A CSWS Noon Talk

Sangita Gopal:  “The Aesthetics of Surface: Some reflections on the New Queer Cinema in India”

March 2, 2016 Noon
1:00 pm Jane Grant Conference Room
330 Hendricks Hall
Free & open to the public

Sangita Gopal, associate director of the UO Center for the Study of Women in Society, will discuss her current research in a CSWS Noon Talk titled “The Aesthetics of Surface: Some reflections on the New Queer cinema in India.” The talk will take place on March 2, 2016 in the Jane Grant Conference Room at 330 Hendricks Hall on the UO campus. Dr. Gopal describes her research as being “located at the intersection of feminist media studies, postcolonial studies and globalization.” An associate professor in the UO Department of English with faculty appointments in the Cinema Studies Program and the Department of Comparative Literature, Dr. Gopal has been teaching at UO since 2004. Dr. Gopal is the author of Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), which “explored how cinema reimagined its representations of marriage in order to register shifts in gender identity and social relations activated by the socioeconomic processes of globalization.” Her current book project grew out of her ongoing collaboration with a scholarly collective that researches transnational women’s cinema in conferences and workshops at various global locations. Entitled Between State and Capital: Women Make Movies, this book “examines the constellation of forces that enabled the rise of woman filmmakers in India. Based on archival research and extensive interviews with these media pioneers, the project suggests that the emergence of a state-owned new media—television—on the one hand and a new emphasis on part of the feminist movement on questions of identity and representation created the horizon of possibility for women’s media work.” Dr. Gopal also coedited the books Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance (with Sujata Moorti; University of Minnesota Press, 2008), and Intermedia in South Asia: The Fourth Screen (with Rajinder Dudrah, Anustup Basu and Amit Rai; Routledge, 2012).