Hello! My name is Angel Mary Joseph, and I am a junior in the Dietrich School of Arts and Science, majoring in Film and Media Studies with concentrations in Psychology and Business Studies. I am an international student from Kerala, India, and I grew up on Indian cinema, with a special interest in Bollywood, and as a fan of Bollywood, I have deeply enjoyed seeing the rise of queer stories in the industry over the last 5 years. After Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (a law established during the British Colonial era and made all sexual acts “against the order of nature” criminal) was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme court in 2018, popular Indian media has included more openly LGBTQ+ characters and experiences in its narratives. My fascination with South Asian queer media started with a lesbian love story and family drama film called, Ek Ladki Koh Dekha Toh Aisa Laga (“How I Felt When I Saw a Girl”, 2019) so I am returning to my first love in the genre to explore the concept of the “Bollywood Lesbian” for my Chancellor’s Undergraduate Research Fellowship (CURF) project.

Through this CURF project, I hope to expand on my academic work studying topics of LGBTQ+ representation in mainstream Indian pop culture through film, television and on-demand media. This semester, I am working on a comparative analysis of the lesbian protagonists of three queer films from Bollywood under the mentorship of Dr. Neepa Majumdar, a scholar of Indian Cinema in the Film and Media Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh. This project is a continuation of my previous work on patterns of queer representation in Bollywood where I first explored the idea of the “Bollywood Lesbian.” These characters are still rare in Bollywood, but they are uniquely located at the intersection of womanhood and queerness and this analysis of the “Bollywood Lesbian” allows me to look at the representation of the intersection of womanhood and queerness of women in Indian contemporary popular films.

The protagonists of the films I am analyzing vary in age, cultural identity, familial status, and have different experiences as women and within that identity as sapphic women. Their characterizations and stories riff off typical Bollywood film tropes for women (who are often assumed to be heterosexual), and construct new ways of understanding Indian women’s experiences, sapphic or not, through popular cinema.