a pervasive category that is known widely by audiences in India. In fact, the term would be recognisable only to audiences that are already patrons of what Amit Rai calls ‘malltiplex films’, by which he means films for and about urban, youthful, globally fluent, consumerist, middle/upper-class audiences with elite lifestyles. And just to be clear, VDW courts precisely such an audience. In this context, the hashtag #IAmNotACHICKFlick, we might argue, serves a contradictory and dual function: it makes present, through negation, a genre-association that most Hindi film audiences would not have to begin with, and while they are not the primary audience for the film, the hashtag does the work of interpellating them into a vocabulary that naturalises an easy facility with global references. In a sense, then, we see the hashtag as something that both shames and satisfies: those unfamiliar with the reference are stimulated to self-educate and become conversant in a global lingo; those who do recognise the reference, on the other hand, can revel in a self-congratulatory satisfaction about their insider status in the world of transnational references.

What is really problematic about VDW’s objections to being called a chick flick is the deflection entailed in the hashtag and the interviews. For one, no Hindi films—popular or Indie—that are centred around women, even if they are too few and far between, have been designated chick flicks—not Mother India (Khan, 1957), Damini (Santoshi, 1993), Mirch Masala (Mehta, 1987), Khoon Bhari Maang (Roshan, 1988) or Margarita with a Straw (Bose, 2015). This is because what constitutes a chick flick is not its focus on women per se, but its postfeminist construction and representation of femininity and women’s lives.

Although chick lit has expanded and given way to multiple subgenres—desi/ladki lit, sistah lit, chica lit, ‘pink-collared beauty’ lit—written by and about women of colour, the predominantly Anglo-American context in which chick lit and chick flicks first emerged is still important. Identified as a White normative genre, chick lit has been read by scholars like Ferris and Young as the embodiment of the postfeminist aesthetic, characterised by ‘a return to femininity, the primacy of romantic attachments, girlpower, a focus on female pleasure and pleasures, and the value of consumer culture and girlie goods’ (Ferris & Young, 2008, p. 4). These, without fail, are all narratological tropes that dominate VDW. But, as scholars such as Eva Chen, Pamela Butler and Jigna Desai have so astutely argued in their study of Chinese and South Asian-American chick lit, respectively, the postfeminist impulse to be preoccupied with consumption and marriage is a manifestation of the ways in which chick lit participates in and produces a middle-class neoliberal female subject (Butler & Desai, 2008; Chen, 2012).

The protagonists of VDW may thus be thought of as the female counterparts of the globe-trotting, luxury-holidaying men in Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (You Only Live Once, Akhtar, 2011), a neoliberal buddy road-trip Hindi film. Despite the film’s hashtag-protestations, therefore, VDW can be classified as a chick flick not because, as the lead stars would have us believe, it is about women or ‘heroine oriented’, but because its vision of what women’s lives entail is co-opted, hegemonised and scripted by a heteropatriarchal neoliberal world view, in which to be liberated is to act as men do—take international holidays to decompress, visit strip joints and crack sexual jokes, in which, nearly all women (including working-class women) who do not meet the criteria of the ‘new young women’ (McRobbie, 2004, p. 262) that the protagonists represent, are subjected to vicious, and frankly sexist disparagement—for being gold-diggers and financial leeches on their husbands, for not being strong enough to leave abusive marriages, for being un-cool aunties, pretentious stepmothers and saccharine-sweet mothers-in-law with gauche aesthetics.

The Women Who are Damned and The Girls Who Are Not: Neoliberal and Postfeminist Politics Of Veere Di Wedding

The single most fundamental tenet of the neoliberal postfeminist ethic is expressed in its rejection of a collectively oriented feminist project that is concerned with how women can unite along shared affinities and struggles, in favour of an individualised politics of selfhood (Snyder-Hall, 2010). In this reconfiguration, the inward-focused feminist subject accepts full responsibility for her own well-being and self-care, lauds an entrepreneurial individualism (Budgeon, 2015) and has little interest in a collective envisioning of social justice. In VDW, this takes the form of utter disparagement of nearly all the women who are not one of the four central protagonists.

