Male Audience Reception of ‘Female Objectivity’ and ‘Female Passivity’ Portrayed in the Hindi Film ‘Kabir Singh’: A Quantitative Study

Abstract

Popular Culture artifacts are academically important due to their social and cultural significance along with the latent and polysemic meanings they posses. One such product of Indian popular culture is film Kabir Singh. Film Kabir Singh is a remake of the original Telugu film Arjun Reddy. Apart from Hindi and Telugu, the film is remade in Tamil language and the remake rights for the Malayalam, Kannada and Nepali language are already sold. Thus, the content of the film has become a nationwide phenomenon. The film is highly polysemic in nature and depicts number of social concepts like ‘toxic masculinity’, ‘female objectification’ and ‘female passivity’. Taking cues from Stuart Hall’s audience studies work, the paper tries to decode the young male audience’s reception of female objectification and female Passivity portrayed in the film. With reference to the ‘Nationwide’ study of David Morley, the paper tries to quantitatively look at the impact of various socio-demographic factors like age, education and locality on the young men’s reception of the film. The collected data for the study comprises of responses of 130 young male participants through an online survey. The respondents were divided into three age categories viz. 18–22, 23–26 and 27–35. Apart from age, the respondents are classified based on the urban or rural background as well as their educational qualification. The study intents to understand the impact of these socio-demographic factors on the meaning making process of the audiences.

Keywords: Audience Reception, Female Passivity, Female Objectification, Kabir Singh, Toxic Masculinity.