E-raamat: Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India

This book is an ethnographic analysis of the familial life worlds of fans of a movie star named Rajinikanth as well as his appropriation into networks of patronage, praise and social mobility via images.

In Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India, Gerritsen explores the circulation of images of a movie star named Rajinikanth. Cities and towns in the south Indian state Tamil Nadu are consistently ornamented with huge billboards, murals and myriad posters featuring political leaders as well as movie stars. A selective part of these images is put up by their fan clubs. Tamil movie fans typically manifest themselves by putting up images of their star in public spaces and by generating a plethora of images in their homes. Gerritsen argues that these images are a crucial part of the everyday affective modes of engagement with family members and film stars but they are also symbolizing the political realm in which fans situate themselves. At the same time, Gerritsen shows how these image productions seem to concur with other visual regimes articulated in government restrictions, world class imaginaries and upper class moralities as presented on India's urban streets. This book contributes to an understanding of the ways in which visual technologies are deployed at the level of the grassroots or vernacular politics and how they are part of negotiations of power as well as of family life. This book gives attention to the work of images themselves. The images are neither taken for granted illustrations brought in and reflecting social life going on elsewhere nor merely representations. Instead, the book puts the images to work, ethnographically and theoretically, by showing that the various possibilities, dynamics and limitations of fandom are not just displayed in urban spaces but in fact played out there and therefore creating these spaces. It gives acute attention to images as representation as well as its material form. This book provides theoretical insights to the understudied connection of the sensuous and the political, the intimate and the public. It takes images in both public spaces and mundane everyday spaces as main feature of investigation and theorizes the predicaments of categories of public and private spheres and distinct image regimes.