When we are first introduced to the adult Avni, we find her representing the interests of a husband against his wife’s alimony demands in a divorce case in a Delhi court room. What is alarming about this sequence is not so much that she represents the interests of a man—lawyers, after all, fight all sorts of cases, even ones where their own politics are not entirely aligned with their clients. Rather, it is the vitriolic condemnation that Avni launches against the wife’s rightful claims to her husband’s money that marks this moment out as political crux of the film. Just as the camera enters the courtroom, we hear the wails of a woman (the wife) and see Avni rolling her eyes in annoyance at what is meant to be viewed as the woman’s manipulative hysterics. Avni’s address to the judge confirms her position: ‘Your Honor, what is the basis of her demand for maintenance? The fact is that she has emptied out the [jewelry] locker [safe]; she hasn’t worked a single day in her life, and she has done nothing in life besides drama. She’s getting what she deserves – zero. She shouldn’t get even a penny’. This is followed by the judge, snappily convinced by Avni’s indefatigable logic, signing the divorce/settlement papers that entitle the woman to nothing.

This scene helps establish the film’s world view very quickly: we are far removed from the feminist struggles of the 1970s and 1980s, in both India and globally, that fought long and hard for women’s economic rights and security in marriage. Avni’s speech and the lack of protest it receives from the judge and even the wife’s own lawyer (who stays silent even when the woman urges him to speak) work to quickly and efficiently—very early on in the film—assuage any audience anxieties that a film with four women will be a ‘feminist’ film, one that entails male-bashing or an exposition of women’s rights. In a context when the anti-feminist men’s rights movement has been gaining ground in India, along with other developments like the continuing ascension of aggressive/muscular Brahminical Hindu nationalism (that expresses itself in campaigns of Love Jihad or the war on Valentine’s Day), and where there is a mainstream acceptance of the discourse that women routinely abuse anti-dowry and anti-sexual harassment laws to persecute innocent men with trumped-up charges, Avni’s opening speech is all the more insidious.

Even more, the scene lays the foundation for a key dichotomy between, and taxonomy of, women who deserve entitlements and those who do not deserve entitlement. What is surprising, though, is that the grounds for what constitutes a ‘deserving woman’ are somewhat fluid. While the wife is berated here for not having an independent income, for not having ‘worked a day in her life’, later in the film, Avni jumps to give her friend Sakshi—who too has no independent professional identity or income, and lives off her millionaire father—legal aid, to protect her financial interests in her divorce case.

Shortly after the courtroom scene, in an arranged marriage set-up, Avni is paraded by her mom in front of Manish and his parents. While the two families are playing the match-making game, we hear sounds of a woman sobbing coming from a different part of the house, and Avni excuses herself from the conversation on the pretext to ‘check on tea’. When Avni enters the kitchen, she sees her domestic help, Shanti, her face bruised, crying as she makes tea for the guests. Avni places her hand on Shanti’s shoulder to turn her around, and we see the full extent of the violence that her husband, ostensibly, has unleashed on her. Avni’s first words to Shanti convey sympathy but also her exasperation at the latter’s circumstances: ‘I cannot see your black and blue face every morning along with my tea’. Avni’s horror at the sight of Shanti’s domestic abuse injuries is accompanied by an impatience at the latter’s refusal to act and leave her husband—‘Uff, stop crying…Thank god I’m a lawyer; I’m going to get you divorced’, she says, threatening also to file a first information report—FIR (a police report) against Shanti’s husband.

There is much to unpack in this scene. Ostensibly, the scene lets us know that Avni is as adept at being a shrewd, no-punches-pulled, kind of lawyer and at calling out women who fake victimhood, as she is at being compassionate and using her legal expertise to intervene on behalf of a working-class woman to stop her domestic abuse. That she pays no heed to Shanti’s protestations of ‘Nahin Didi’ (no, sister) is meant to be beside the point. And yet, it is significant that Avni’s paternalism is blind to what the lower-class woman may herself want. This could have potentially been a moment where the similarities between Avni and the maid’s situation are made visible—they are both working women (unlike Avni’s friends), and they both struggle to navigate marriage/matrimonial market and the concomitant gendered inequities that follow. Instead, in this moment, as elsewhere in the film, middle-/upper-class modern young women like Avni display female individualism at the expense of feminist politics. The film opts to establish the upper-class woman as the working-class woman’s saviour. ⁶ It is also interesting that while victim-status is granted to Shanti (as opposed to the woman in the court scene), Avni still expresses impatience at Shanti’s tears, in a kind of ‘if you won’t fix your problem, stop crying about it’ way. The postfeminist rhetoric that women are responsible for fending for themselves combines, in this scene, with a neat and convenient distinction, along class lines, between who still needs access to the hard-won rights that feminism made accessible to women, and those who are post/past the need for feminism. As Dosekun so astutely notes, ‘In highly inegalitarian local contexts’ while upper-class women function as ‘empowered’ and thus no longer in need of feminism, lower-class women are seen as ‘still disempowered’ and in need, still, of feminism’s interventions (Dosekun, 2015, p. 967).

