Editing is Women’s Work

This anthro-historical project will foreground production cultures and gendered labour practices in Bollywood amidst globally converging new media industries. By focusing on the editing process, including the often-unseen labour of female editors, this project seeks to provide a nuanced understanding of how Bollywood’s production culture and narrative strategies are constructed and disseminated. In doing so, it aims to shed light on the gendered dynamics within Bollywood’s editing rooms while contributing to the emerging scholarship on the sociology of labour, particularly focusing on film genre stratification and the precarity of
feminized labour across creative media industries. Additionally, the role of female editors as the bridge between filmmakers and audiences will be investigated. In such ways, this study will highlight the often-overlooked contributions of female editors in Bollywood while reframing their work within the broader contexts of creative labor and gender dynamics in the media and entertainment industry.