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“More Sexpression Please!” 77

Shima, who speak “clear,” spostho, Bengali were hired to dub over the voices
of actresses such as Jenny, thus bringing the aural grain of another body to
map onto the image of Jenny’s physique.
Shima started her dubbing career as a young girl, dubbing the voices of
child actors. With a short break when she first got married and had a child,
she had been dubbing ever since. Now in her thirties, she had become an
established figure in the film industry and did not lack for work. This
didn’t translate into fame however. She explained the following to me:

Shima: I like dubbing. No one sees me, no one knows anything about me,
won’t recognize me. I am dubbing surreptitiously [bhitor bhitor], I like
that.
Lotte: You don’t like it if people see you?
Shima: My mother doesn’t like it. And anyway, in my in-laws’ house, the
family I got married into, they are a little different. They don’t really
like me acting. I don’t have any desire to act myself and on top of that,
they don’t like it. And when you dub, no one sees you, recognizes you,
or knows you, so there is no problem in doing that.
. . .
Lotte: But you are working here, they don’t find it problematic?
Shima: No, no, that’s no problem. Because no one sees me, knows me. And
when a film gets released, then the names of all those who have worked
on the film are mentioned in the credits. But the names of the dubbing
artists are never mentioned. Because if they gave the names, then the
audience would know who dubbed whose voice. The names of dubbing
artists are never given.

For Shima, the shift toward “obscene” films has meant she preferred to
dub, rather than be publicly associated with the industry, as her own
mother had been two decades back. Shima explained that she likes dub-
bing because it allowed her to be withdrawn, hiding inside the dubbing
theater, where the imagined audience couldn’t see her. It is the pressure
from her family that she quotes as the reason for her preferred invisibility.
Interestingly, this invisibility is only required in relation to an imagined
“outside” audience. The fact that Shima went to work daily at the FDC,

which was popularly imagined to be a space of vice and immorality, seemed
not to be an issue with Shima’s in-laws.
I would like to suggest that the ways in which Jenny and Shima lend
their physical attributes to the film industry and how they negotiated their
public availability suggests something about the ways in which commu-
nity, morality, and mass media come together to produce different senso-
rial emanations of the female body in Bangladesh. The ethnographic
material presented here offers two answers to the question why women’s