What is most unsettling is the speed and ease with which Shanti’s plight is forgotten. Avni is distracted by the news, received via text, announcing her friend Kalindi’s engagement to her long-term boyfriend. Avni shrieks with joy, announcing the good news loudly to Shanti, who grins widely in response to her employer’s excitement. The abrupt shift in the scene’s tonality—from sombre to exuberant—is indicative of just how incidental working-class women’s predicaments really are to Avni and to the film; the forgettability of Shanti’s problems is seconded by the fact that she never appears on screen again.

In fact, there are only other two contexts in which working-class women are even referenced, both times as insulting appellations. When a potential suitor Nirmal rejects Avni after she kisses him, she berates him for his double standards, saying, ‘You think you want a modern and independent wife, but all you really want is a naukarani [servant/maid] who nods her head [in agreement]’. Clearly, a servant cannot be modern or independent since the sort of liberation or empowerment being envisioned here is exclusively the preserve of middle-/upper-class women like Avni and her friends. Another important moment is when we finally discover the reason for Sakshi’s divorce: among the many stresses in her marriage, one is that her husband would expect her to do domestic chores (daily cooking, hosting parties, etc.) and then humiliate her for not being well turned out when his work-friends were over: ‘You’re looking worse than a bai [servant]’, he tells her. When Sakshi finally reveals the acrimonious details of her marriage to her friends, in their eyes, it is this crime—of comparing her to a working-class woman/domestic help—that most condemns her husband. Avni tells Sakshi she will help her fight her divorce case, stop her husband Vineet from blackmailing her (for having caught her masturbating) into coughing up millions because ‘Nobody calls my best friend a bai’. The film then renders working-class women’s lives, their struggles, into immemorable glitches that matter only inasmuch as they impede the postfeminist female subject’s morning tea consumption; their professional identities—as domestic help—are turned into insulting appellations, by the men who use them and by the women who accept them as degrading comparisons. In the postfeminist gender regime, it is far worse to be called a poor woman than a slut.

In fact, the film and its central protagonists travel a fair distance in legitimating their general displeasure at, and lack of, solidarity with nearly all the other women in the film (besides each other). All middle-aged or older women (mothers and aunties) are dismissed as nags (Avni’s mother) or gossipy neighbourhood aunties who make the lives of young, single/divorced women hard with their taunts, jibes and snooping questions. Even the well-intentioned older women, like Kalindi’s mother-in-law and Bhandari’s mom (the man Avni has a one-night stand with), are rendered contemptible for their gauche and smothering mannerisms, and grotesque aesthetics; they embody the aspirations of the nouveau riche, getting the markers of a globalised aesthetic terribly wrong. As a result, their taste in clothes and decor are the subject of multiple jokes in the film. Finally, Kalindi’s stepmother, Paromita, is made the object of vicious ridicule: she is depicted as the stereotypically loud and pretentious Bengali woman dressed in handloom saris and silver jewellery. She is even called a ‘slut’ or whore (bazaroo aurat) by Kalindi’s snobbish and sexist gay Uncle.

In VDW’s version of things, the postfeminist subject is a tricky assemblage; not every woman, simply by virtue of being a woman under a neoliberal regime, gains automatic entry into the echelons of empowered neoliberalism. In the film, it is only the central protagonists, the four friends, who check the right boxes, embody the correct cultural facets and, thus, represent the right kind of femininity. Being upper class is a requirement, of course, but not sufficient criteria (as we learn in the courtroom scene); being born rich, rather than simply marrying rich, makes for a more ‘legitimate’ postfeminist subject, which explains why Avni offers to help Sakshi protect her (father’s) financial interests during her divorce, when she did not extend the same courtesy to the woman in the courtroom scene.

Fascinatingly, the postfeminist neoliberal subject critiques patriarchy most staunchly only when it comes in the way of her exploring her heteronormative sexuality. Sexual double standards are a deal breaker for her. This is why Avni’s rejection of Nirmal (on the grounds that he morally castigates her for trying to kiss him) and her journey to sexual self-confidence are some of the most central concerns of the film. In this new gender regime, ‘being without a husband does not mean [women] will go without men’ (McRobbie, 2004, p. 262). Sexual freedom is the one cause, the one ethic, for which postfeminist subjects will seemingly stake a political claim. At the same time, though, as the next section of the article on sexual humour will demonstrate, sexual autonomy is a privilege that only the right kind of woman—the postfeminist subject—can avail. Older women, stepmothers, daughters of unlikable aunties—are exempt from partaking in this privilege.

