Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften

Project description

“Editing is Women’s Work”: An Anthro-historical Account of Gendered Labour in
Indian Media Industries

This anthro-historical project will foreground production cultures and gendered labour
practices in Bollywood amidst globally converging new media industries. By focusing on the
editing process, including the often-unseen labour of female editors, this project seeks to
provide a nuanced understanding of how Bollywood’s production culture and narrative
strategies are constructed and disseminated. In doing so, it aims to shed light on the gendered
dynamics within Bollywood’s editing rooms while contributing to the emerging scholarship on
the sociology of labour, particularly focusing on film genre stratification and the precarity of
feminized labour across creative media industries. Additionally, I will investigate the role of
female editors as the bridge between filmmakers and audiences, addressing the historical and
anthropological gaps in scholarship that have justified their low pay, contractual employment,
and lack of acknowledgment in post-production marketing events. In such ways, this study will
highlight the often-overlooked contributions of female editors in Bollywood while reframing
their work within the broader contexts of creative labor and gender dynamics in the film
industry. Hence, the project challenges existing notions that relegate editors to mere subsets of
film direction, instead highlighting their pivotal role in film production. The two questions
guiding this study are: How can we understand editing processes within the relationalities of
film production cultures and across increasingly networked global media industries? Why do
women pursue film editing in India and what challenges have they encountered historically and
across contemporary times?