From Silence to Power: Affective and Multimodal Narratives of Female Resistance in Netflix Series
Abstract
In the mainstream films and serials, however, the representation of women of south Asia has been patriarchal since its beginning till its end and this silence and lack of autonomy has been disguised in the film as women’s numbness. Netflix has paved the way for a new dimension in feminist narration in India, but the existing scholarship has been on the ‘feminist resistance’ discourse or on a thematic analysis, with no emphasis given to the emotional and visual build up of female resistance. Most importantly, no research exists which correlates a named affect theory with a named multimodal theory in the same scenes of these particular texts. Therefore, the aim of this study is to fill this gap, with a major literary genre of Affect Theory, and two minor literary linguistic genres of visual grammar and spatial-sound semiotics as the modes in Multimodal Discourse Analysis of two productions of the Indian Netflix Haq (2025) a courtroom drama set in the backstory of the landmark Shah Bano case and Bombay Begums (2021) a corporate drama with five females across various class positions in Mumbai. Affectively 20 scenes from each film were selected and analysed three times, once in an affective level, once in a multimodal level and once in a comparison between films. There are three scenarios: the shame is turned into public shame, the female body is turned into a space to attack and a space for struggle and the institutional space is turned into a political space.The results showed that the South Asian feminist aspects in Netflix could not be understood in terms of the end of the storyline itself. It is recommended that the framework be expanded in Pakistan by adding Pakistani OTT productions and the mechanism for reacting to the audience should be added to the framework.
Keywords: Affect Theory, Multimodal Discourse Analysis, female resistance, visual grammar, feminist media studies.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21714775