This is not to suggest that the postfeminist subject is perfect, or inured, against committing mistakes; quite the contrary, in fact. As Kalindi’s dead mother’s voice-over tells us, the whole film is an exposition on letting daughters/women make mistakes and learn from them. What distinguishes the four friends, however, is that they never resort to melodrama or hysterics (unlike the woman in the courtroom, Shanti, or Kalindi’s mother-in-law) in the face of adversity. Remarkably, then, we do not see even one of the four characters cry—they always maintain a dignified emotional sobriety, which singles them out as being adept at managing life’s travails.

And, of course, when it all does get too much, the girls know what to do to keep calm and carry on: take a luxury holiday abroad, blow off some steam through the appropriate channels of consumerism and return to normalcy with the renewed commitment to addressing their problems head on.

Since female liberation in the film translates to girls playing the same games that veeres/bros do, the film borrows tropes from the neoliberal bromance or contemporary Bollywood male buddy road to superimpose onto its vision of what feminine choices entail and enable. The girls’ trip to Thailand allows the chick flick or ‘veer-romance’ to further trade in hyper-consumerist spectacles in environments of urban affluence and privilege. What brings the girls’ together is their ability for consumptive travel, their attitudes and lifestyles. With a swipe of her credit card and a few clicks on her iPad, Sakshi books an extravagant trip where her female buddies (who she refers to as ‘bitches’ in another postfeminist move of reclaiming an insulting word) can heal (or stop ‘giving it up’ to everyone, as she puts it) after Kalindi breaks off her engagement to Rishabh as she feels overwhelmed by the demands of his suffocating family. With an HSBC credit card, there is really nothing that money cannot buy; nothing is priceless! The girls fly business class, stay at a private luxury villa, have champagne by a swimming pool, stroll on the beach in bikinis, eat crab by the ocean, smoke marijuana joints and visit strip clubs. When they end up on the dance-stage, Sakshi and Meera gyrate on the poles, reinforcing the film’s postfeminist moves, a sense that feminism has been ‘taken into account’ (as McRobbie puts it).

Post-vacation, the girls decide to ‘lean in’ and are able to quickly mend the chinks that have emerged in their friendship and deal with their personal issues. It is this—their capacity to take individual responsibility of their ‘bad choices’ (marriage-phobia; obsession with getting married; sexless marriage; failed marriage and the subsequent acting out through alcohol consumption and late night partying out of guilt for having embarrassed one’s parents), and their ability to rectify their mistakes by making ‘good choices’—that marks them out as the only ‘girls’ (because postfeminist culture girlifies women) deserving of the accolades that neoliberalism and postfeminism shower on its adherents. By the time the four friends return from their holiday, they have resolved their internal conflicts, and we see each of them taking ‘action’, setting in motion their entrepreneurial spirit, to fix their lives: Kalindi reconnects with her fiancé and ultimately marries him; Avni confronts her mother about the pressure the latter puts on her to get married because she has come to terms with her own sexuality unencumbered by matrimony; Sakshi finally tells her parents why her marriage ended, only to find that they are nothing but supportive of her; and, Meera fixes her sexless marriage by initiating sex with her husband immediately after her return from the holiday with friends.

Female Bros, Dildos and Sexual Gratification: The Politics Of Sexual Humour in Veere Di Wedding

