#ImNotAChickFlick: Neoliberalism and Post-feminism in Veere Di Wedding (My Friend’s Wedding, 2018)

Abstract

Released in 2018, Shashanka Ghosh’s Veere Di Wedding ( VDW; My Friend’s Wedding), dubbed as India’s answer to Sex and the City, evoked mixed responses. While many reviews of the film denounced it for its vulgarity and tawdriness, frivolity, flippant vision of women’s liberation and as a threat to Indian values, others, however, celebrated it for its frank depiction of female desires. This article undertakes a close study of the film to argue that while the focus on female desire and sexuality is rare in Hindi cinema, and thus VDW marks an important landmark, the film is not a feminist film, and it does not offer a radical politics of female solidarity. On the contrary, by locating it within its neoliberal and postfeminist politics and aesthetics, we will argue that it haphazardly borrows and superimposes tropes from the ‘bromance’ and ‘the buddy road movie’ genres onto its vision of what feminine choices entail and enable. Its casual evocation of elite lifestyles, denigration of working-class women’s life struggles, and sexual humour jeopardise a radical reworking of patriarchal and heteronormative frameworks, and it encourages us to settle for a future in which ‘women playing the same games as men do’ is the only mode of radicalism or emancipation on offer. While it is undeniably refreshing to watch the film’s push back against the repressive taboos surrounding women’s sexuality and desire, these are articulated only within neoliberal renditions of heterosexuality, matrimony, motherhood and consumerism.