Personal Information
Assignment Details
Abstract
Keywords
Introduction
Theoretical Framework
Methodology
Case Study: Badhaai Do (2022)
Case Study: Darlings (2022)
Case Study: Made in Heaven (2019–2023)
Comparative Analysis: Convergences and Divergences
Broader Trends and Contemporary Contexts
Conclusion
References
Name:- Rutvi Pal
Batch :- M.A. Sem 2 (2024-2026)
Enrollment Number :- 5108240025
E-mail Address :-rutvipal4@gmail.com
Roll Number :- 23
Topic : Beyond Binaries: The Queer-Feminist Language of Modern Indian Cinema
Paper & subject code :- 204: Contemporary Western Theories and Film Studies - 22409
Submitted to :- Smt. Sujata Binoy Gardi, Department of English, MKBU, Bhavnagar
Date of Submission :- 7 November 2025
This essay examines how contemporary Indian cinema and streaming series articulate a queer-feminist cinematic language that challenges normative binaries of gender and sexuality. Using Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality and Judith Butler’s gender performativity as conceptual lenses, three texts — Badhaai Do (2022), Darlings (2022) and Made in Heaven (2019–23) — are analysed in terms of formal strategies, narrative structures and representational politics. The analysis shows how each text employs performative occasions (marriage, domestic space, wedding spectacle) to destabilise heteronormative and patriarchal orders, while also highlighting how class, economic precarity and family-expectation mediate queer and feminist subjectivities in the Indian context. The essay argues that while these works make significant strides towards inclusive representation and narrative complexity, they also contain limitations — particularly in terms of intersectional reach (caste, rural geographies) and the assimilation of critique within mainstream form. Finally, the essay suggests that this emergent queer-feminist language is becoming a vital resource for audiences as well as scholars concerned with cinema, gender, and social change.
Intersectionality; performativity; queer representation; feminist cinema; Indian mainstream; Badhaai Do; Darlings; Made in Heaven.
In recent years, Indian film and streaming-platform content have begun to reflect significant changes in the representation of gender, sexuality and power. The decriminalisation of consensual same-sex acts (Section 377, 2018) and the rapid growth of OTT platforms in India have opened up new possibilities for narratives that interrogate heteronormative institutions, patriarchal domesticity and normative marriage. In this milieu, films such as Badhaai Do (2022) and Darlings (2022), alongside the streaming series Made in Heaven (2019–2023) have adopted what may be described as a queer-feminist cinematic language: formal and narrative strategies that bring queer subjectivity and feminist critique into mainstream aesthetic registers.
This essay uses two theoretical frameworks to interrogate those strategies. On one hand, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality emphasises that gender or sexuality cannot be understood in isolation but are shaped by intersecting axes of class, caste, religion and economic power. On the other hand, Judith Butler’s notion of gender performativity conceptualises gender (and by extension sexuality) as repeated performative acts rather than stable identities. Together, these frameworks enable a layered analysis: intersectionality situates the socio-political conditions under which subjects operate; performativity enables reading of how those conditions are visually and narratively enacted (and disrupted) on screen.
The central thesis of this essay is that Badhaai Do, Darlings and Made in Heaven each articulate, in different registers, a queer-feminist challenge to binaries of gender/sexuality (male/female, heterosexual/queer) by making visible the performance of normative roles, and by offering sites of resignification or disruption. They do so while remaining within mainstream idioms, thus negotiating both formal accessibility and critical potential. At the same time, the essay acknowledges that their intersectional reach has limitations: metropolitan, middle-class contexts predominate, and caste or rural forms of queer-feminist experience remain under-represented.
Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality emerged from Black feminist scholarship to argue that social categories such as race, gender and class overlap and cannot be analysed in isolation. In her seminal essay “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color”, Crenshaw shows how single-axis frameworks (e.g., “women” or “black”) erase the experiences of those who sit at the intersection of multiple categories. Although her work originally focused on race and gender in a US context, its relevance extends to Indian cultural fields where gender, sexuality, caste, religion and class intersect deeply. An intersectional reading of Indian cinema asks: which queer or feminist subjectivities are shown? Which remain invisible? How do economic and familial pressures mediate gender- and sexuality-based identity? Intersectionality thus becomes a scaffold for reading the social embeddedness of representation.
Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, particularly articulated in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, conceptualises gender not as a fixed identity but as the effect of repeated and regulated social performances. In cinematic terms, this invites us to view characters’ bodily gestures, costume, spatial relations, camera framing, and rituals (marriage, domestic choreographies) as sites of performative action. When cinema makes visible the artificiality of those performances — or subverts them — it intervenes in normative gender systems. Butler emphasises that subversion happens not only via radical rupture but via resignification of existing acts: performing the roles differently to expose their contingency and power.