Indeed, the reclaiming of sexuality and sexual pleasure seems central in the film’s postfeminist gender regime, one that is supposed to unsettle traditional insistence on female chastity and virtue. The ubiquity of sexual humour is one of the prime forms that this embrace of sexuality takes in the film. Its investment in exploring the lives of four economically privileged women, and the modes of self-fashioning and self-articulation they have access to, combined with the film’s predominantly comic tenor, opens up the possibility of endless jokes, sexual innuendoes and witticisms that these women share with each other in their attempt to voice their frustrations. Like never before, at least in popular Hindi cinema, we see young women embrace their ‘bad girls’ status as they unabashedly plough through the audience’s (and, at times, even their own) discomfort at sexually explicit humour and adamantly reinstate the sexual in their everyday lives and conversations. In some ways, then, their recourse to sexual humour may be read as an integral component of women’s expressive rituals and their ordinary conversations; it could be seen as an urban-chic variant of what Gloria Raheja and Ann Gold, in their study of rural women’s oral traditions in North India, argue constitutes ‘a moral discourse in which gender and kinship identities are constructed, represented, negotiated, and contested in everyday life’ (Raheja & Gold, 1994, p. 1). At the same time, however, a closer analysis of the humour they resort to, as well as the code-switching they engage in, in these ‘funny’ moments, and the content and target of humour leaves us with a less than satisfying envisioning of the liberatory potential of the kind of sexual humour that VDW puts on offer. In other words, while Raheja and Gold examine the relationship between language and gender to uncover the ‘creative power of women’s discourse’, our computational analysis of VDW’s sexual humour, similar to Stanley Tambiah’s findings in relation to North Indian women’s songs, unveils the ways in which the linguistic rebellions of the four protagonists, ‘leave the dominant male ideology more or less intact’ (Tambiah, 1989, p. 418). The ostensibly subversive titillations offered by the film’s sexual humour, in fact, mask an insidious normalisation of, and participation in, a sexist logic conflated with entitlements of caste–class privilege.

Conventionally, sexual humour has been identified as a masculine pursuit, which, as John Morreall suggests, allows men to communicate with one another without revealing anything about themselves. In fact, the world of dirty jokes and bawdy humour has long alienated women. For one, in such standard jokes, women exist mostly as stereotypes: dumb blondes, nagging wives, angry feminists, mothers-in-law and sex objects. Women are, thus, invariably the butt of the joke in sexual humour. Second, there is a tacit pressure on ‘respectable’ women to excuse themselves from such humour or ignore it when it occurs in their presence for fear of being judged as sexually available or promiscuous. Women who agree to listen to or tell such jokes are read as signalling their access to ‘fallen knowledge’, and thus read as conveying their willingness to accept a man’s sexual approach (Farb, 1974, p. 96). At the same time, women are caught in a double bind: their unwillingness to laugh at sexual jokes is used to condemn them for having no sense of humour.

In this context, Janet Bing earmarks a useful distinction between the more mainstream sexual jokes that men ostensibly tell and what she terms ‘liberated sexual jokes’. While the former simply violate the ‘taboos against talking in public about sex’, ‘liberated sexual jokes’, she writes, ‘are funny because they violate taboos against talking about sexism’ (Bing, 2007, p. 338). Bing’s ethnographic work, in which she studies sexual jokes shared between women, crucially disrupts the assumption, shared both by common wisdom and humour scholars that women do not tell dirty jokes. At the same time, her conclusions reveal an interesting facet that often characterises women’s sexual humour: sexually liberated jokes, in which the script shifts from the sexual to the non-sexual (the reverse set-up mostly characterises jokes that men tell) allow women to introduce difficult subjects that are hard to openly discuss, like the unequal distribution of domestic responsibilities. In women’s liberated jokes, then, it is the inferior status of women rather than the sex that is the focus of the punchline. A similar pattern can be traced in women’s expressive traditions that Raheja and Gold translate: the ‘hidden transcripts’ of stories, songs, personal narratives and conversations they examine, ‘at some levels serve to perpetuate gender inequalities, but they also render conceivable and may indeed sanction women’s active resistance’ (Raheja & Gold, 1994, p. 26).

VDW offers a fascinating test case for the analysis of women’s sexual humour. We coded approximately 36 moments of sexual humour that were shared between the four protagonists. Our goal was to follow Bing’s lead in trying to track the patterns of interaction in an all-women friend group, when the topic of conversation turned to sex or when a non-sexual matter was deliberately sexualised. ⁷ We defined the moments of sexual humour as ones where one of the four characters says something sexual that elicits laughter from the characters on screen or is meant to produce laughter from the audience. ⁸ Most often, such utterances included both serious conversations and teasing one-liners about sex, masturbation and orgasms. On a few occasions, we found that the humour entailed invoking a hyper-sexualised identity (for instance, women referred to as ‘slutty’ or randi) or using sexual vocabulary as an expletive (‘go fuck yourself’). We coded these sexual utterances that produce laughter to reveal the following:

Who cracked the most sexual jokes and which character was at the receiving end of this kind of humour?

Fascinatingly, we found that it was Sakshi—the richest of the four friends, on the verge of a divorce, the most brazen in her consumption of cigarettes and alcohol and the most gratuitously ‘carefree’—who cracks the maximum number of sexual jokes. Most commonly, her jokes ranged from alternately teasing Avni about her ‘sexcapades’ (with her boss; the men she meets at her mother’s behest through matrimonial websites; her one-night stands) to encouraging Avni to unabashedly pursue her sexual adventures. In total, then, Sakshi was responsible for nearly 53% of the sexual humour in the film.

