Consuming the Spectacle: Female Spectatorship, Body Politics, and the Cultural Reception of Gender in Indian OTT Series

Abstract

The explosion of over-the-top (OTT) streaming platforms in India—Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ Hotstar, SonyLIV, and regional platforms such as Manorama MAX and Sun NXT—has fundamentally transformed the conditions under which Indian audiences encounter gendered representations on screen. Unlike theatrical cinema, which is consumed in public, communal, and temporally bounded settings, OTT content is consumed privately, individually, and on demand—often on personal smartphones in domestic spaces. This paper argues that this shift in the apparatus of spectatorship produces a distinctive mode of female spectatorship that requires new analytical frameworks beyond Mulvey’s (1975) foundational theorisation of the cinematic male gaze. Drawing on feminist reception theory (Ang, 1985; Radway, 1984), Mankekar’s (1999) ethnographic analysis of Indian television and gendered subjectivity, and the author’s doctoral research on body politics and female spectatorship in Indian visual culture, the paper examines how Indian women negotiate gender representations in three critically acclaimed OTT series: The Great Indian Kitchen (2021, Malayalam), Made in Heaven (2019–2023, Hindi), and Bombay Begums (2021, Hindi). Through critical textual analysis informed by feminist spectatorship theory, the paper identifies three modes of gendered reception that the OTT apparatus enables: intimate identification (the private screen as a space of recognition), critical distance (the capacity to pause, rewatch, and analyse), and affective community-building (the social media discourse that extends the spectatorial encounter into networked feminist publics). The paper contributes to the intersection of feminist media studies, platform studies, and Indian cultural studies.