The Gendered Body on the Screen: Popular Erotic Songs in Nepali Films

Abstract

Film songs and dance mobilize the entire apparatus of the movie by bringing the stars dancing body to generate a unique filmic spectacle. So, a new dimension has come forth to provide critical lens to study the body exposure in Nepali movies. Revealing the nude body in line with the verbal expression of song in Nepali cinemas has fascinated many of the young audiences as we find youngsters considering the stars role as models and following them with. Modern songs have been considered a musical performance with dance sequences. They contain some powerful storylines of the movies with a primary purpose to entertain the audience. Over the years, the structure of presenting songs is guided by the male’s pleasure principle as it primarily oriented to the male satisfaction to look at female body on the stage and screen. The framing of the female body in cinema reinforces engendering sexual and erotic fantasies. Representing the sexy body in Nepal cinema gratifies the male gaze that often impacts on the audiences with the visual spectacle. It is a dance sequence performed by a female that immediately renders to the voyeuristic, heterosexual male gaze. In movies, audiences are often presented with fascinating body parts, such as hip, thigh breast, eyes, bellies, lips, navel with extreme close up of the female with the sense of sexual longing or lust. All the represented bodies bring down the male gaze so the image of a woman takes the central place of visual pleasure in films. In the film world, the film producers are motivated to produce attractive female bodies, considering the male audiences’ gaze upon the beautiful female body in a patriarchal social structure. It is difficult to find empowering female representation as their performances have cast their essentiality to offer up their body as a passive, sexual object of lust to attract viewers in the modern sense. Their performances become the carrier of the male dominated cultural motif of the capitalist society. The analyses of the selected songs analyze that media is heterogeneous and representing body seems common in media culture where men seem superior to females and it is their right to the gaze and consume them .The gaze is a technical term that describes the way audiences perceive others' bodies with the sense of sexual longing or lust. Mulvey explains how female in movies serve as passive erotic objects for the male to forecast erotic fantasies on their physical appearance. Male gaze is represented through camera. Acknowledging this, the research aims at studying the selected movie songs of 2016 with the key application of Laura Mulvey's male gaze concept from the feminist perspectives, a predominant twentieth–century cultural study in order to explain the gendered body representation focusing mainly on the physical figures and camera work.