Locating the Re/presentation of the “Feminine Other”: 1970s– 1980s’ Popular Bangla Movie Songs as Gendered Discourses - Jarin Tasneem Shoilee

Locating the Re/presentation of the “Feminine Other”: 1970s– 1980s’ Popular Bangla Movie Songs as Gendered Discourses -Jarin Tasneem Shoilee Lecturer in English, Jashore University of Science and Technology (JUST), Bangladesh jarintasneem696@gmail.com Abstract Bengali song titles like "চুমকি চলেলে এিা পলে( "Chumki is Alone on the Way( to "নীে আিালের কনলচ আকম রাসাত চলেকে এিা( "I'm Walking Alone under the Blue Sky( demonstrate how men are safe and free but women are unsafe if she's alone on a Bangladeshi road. Some song lyrics can be powerful media for infusing particular discourse into the audience’s mind. Viewing and listening to famous Bengali movie songs is enjoyable but the problematics of the songs as gendered discourse are rarely addressed. According to the idea of “otherness as stereotype” from cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s famous essay “The Spectacle of the Other” (1997(, many Bengali songs demonstrate the connotations of gender binarism that stereotype women as the ‘other’. The mechanism of stereotyping considers Bengali women as the “fragmented other”, as film theorist Laura Mulvey discusses in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975(. The paper explores the fact that 1970s– 1980’s Bangla movie songs reflect the male-dominated, stereotyped norms of the 1970s’ Bangladeshi culture. The paper also analyzes how these selected song lyrics and their music videos represent women as the ‘feminine other’, or the gendered binary of men. Introduction: Romantic Songs in the 1970s– 1980s’ Bangladeshi Media: Romance as Male Fantasy