Combining intersectionality and performativity creates a powerful analytical lens for cinema. A queer-feminist language in this context means: (a) focusing on representations that destabilise or problematise binaries of gender/sexuality; (b) attending to the intersectional conditions of those representations; and (c) analysing how formal cinematic devices — narrative structure, mise-en-scène, editing, sound — enact performative disruptions of normative gender/sexual roles. This lens aligns with broader film-theory scholarship which emphasises how representation, form and ideology are deeply intertwined (Perkins, 2023) and how mainstream film must be read for both possibilities and compromises.
The essay proceeds via comparative case-studies of the three texts. For each text, I examine: (i) its narrative and thematic concerns; (ii) its formal strategy (mise-en-scène, framing, character performance, editing); (iii) how it enacts queer-feminist disruption via performative devices and intersectional awareness; and (iv) its strengths and limitations in terms of wider representation and politics. The primary sources are the films/series themselves; secondary sources include peer-reviewed articles, published analyses (JSTOR/Taylor & Francis where available) and long-form critical commentary. Because film-specific peer-reviewed scholarship is still emerging in some cases, this essay also includes credible academic-journal papers on related topics (e.g., OTT queer representation) as contextual support.
Badhaai Do, directed by Harshavardhan Kulkarni, presents Shardul Thakur (Rajkummar Rao), a gay police officer, and Sumi Singh (Bhumi Pednekar), a lesbian physical education teacher, who enter a “lavender marriage” to pacify their families while privately pursuing queer relationships. The device of marriage-of-convenience foregrounds the normative institution of marriage while simultaneously undermining it: the protagonists perform the role of husband and wife to satisfy heteronormative expectations, while living otherwise. Critical commentary notes the film’s novel representation of queer interiorities in a mainstream Hindi production. (“Badhaai Do: The Suffocation of Being Queer in a Homophobic Society,” Goyal 2022)
The film uses domestic and institutional spaces as regulatory sites: the married couple move into a police colony, constantly under watchful family expectations. The camera often uses medium-wide shots to capture family gatherings and the performative nature of marital rituals. The domestic interior becomes a stage of normative performance: for example, dinner with in-laws, the honeymoon photo-op, family dinner conversations. In these scenes, the protagonists adopt roles: the dutiful son/husband, the dutiful daughter/wife—gestures, costume (police uniform, schoolteacher outfit), and blocking emphasize scripted gender behaviour.
But the film also creates counter-performative moments: Sumi’s intimate domesticity with her girlfriend Rimjhim, Shardul’s candid gym scene where he strips off his shirt and stares in mirror reflect internalised masculinity and its tension with his queer self. The film thereby invites viewers to see gender and sexuality as stage-acts rather than fixed essences — a direct mapping of Butler’s concept of performativity.
While the film is explicitly about queerness, it is also shaped by class, familial pressure and institutional roles. Shardul is a police officer — an emblem of state power — but his queerness places him in a subordinate position. Sumi, a teacher, comes from a modest family facing marriage pressure. Crenshaw’s intersectionality helps us recognize: the protagonists’ struggles are not just about same-sex desire, but about the clash between class expectations, family honour and institutional respectability. Some analyses (Meher 2024) indicate that Indian queer cinema continues to reduce queer identities to their sexuality/gender-presentation rather than fully exploring intersecting oppressions.
Strength: The film brings queer subjectivity into mainstream Bollywood via the marriage trope, thereby reaching wider audiences. It humanises its queer protagonists without stereotyping them as villains or victims (contrast with earlier queer Indian cinema). It offers moments of relational intimacy and interiority rather than purely crisis-driven narratives.
Limitation: The film remains largely urban, middle-class, and heteronormative in family-setting (the couple still engage with the institution of marriage). Caste, rurality and non-urban queer experience remain invisible. There is a risk that queerness is domesticated via assimilation into family and institutional norms.
Darlings, directed by Jasmeet K. Reen and produced by Alia Bhatt, foregrounds female agency and feminist resistance in the domestic sphere. The protagonist, Badru (Alia Bhatt), is trapped in abusive marriage with Hamza (Vijay Varma) and, in collusion with her mother and other women, plots revenge. While not a “queer film” in the conventional sense, Darlings operates within a queer-feminist register: it uses humour, genre hybridity, and performative subversions of domestic space to critique patriarchal violence. One reviewer notes: “Darlings offers pathways to reimagining women’s social realities through the depiction of various relationships.”
