Teaching Gender Through the Screen: Feminist Film Pedagogy, Visual Literacy, and Critical Consciousness in Indian Undergraduate English Classrooms

The Indian undergraduate English classroom is overwhelmingly text-centric: literary study is organised around the close reading of novels, poems, and plays, with visual and cinematic texts relegated to supplementary or extracurricular status. Yet the students who inhabit these classrooms are, paradoxically, among the most visually saturated learners in human history—immersed in the image cultures of Instagram, YouTube, OTT platforms, and Bollywood from childhood. This paper argues that feminist film pedagogy—the systematic integration of cinema into English literature teaching through feminist critical frameworks—offers a transformative methodology for developing gender-critical consciousness in Indian undergraduate classrooms. Drawing on bell hooks’s (1996) theorisation of film as a pedagogical site, Mulvey’s (1975) foundational analysis of the gendered gaze, and Freire’s (1970) concept of critical consciousness, the paper presents a practitioner-based case study of feminist film pedagogy implemented in an undergraduate English programme at an aided college in Kerala. Through the analysis of three pedagogical interventions—teaching Mulvey through Malayalam cinema, using Bollywood item numbers to teach objectification theory, and deploying OTT series to examine intersectional gender representation—the paper demonstrates that feminist film pedagogy produces measurable gains in students’ critical visual literacy, gendered analytical vocabulary, and willingness to interrogate the patriarchal logics of the media cultures they inhabit. The paper proposes a replicable framework for integrating feminist film pedagogy into Indian English curricula.