The character who came closest to Sakshi in making sexual quips, albeit with a wide margin separating them, was Meera—a fat woman, married to a White man, going through a proverbial ‘dry spell’ (sookha as Sakshi calls it) in her marriage, on account of the travails of childbirth and postpartum weight gain—because of which she feels poorly about her body, and thus cannot bring herself to have sex with her bechara (pitiable) husband, John. ⁹ The teenage and adult versions of Meera combined make 13 jokes (3 as a high schooler and 10 in adulthood), bringing her sexual jokes to 27% of the total sexual jokes told by one of the four main characters. ¹⁰ Her humour, like Sakshi’s, is also supportive of Avni’s sexual rendezvous (she keeps telling Avni to ‘mount’ Nirmal (tu chad ja), but differently from Sakshi, she makes allusions to the size of her husband’s penis, speciously convincing her friends that she has a gratifying sex life (‘Who can’t be happy with John’s john?’). Importantly, she is also the one to introduce the humour around ‘what masturbation is called in Hindi’ (‘charam sukh’), which goes onto become a running joke for the rest of the film. A key distinguishing factor uniting Sakshi and Meera, then, is the fact that they are (unhappily) married. Their matrimonial status, it seems, entitles them to a certain amount of narrative space to engage in sexual humour. This entitlement, though, as our analysis demonstrates, is actually rooted in, and is an attribute of, a sexual politics invested in preserving the virginal sanctity to their more reputed co-stars.

In contrast, Avni cracks only four (11%) jokes, most of which are self-directed, and they draw attention to the ways in which her life is hemmed in by society’s sexual double standards. For instance, she highlights how even though it was her boss who was married, with two kids, having an affair with him made her the tawaif (tramp). Finally, Kalindi, around whom the film’s central crisis revolves—she is marriage-phobic because of her childhood trauma of watching her parents’ ugly fights—says something sexual and funny only twice in the film: the first is directed at her step-mother, Paromita (she tells her friends she wishes Paromita would go ‘fuck herself’ rather than interfere in her wedding planning). The second time, her humour is directed at Sakshi after the latter reveals the long-awaited reason for her divorce—that she was caught masturbating by her husband. With utter incredulity, Kalindi asks Sakshi to explain the course of events: ‘So, basically, after the fight [with your husband] you were sitting around bored, and thought you may as well jerk off?’

At first glance, this disparity between those who make sexual jokes and those who do not, might be attributed to the different personalities in the friend group, a symptom, perhaps, of nothing more than the varied levels of comfort with sexual humour that each character is willing to display. And yet, the data are revelatory of much more. Sakshi and Meera, the two women who are responsible for producing, between them, 80% of the sexual humour, are not just married women, but they are also both women whose married lives have turned out to be far from perfect, and it is around a ‘lack of sex’ that the crisis in their matrimonial relationship is articulated and crystalised. There seems to be, then, a direct correlation that the film makes, perhaps unwittingly, between personal sexual frustrations (Sakshi resorts to masturbating with a dildo only after 3 months of no sex with her husband, and Meera has been in a sexless marriage for a year) and the capacity to engage in sexual humour.

Even more interestingly, however, it is telling that the burden of the film’s risqué manoeuvres is carried, to a disproportionate degree, by a woman who is a soon-to-be divorcee and a fat woman. What we find, therefore, is that it falls upon the two archetypal characters, who have been historically maligned, and treated as objects of derision and ridicule in popular Hindi cinema, to facilitate the film’s gamble in pushing the boundaries of propriety as it challenges audiences to imagine the sexualised life of its female protagonists. That two of the most vulnerable character-types do the majority of the sexual humour–labour, as it were, that they do the work and bear the responsibility of keeping things light, even as the film undertakes the task of opening up new vistas of possibility for women in Hindi films, are very much in alignment with a postfeminist myopia about the unequal distribution of vulnerability that different women embody. It perfectly encapsulates neoliberal feminism’s blindness to the incommensurate scales of emotional labour that certain women have to perform and, the risks they have to incur, in order to make their own lives, and the lives of women who are far more privileged, easier/more liveable.