The film blends black comedy, melodrama and revenge thriller — a tonal hybridity that reflects queer theory’s emphasis on disrupting normative forms. The domestic apartment is both a site of surveillance and rebellion: the film uses exaggerated props (whipped-cream canister as weapon), staging of kitchen/dining scenes as choreography of performance, and costume-changes to signal shifts in power. For example, Badru’s seductive dress when awaiting her husband becomes a performance of femininity that she later weaponises. The editing is punchy and rapid in revenge sequences, contrasting with languid scenes of domestic suffering — this contrast maps the performative doubling of womanhood: docile wife vs. avenging agent.
Badru is economically precarious (her husband’s job unstable), her mother is working-class, and their Muslim-urban identity intersects with patriarchal caste/class norms in India. Feminist scholars note the import of class in domestic violence narratives: not only gender but economic dependency shapes resistance. Thus applying intersectionality highlights how the feminist fight in Darlings is not abstract — it is rooted in class, religion and labour. The film thus offers a stronger intersectional reach than many female-centered Bollywood films which focus solely on gender.
Made in Heaven, a web series on Amazon Prime Video, created by Zoya Akhtar, Reema Kagti & others, follows the lives of wedding planners Tara Khanna and Karan Mehra, and through their clients and associates, narrates stories of class aspiration, gender and sexuality, family honour, and identity. Each episode uses the wedding as a microcosm of normative social performance. One article notes that “New gender representation on the Indian OTT platform” shows how the series deals with homosexuality, trans characters and marriage institutions.
The wedding setting is rich in performativity: rituals, costumes, choreographed dances, rituals of bride/groom, family honour — all staged for spectators. The series uses these formal features to reveal the performative nature of normative gender/sexual identity. For instance, Karan Mehra’s narrative arc grapples with his gay identity in a hyper-heteronormative wedding-business environment; trans characters navigate elite Delhi circuits; the series uses flashbacks, shimmering mise-en-scène and juxtaposition of real/private spaces with public spectacle. An article on “Queer Horizons: Representation of Indian Queer Relationship in the Web Series Made in Heaven” shows how the show begins to create room for queer relationship within Indian wedding culture.
While the series is set in Delhi’s affluent strata, it juxtaposes class, religion (Hindu/Muslim weddings), and gender/sexuality in layered ways. The weddings’ clients include Dalit or lower-caste union stories, which point to caste intersections (though not always fully analysed). The show thus offers more expansive intersectional terrain than many mainstream films. For example, one narrative involves a transwoman navigating elite class constraints, pointing to how gender/sexuality and class interrelate.
Strength: The serialized form enables extended character-arcs and intersectional storylines; wedding spectacle functions as an apt metaphor for performance of normative identity; queer and trans characters are given sustained narrative space.
Limitation: The world remains largely metropolitan, elite and service-class oriented. The spectacle of wedding glamour can at times overshadow the critical skeleton of queer/feminist representation: the very glamour may neutralise radical potential into aesthetic consumption.
Performativity foregrounded: All three texts use social rituals (marriage, wedding, domestic performance) as micro-scenes of performative identity. Butler’s concept that gender is “what one does, not what one is” finds cinematic instantiation: the characters perform normative scripts and then rework or resist them.
Intersectional awareness: Each text acknowledges that gender/sexuality intersect with class, family expectations and economic precarity. Crenshaw’s framing invites us to see these intersections as central rather than peripheral — and these films do to varying extents.
Mainstream strategy of critique: These texts adopt popular forms (rom-com, melodrama, streaming series) rather than niche queer art cinema — thus offering the potential for larger audience impact while still engaging with critical questions of representation.
Centrality of queer identity: Badhaai Do explicitly centres queer protagonists; Made in Heaven integrates queer/trans storylines but within ensemble plots; Darlings is primarily feminist with a less explicit queer focus. Thus the degree of explicit queer disruption varies.
Genre and tone: Badhaai Do plays as a mainstream rom-com/drama; Darlings as a darkly comic feminist revenge film; Made in Heaven as a serialized, glossy ensemble series. The tonal variation reflects different strategies of disrupting normativity.
Social reach and locus: While all are urban and middle-class, Darlings reaches into working-class economic precarity; Badhaai Do into institutional roles (police, teaching); Made in Heaven into elite wedding-culture. Thus the intersectional reach differs in each.
