Señoritas at Work: Gendered Work, Aspiration and Leisure in the Films of Zoya Akhtar

Abstract

This chapter will examine the gendered spatial politics of leisure and work in the films of Zoya Akhtar, analysing the representation of working women and ‘workplaces’ of leisure. The chapter will build on Kathi Weeks’s formulation of the workplace to interrogate two crucial aspects of Akhtar’s representation of spaces of gendered work: first, where such spaces are framed as sites of dreams and aspirations, and second, where work is invisibilised as p/leisure. By interrogating the gendered framing of the work/leisure dialectic with an emphasis on analysing the spaces of aspiration and leisure in Zoya Akhtar’s first three feature films, this chapter asks: how do the films of Akhtar construct a genealogy of women’s leisure?