Significantly, this mismatch between the sexual humour–labour that the different characters undertake maps on perfectly to the hierarchy in the celebrity status of the actors who play these roles. The two junior actors—Swara Bhaskar (also known in the industry for sticking her neck out to defend liberal, secular, and feminist politics) and Shikha Talsania—who do not have very much leverage or dynastic cache in the industry, produce the maximal raunchy humour in the film. On the other hand, Kareena Kapoor Khan and Sonam Kapoor Ahuja, who are far more secure and ensconced in the elite echelons of the industry by virtue of their ‘star-kids’ status and their affiliations with the big film dynasties (Kareena, of course, has the double buffer, as it were, of being a Kapoor and a begum through marriage to Saif Ali Khan, scion of the royal Pataudi family), rarely get their hands dirty with the dirty jokes. Kalindi/Kareena is able to remain entirely untainted by the sex-talk that happens around her. She is almost never ¹¹ on the receiving end of her friend’s sexual humour, and when these conversations do happen around her, she is able to maintain an air of ‘I’m too cool to be perturbed/shocked, but too decorous to participate’. Even though she has been in a live-in relationship with her partner for 3 years, there is never any conversation about her sex life, and no allusions made to her desires. The film subtly but adamantly makes clear that her crisis is not sexual; it is emotional. And, therefore, the film is able to create this implicit and neat divide between women who render themselves sexual, through humour, and those who remain virginal (even if not literal virgins) by a lack of participation in that humour. And it is important to note that the virginal status is retained for the most important character, for Kalindi and her story is set up as the film’s anchoring centre. In doing so, the film consolidates the most mainstream and conventional form of femininity that has dominated Bollywood thus far. But even more, in retaining her as the non-sexual centre of the film, it protects the celebrity status of the actor who plays the part. Not long before the film was made and released, Kareena entered motherhood. By creating this imperceptible, yet crucial, distance between Kareena and sexual humour, the film opts to protect Kareena from charges of impropriety that would mar her status both as begum and mother. In doing so, however, it reinstates the gendered and sexual status quo that it ostensibly aspired and avowed to overturn in the first place. ¹²

There were some other notable highlights that emerged from our coding of sexual humour in the film: in nearly 40% of the jokes that were cracked, women were referred to in some demeaning capacity (as in the case of the two jokes that Kalindi makes at her stepmother and Sakshi’s expense), or the point of the joke was to shame the woman for her sexual choices or situation (including lack of sex). Sakshi, for instance, quizzes Avni about how she can bring herself to have sex with a man called Nirmal. In another instance, towards the end of the film, when Sakshi confronts the neighbourhood aunties who have taunted her about her inappropriate nightlife, her clothes and her return to her parental home without her husband, Sakshi avenges her humiliation at their hands, ironically, by ousting the daughter of one of these aunties for being a drug addict, and shaming her for sleeping with a drug peddler. In fact, our data here may be downplaying just how derogatory the film is towards most, if not all, women that are not one of the four of them.

Furthermore, we found that only 25% of the jokes were, in some capacity, a critique of sexism/patriarchy/sexual double standards. Or, to frame it another way, for 75% of the sexual humour, the fact of sex itself was funny, or the object of humour, the punchline of the joke. What this suggests is that very few jokes would qualify as what Bing considers sexually liberated jokes. Additionally, the results were in keeping with our argument that the film endorses a mindless imitation of masculine and masculinist rituals and cultures of self-expression as a model for women’s liberation, and, to be fair, the title of the film itself explicitly encourages us to expect, and accept, this modality for women’s way forward. The film not only works with the cliché assumption that women ‘blow off steam’ in the same way that men do but also actually encourages it as an elixir to the array of life’s problems. Sexual humour, like leisure holidays abroad, are the lessons in un-repression that these women seemed to have learnt from their male, cinematic counterparts.

What was especially illuminating was that we found that 64% of the incidents of humour entailed the use of Hindi verbiage in the most explicitly sexual component of the joke. These included references to condoms as chatri, orgasms as charam such, fucking as thokna, whining as randi-rona and masturbation as apna haath jaggannath. This may seem to be a curious thing to highlight, given that the entire film is in Hindi. However, if we consider the class background of these characters, the code-switching to Hindi in moments of sexual humour feels incongruent within the cultural milieu the film itself contrived as an authentic rendition of upper-class women’s lives. It is interesting that a film that chooses to pitch itself as giving the audience an inside view of what ‘real’ conversations between urban upper-class girlfriends look like, and does not shy away from placing these women in their extremely privileged socio-cultural milieu, suddenly opts out of the linguistic realism of what these moments would sound like, and chooses instead, to turn them into occasion for exploring, possibly, the earthiness of sex-talk in Hindi. It is hard to completely understand the logic for inserting Hindi, in this insistent and contrived way: perhaps it is the film’s way to making its deeply bourgeois habitus palatable and accessible to a wider audience; it could be a way of just adding to the titillation and sensationalism associated with the film. But what it also does is to turn Hindi—the language—itself into an object of humour. This is most evident when Meera shares the Hindi word for orgasm with her friends—they all giggle and practise the throaty, guttural sound that the word sukh, when said right, produces. What is abundantly clear in this moment is that it is not the reference to an orgasm that has the girls in splits, but it is the oddity of what it sounds like in Hindi.

