abstraCt thesis

ABSTRACT

This doctoral research investigates the representation of female identity and agency in contemporary Indian women-centred OTT web series. The inquiry emerges from the profound transformation of India’s media landscape since the streaming boom of 2018. It asks whether the new visibility of women on subscription platforms signifies genuine sociocultural change or a repackaging of patriarchal structures within neoliberal, globalised media aesthetics.

Aim and Theoretical Orientation

The study integrates multiple frameworks: Feminist Media Theory, Male Gaze Theory, Postfeminist Media Culture, Semiotics, Representation / Encoding-Decoding, Cultivation Theory, and Intersectionality to unmask the ideological logics at work in digital content. It analyses three representative Hindi/bilingual series: Four More Shots Please! (Amazon Prime Video), Hush Hush (Prime Video), and The Fame Game (Netflix), each offering distinctive genre ecologies like urban friendship, elite noir, and celebrity melodrama.

Methodology

Following an interpretivist, feminist-standpoint epistemology, the research employs a dual-track qualitative method:

(1) Visual semiotic analysis examining colour, light, framing, costume, props, spatial organisation, and sound; and

(2) Thematic analysis mapping recurring patterns of struggle, negotiation, and resolution alongside gaze regimes, postfeminist sensibilities, and intersectional markers.

Scenes serve as the primary unit of analysis, supported by reflexive memoing, peer-debrief validation, and an ethical protocol observing fair-dealing for copyrighted materials.

Findings

The results identify three dominant forms of agency: care-collective, crisis-competence, and craft-performance, that correlate with genre. The traditional single masculine gaze has fragmented into multi-gaze regimes: erotic, reciprocal, investigative, and institutional/media. Postfeminist discourse, highly visible in lifestyle-driven narratives, is reframed in others as technical skill or survival labour. Semiotic evidence shows how urban space, colour palettes, and sartorial codes visually encode freedom, secrecy, or performance, while the silent persistence of class and caste boundaries produces ideological contradictions.

Extending beyond textual analysis, the study’s later chapters link global OTT theory (Lotz, Lobato) with Indian feminist scholarship (Ganti, Menon, Mazumdar), revealing how Indian streaming reflects a hybrid feminist modernity - global in form, local in morality. It reconceptualises cultivation theory for personalised, binge-watching habits, arguing that streaming produces fragmented empowerment: repetitive exposure normalises female autonomy among receptive audiences but rarely bridges social divides. The inquiry further relates gender portrayal to platform capitalism: subscription models promote women-led content for brand differentiation yet aestheticise empowerment through glamour and consumption. Economic incentives thus both enable and restrict feminist narratives.

Contributions

The research proposes new analytical concepts: class-coded feminism, multi-gaze regimes, intersectional silence, and care-crisis-craft as an agency taxonomy. Methodologically, it formulates a replicable semiotic-thematic codebook and ethical model for digital-textual analysis. Theoretically, it expands feminist film theory into the serial and algorithmic paradigm of streaming media, demonstrating that empowerment in Indian OTT is negotiated competence within market modernity rather than radical rupture.

Practical Implications

Recommendations include parity targets and diversity riders in OTT commissioning, gender-sensitivity training and equitable authorship in production teams, creation of regional women’s storytelling funds, and integration of feminist semiotic pedagogy in media education. These measures could transform streaming from a marketing spectacle of feminism into a structurally inclusive industry.

Conclusion

The thesis concludes that Indian OTT has reshaped narrative and visual conventions to foreground women’s experiences, decentralised patriarchal gazes, and fostered meaningful yet class-bounded empowerment. It contributes to bridging global and Indian feminist scholarship while offering an empirically grounded model for future intersectional media research and policy reform.

Keywords:

Indian OTT Series, Feminist Media Theory, Male Gaze, Postfeminism, Semiotics, Representation, Intersectionality, Digital Culture, Gender Agency, Platform Economy