Presenter: Damini Kulkarni
Registration Number: 046
Institution: Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune, India
Abstract: The advent of digitality has vastly reconfigured the ways in which cinema audiences negotiate with the metaphorical and literal distance between technologies of cinematic representation and their everyday lives. As audiences come to own the screens on which they consume cinema, holding them close to their bodies and identities, the films they watch on them interact in complex and diverse ways with their embodied sense of self. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to violently underscore both, the precariousness and the pre-eminence of corporality, audiences’ bodily engagement with these screens is apt to undergo a range of shifts. When India attempted to control the spread of the disease with the most stringent lockdown in the world, audiences of a nation that has been famous for its fevered penchant for cinema confronted locked theatres: people with the privilege of access to digital technology turned to screens that were accessible within their homes or other safe spaces. This study examines the gendered dimensions of these audiences’ embodied interactions with the digital screens on which they watched cinema while enduring the COVID-19 pandemic. In the process, the study attempts to underline the interplay between gendered identity and the affordances of the digital in the face of widespread inaccessibility to public spaces of film exhibition. Heightened focus on corporal vulnerability in public discourse in the wake of the pandemic, coupled with large, intricate and interconnected changes that the threat of the disease triggered in the material realities of the everyday life of women, led to a reconfiguration in their relationship with the devices on which they watched cinema. Based on in-depth interviews conducted with over forty women from predominantly urban India over the course of two months, this study finds that these reconfigurations have primarily proceeded along three axes: shifts in the linguistic and ideological rubric within which the body’s investment in the digital screen is emplaced, emergence of new constellations of women’s communities around cinema, and increased introspection among women about the kind of cinema they watch on the digital screens, and the way in which it impacts their gendered identity. Since most of the interviews were conducted remotely, the study also gestures towards some methodological implications associated with conducting a study of audiences consuming cinema on digital devices via predominantly digital channels. The study also outlines the epistemic implications for the process arriving at a philosophy of the digital in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. 
Bio: Damini Kulkarni is currently pursuing her PhD in Media and Communication Studies as a UGC Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Media and Communication Studies in Savitribai Phule Pune University. Her research interests include popular cinema, cinema spectatorship, Hindi film audiences, film philosophy and questions of gender and representation in cinema. Her work has previously appeared in publications such as Film International, Film Criticism, Economic and Political Weekly, Scroll.in, Critical Collective, and Himal Southasian, among others. Her poems and short stories have appeared in publications such as Vayavya, Mad Swirl, and New Woman, among others.