What was discomforting was that these moments of sexual humour, then, become occasions for these otherwise intensely Anglophilic (and quite possibly anglophone), upper-class women to dabble in what might be considered ‘linguistic slumming’. As Tejaswini Ganti in her essay about ‘language hierarchies in Bollywood’ argues, India’s linguistic terrain has shifted substantially since liberalisation: even though Hindi films, today, are ‘much more diverse and regionally specific’ than ‘films from earlier decades’, there is a corresponding ‘waning’ of fluency in Hindi among the elite members of the film industry, and Indian society, more generally (Ganti, 2016, p. 120). Language, thus, continues to function as a site ‘for the elaboration of distinction, the performance of cultural capital, and the enactment of new hierarchies’ (Ganti, 2016, p. 120). The Indian super-elite, today, thus, distinguish themselves from the aspirational middle classes by displaying a hyper-fluency in ‘polished’ English, and Westernised (Americanised) accents, verbiage/idioms (‘bro’, ‘chick flick’). While Ganti’s argument draws attention to the discrepancy between the increase in ‘localised registers of Hindi’ in film dialogues versus the ‘increased prevalence of English within the film industry’, we want to draw attention to the treatment of Hindi within the social landscape of the film itself. As characters of a popular Hindi film, the majority of their dialogues are, indeed, in Hindi, and yet, their titillated unfamiliarity with, and jocular recruitment of Hindi for its sexual slang, and in moments of sexual humour, draws attention to the characters’ relationship to the language—as low-brow novelty.

This would explain why Kalindi—who we have earlier identified as virginal and whose characterisation is most enveloped by the star-status of the actor who plays her—never utters a sexual word in Hindi. The only two times that she does produce humour, even as she toys with a sexual vocabulary, she uses explicitly English terminology—‘fuck off’ and ‘jerk off’. What seems to be happening, then, is that the film treats humour as not only a way to talk about sex but also as a way to joke about Hindi. We may even say, then, that more than any character in the film, it is Hindi that is most often the butt of the joke. And, because there is an exhilaration associated with engaging in the very things we revile and disparage, we see the women enjoying their derive through the linguistic cultures they would not ordinarily touch with a bargepole.

Conclusion

On 25 January 2019, Amazon Prime, India, released the 10-episode web series Four More Shots Please, and the show got enough traction to be renewed for a second season that was released in April 2020. The web series revolves around four upper-class female friends in Mumbai and their conversations around sex/sexuality, desires and marriage. The proliferation of other such cultural productions—like the 2019 film, The Zoya Factor, an adaptation of Anuja Chauhan’s successful 2008 Indian chick-lit novel and the 2020 Netflix reality TV show, The Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives (2020)—that have arrived on the heels of VDW’s commercial success speak to the influence of the neoliberal and postfeminist aesthetics and politics of VDW. These texts reinforce VDW’s status as an important marker in post-liberalisation and millennial New Bollywood’s representations of femininity and feminism, one where ‘post-feminism and neo-liberalism coalesce in the construction of a selfhood that celebrates self-enterprise, pleasure, and sexuality, and posits them as women’s empowerment’ (Chaudhuri, 2014, p. 152). Through focusing especially on the workings of sexual humour, the depoliticised presentation of women’s lives, and the lack of solidarity with other women, we have situated our analysis of VDW in contrast to the celebratory reviews of the film that see its treatment of female desires as radical or groundbreaking. Instead, we see VDW—through its endorsement of entrepreneurial individualism, aspirational lifestyles, language of choice and individual empowerment—as exemplifying a postfeminist rationale, a symptom of the co-opting of feminism in contemporary neoliberal India, in which, to quote from a song in the film, ‘no one gives a damn’ about structural inequalities or collective struggles for social justice.