Page 93 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

78 Lotte Hoek

voices are generally dubbed in the Bangladesh film industry. The first
answer relates to the ability and need for female film personnel to negotiate
their physical availability in relation to the audience “out there.” This
answer shows the relationship between moral claims of the community
upon the female body to conform to a particular aesthetics of propriety
and piety, or porda, in contemporary Bangladesh. The second answer to
the question of female dubbing relates to the ways in which the aesthetic
expectations of bodily comportment for women also constitute the possi-
bilities for erotic desire. Film producers use these strictures creatively and
to erotic effect in the production of a fantasy female on screen. I will dis-
cuss these answers in turn.

Cinema Screens: Porda and
the Female Film Artist

In this section I would like to argue that the ways in which Shima and
Jenny made different parts of their body available to technologies of
mechanical reproduction relates directly to the nature of that technology
on the one hand, and to the moral community that they are embedded in
on the other. The reason why they effectively made only parts of their
physical selves available to the filmmaking process was because of the
physical proximity it put them into with a mass of unknown others and the
strictures placed on the relationship between women and unfamiliar oth-
ers within the Muslim majority community of Bangladesh.
To start with the latter, Shima and Jenny’s partial availability (aurally
and visually) should be considered a form of porda (screen), which is gen-
erally understood as practices of female seclusion or veiling. In my opinion
porda is better defined as a set of community based aesthetic demands on
female public presence. Shima’s surreptitious dubbing, hiding out in the
“depths” of the dubbing studio, invisible to the audience, not even named
in the credits, as well as Jenny’s visual transformations should both be seen
as particular responses to these aesthetic demands. Shima’s preference for
dubbing was not only personal. As she suggested herself, it had to do with
her in-laws whom she described as being “a little different.” With this
euphemism she gently avoided talking about the religious orthodoxy that
informed the expectations her in-laws had of her. While her own family
had been embedded in the film industry, her in-laws were less comfortable
with their daughter-in-law’s labor at the FDC. Shima avoided naming this
sentiment “Islamic,” as Islamic orthodoxy was by many considered to be
rather unfashionable in Dhaka, especially among those who thought of