Episode 6 - Roll Sound, Lights, Camera, Female Gaze

The final guest segment of this miniseries explores the central themes discussed throughout the podcast: the female gaze and the politics of women’s lived realities. This episode reflects on the collective consciousness shaped by women’s experiences, labour, emotions, and everyday lives.

In conversation with filmmaker Paromita Vohra, we explore what it means to truly centre women’s perspectives in storytelling and representation. Drawing from her documentary The Working Girls, the discussion examines how women’s labour, long stigmatised and morally ostracised, is represented and understood in society. The episode also reflects on the importance of recognising women’s experiences in their fullness: their sense of joy, leisure, exhaustion, survival, and the invisible labour that structures their everyday realities. In doing so, it invites listeners to rethink how women are viewed and represented as human beings with complex, deeply lived realities.

Meet Paromita Vohra

Paromita Vohra is a filmmaker, writer, and committed antakshari player whose extraordinary body of truth-telling, kinetic, and intensely sensuous work, including films, online videos, art installations, and television programming, explores feminism, gender, desire, urban life, and popular culture. She has directed several documentaries, including Unlimited Girls, Q2P, Where’s Sandra?, Morality TV and the Loving Jehad, Partners in Crime, and most recently, Working Girls. She has also written the film Khamosh Pani/Silent Waters, the comic Priya’s Mirror, the play Ishqiya Dharavi Ishtyle, and a weekly newspaper column, Paronormal Activity, which she wrote for 15 years. In 2015, she founded Agents of Ishq, a pioneering digital platform that has transformed conversations on sex, love, and desire in India.

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