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Feeling Good? Look Again!

Feel Good Movies and the Vanishing Points of Liberation in Deepa Mehta's Fire and Gurinder Chadha's Bend It Like Beckham

Alison Donnell is Reader in English Literature, University of Reading, Whiteknights, PO Box 217, READING, Berkshire, RG6 6AH, UK. E–mail: a.j.donnell{at}reading.ac.uk

This article discusses two very different South Asian diasporic films that both promise an identity politics congruent with the objectives of postcolonial feminism alongside a distinctive ‘feel good’ factor: Deepa Mehta's Fire (1997) and Gurinder Chadha's Bend It Like Beckham (2002). Both films explore the pressure that certain ideas of India exert on female subjectivities in the diaspora a.nd at home, and their success as feel good films depends on the viewer's ability to understand and ally themselves with the liberation of the central characters from these pressures. By reading the limits as well as the triumphs invoked by the emotional crescendos of these films and the politics of liberation that they endorse, this article also considers other points of continued silence and struggle (specifically queer diasporic subjects and sex workers), not foregrounded by the visual or narrative persuasions of the films themselves.

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