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201553 https://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.2.N.201553 http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ All Rights Reserved 2025 196 pages Doctoral Dissertation Academic theses en Guha, Madhurima Kuo, Karen Switzer, Heather McGibbney, Michelle Arizona State University Partial requirement for: Ph.D., Arizona State University, 2025 Field of study: Women and Gender Studies This dissertation project, entitled ‘No one noticed her: Understanding the Aging Indian Women in Cinema,’ conducts a feminist analysis of the radical representations of aging Indian women in cinema. For decades, older Indian women have been a constant yet overlooked presence in popular culture. Despite their ubiquity on screen, roles for women over 40 remain severely limited, often reduced to binary stereotypes: the self-sacrificing mother, grandmother, or mother-in-law, or the scheming, monstrous, and meddlesome auntie. These rigid portrayals erode complexity, reinforcing their invisibility as autonomous, agentic individuals. Mainstream media has constructed feminine aging as a “crisis,” portraying the aging female body as a “problem body”—desexualized, disempowered, and pathologized through agist and sexist cultural narratives. Drawing from feminist intersectionality, postcolonial feminist film theory, and transnational feminism, this dissertation challenges these dominant agist discourses by analyzing four non-mainstream films Fire (1996), Paramitar Ek Din (The House of Memories, 2000), The Namesake (2006) & Goynar Baksho (The Jewelry Box, 2013) which are produced in India and the U.S and made by progressive feminist filmmakers Mira Nair, Aparna Sen, and Deepa Mehta. This dissertation argues that these films portray aging Indian female protagonists (between 40 and 80 years) as ‘liminal’, ( Miriam. B. Puyal, 2020) ‘subjects-in-process’ (Trinh T. Minh-ha 1989) and as ‘parallel texts’ (Debasrita Dey and Priyanka Tripathi, 2021) who challenge the sexist conventions by leveraging their bodily and social vulnerability as a source of power, thereby reclaiming agency. By adopting in-depth semiotic cinematic analyses of themes critical to feminine aging—such as intergenerational female bonding, erotic consciousness, sense of material attachment/detachment, and self-discovery while living alone—the dissertation asserts that, rather than conforming to stereotypes, these women's liminal existence enables them to remain unanchored, unpredictable, and constantly evolving. This creates counter-narratives that challenge the monolithic, reductive, and patriarchal discourses surrounding Indian women’s aging. On a greater scale, this research unveils the limitations of the critical cultural identity of the “new Indian woman,” redefining the parameters and arguing for the inclusion of older women within the discourses of new Indian womanhood. Women's Studies Film Studies Ethnic Studies Aging Women Cinema and films South Asian Women No One Noticed Her: Understanding the Aging Indian Woman in Cinema