Together, these texts suggest an emergent queer-feminist cinematic language in Indian mainstream media: one that reimagines domestic/ritual spaces as sites of identity performance, offers representation of non-normative genders/sexualities, and engages intersectional stakes of class/family. Yet the limits are equally visible: rural, caste-marginalised, lower-class, and non-metropolitan queer-feminist experiences remain under-represented; the negotiation with mainstream form sometimes dampens radical critique by assimilating the “risk” into safe narrative closures.
Beyond the three texts, the broader Indian-subcontinent media landscape offers further evidence of this shift. Films like Joyland (Pakistan, 2022) and Badhaai Do reflect the global conversation about queer inclusion, while OTT series such as Four More Shots Please! and His Storyy indicate that the streaming ecosystem allows more experimental, intersectional queer/feminist narratives. A recent study of “Analysis of LGBTQ+ Representation in Hindi OTT Series” (Khan & Hemalatha, 2025) argues that representation is becoming more nuanced and less stereotypical post-2018.
However, as this scholarship also notes, many representations remain urban, middle-class and oriented towards consumption. The gap between representation and structural change (in social norms, legal rights, intersectional justice) persists. This critical insight echoes film feminist scholarship (Perkins, 2023) which warns against over-celebration of representational “wins” without material transformation.
In conclusion, Badhaai Do, Darlings and Made in Heaven illustrate how Indian mainstream cinematic forms are deploying a queer-feminist language that both acknowledges and disrupts binaries of gender and sexuality. Using the theoretical tools of intersectionality and performativity, the essay has shown how each text makes visible the performance of normative identity, the interlocking logics of oppression, and the possibilities of resignification. While each has considerable strengths in representation and formal innovation, their limitations remind us that representation is only a first step. Further research might investigate: reception by non-urban and caste-marginalised audiences; how rural/vernacular queer-feminist films might differ; and how streaming platforms’ economics shape the visibility of radical intersectional stories.
References :
Badhaai Do. Directed by Harshavardhan Kulkarni, performances by Rajkummar Rao, Bhumi Pednekar, and Chum Darang, Junglee Pictures, 2022.
Chaudhary, Aman. “Queer Horizons: Representation of Indian Queer Relationship in the Web Series Made in Heaven.” KUEY: International Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, 2024, https://kuey.net/index.php/kuey/article/view/2164/1215.
Das, Anuja. “‘Darlings’: Two Women, One Story.” In Plainspeak (TARSHI), 19 Sept. 2022, https://www.tarshi.net/inplainspeak/darlings-2022-review/?utm.
Darlings. Directed by Jasmeet K. Reen, performances by Alia Bhatt, Shefali Shah, Vijay Varma, and Roshan Mathew, Eternal Sunshine Productions and Red Chillies Entertainment, 2022.
Dey, Arunima. “New Gender Representation on the Indian OTT Platform: A Study on Web Series Made in Heaven.” The Scientific Temper, vol. 15, no. 1, 2024, pp. 1901–1906. https://scientifictemper.com/index.php/tst/article/view/1052.
Goyal, Mahi. “Badhaai Do: The Suffocation of Being Queer in a Homophobic Society.” Feminism in India, 26 July 2022, https://feminisminindia.com/2022/07/26/badhaai-do-the-suffocation-of-being-queer-in-a-homophobic-society/?utm.
Khan, Ameena Kulsum, and R. Hemalatha. “Analysis of LGBTQ+ Representation in Hindi OTT Series: An Examination.” International Journal on Science and Technology (IJSAT), vol. 16, no. 2, Apr.–June 2025, pp. 1–9. https://www.ijsat.org/papers/2025/2/5498.pdf.
Made in Heaven. Created by Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti, directed by Zoya Akhtar, Nitya Mehra, Prashant Nair, and Alankrita Shrivastava, performances by Sobhita Dhulipala, Arjun Mathur, Jim Sarbh, and Kalki Koechlin, Tiger Baby and Excel Entertainment, 2019–2023.
Meher, Bandana. “Queer on Reel: An Analytical Study on Representation and Identity Formation of Queer Community in Indian Cinema.” Society and Culture Development in India, vol. 4, no. 2, 2024, pp. 223–236, https://www.arfjournals.com/image/catalog/Journals%20Papers/SCDI/2024/No%202%20(2024)/1_Bandana%20Meher.pdf.
Vyavahare, Renuka. “Darlings Movie Review: A Satirical Portrayal of Love and Abuse in a Marriage.” The Times of India, 5 Aug. 2022, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/web-series/reviews/hindi/darlings/ottmoviereview/93290772.cm
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