The feminisation of youth: Rahman’s stardom in Malayalam cinema of the 1980s

ABSTRACT Anchored on the figure of the young Malayalam film actor Rahman and his mercurial rise to popularity in the 1980s, this paper argues that ‘youth’ bears within itself the desire to transcend the gender barrier and fashion a shared sensibility and subjectivity that reaches its peak in the neoliberal moment, thus signifying a new metrosexual, even androgynous, subject who is able to speak for the aspiring global citizens of the region. Rahman signifies a break in the traditional, hegemonic imagination of South Indian masculinity that is rooted in the region, and instead stands for the new configuration of cosmopolitan youth that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as a result of the migration to the Persian Gulf and the inflow of money and consumer goods from there – a category of youth whose self-fashioning was inflected in a significant way by their consumption practices. Certain representational techniques also resulted in a queering or androgyny of the youthful figure that he personified, suggesting the liminality of gendered identity in youth. Apart from textual analyses of a selection of his films, I also draw on popular reportage around his stardom in the form of news reports and gossip columns published in the leading Malayalam film weekly, Naana, in the 1980s. While the former helps to outline the representational function of Rahman’s body in film narratives, the latter supplements this with data on how the ways in which his figure was imagined and received, both within the industry and among fans, contributes to fashioning a new youth subjectivity.