Seeing and Unseeing like a State

This article traces how the questions of gender inequality and developmentalism are staged in the official documentary film archive in India. I examine official films made in the wake of the International Women’s Year in 1975 as knowledge-making sites where discursive constructions around gender were being actively forged, debated, and reinforced in direct relation (or opposition) to the women’s movement and contemporary debates on development in India at the time. I argue that to rewrite official histories of gender, films, and development, we must unsee like a state and reveal the film archive as a site in flux to activate new meanings. And we must cultivate a feminist curatorial eye that proactively seeks films, sometimes only fragments of films, to open the possibility of identifying affective encounters and subjective experiences that exceed the bounds of the state’s developmental agendas.