The Class-Blind Feminist Fantasises of Zoya Akhtar

Abstract

This article examines feminist action and female character arcs in Zoya Akhtar’s filmography by foregrounding how an upper-class gaze shapes what counts as “empowerment” on screen. I argue that Akhtar’s corpus exemplifies class-blind feminism: women register as modern or liberated chiefly when their agency is legible within upper-class, neoliberal frames — individual choice, market visibility, aspirational mobility — while survival-oriented forms of agency braided with caste, class, and religion are minimized, pathologized, or rendered comic. I analyse three of Akhtar’s most popular and culturally impactful films — Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011), Dil Dhadakne Do (2015), and Gully Boy (2019) — through Catherine Kohler Riessman’s narrative analysis (to track sequence, consequence, and the distribution of decisive speech), bell hooks’s oppositional gaze (to interrogate spectatorship and identification), and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality (to reveal how single-axis frames misrecognize otherwise-privileged women as universal). Across the case studies, a consistent choreography emerges: women are most valued when they enable male self-making or when their autonomy is market-legible; elite spaces are filmed as epicentres of freedom, while subaltern spaces provide aesthetic texture rather than structural constraint; pivotal articulations of “feminist” positions are frequently delegated to male or elite intermediaries. By naming these patterns as products of classed authorship rather than incidental slips, the article reframes Akhtar’s celebrated “progressivism” as a form of feminist legibility optimized for consumption rather than redistribution, and offers a transferable framework for analyzing gender in mainstream Hindi cinema.