READING THE VISUAL, TRACKING THE GLOBAL Postcolonial Feminist Methodology and the Chameleon Codes of Resistance

It is late evening in the bustling global city of Hyderabad, India, in July 2004—a large billboard with a single human figure looms out of the horizon alongside a new highway bridge that adjoins high-rise office buildings, apartments, and shopping complexes. A young Indian woman dressed in low-rise blue jeans and a tight tank top with her thumb inserted suggestively into the waistband of her jeans looks down on commuters from her elevated position on the white space of the billboard.Anchoring her inviting sexual gaze to the titillating promise of the investigative scoop, the local newspaper Deccan Chronicle’s bold copy on the billboard declares, “We dare to bare. Investigative reporting at its best.” Standing tall in the midst of the city’s traffic, the visual spectacle of the modern Indian woman, packaged within the commodity aesthetics of erotic White femininity, signals the softening of semiotic boundaries between the pure nationalist self (modest woman in Indian clothing) and the impure Western other (promiscuous woman in Western clothing) in a globalizing India—these gendered boundaries of insider/outsider structured the discursive landscape of public culture in earlier eras of colonial and postcolonial nation building (Chatterjee, 1989). The Deccan Chronicle’s deployment of a sexualized image of a young woman to court readers, a promotional strategy that would have been declared crude and sensational merely two decades ago, follows in the wake of recent dramatic changes in the Indian economic and cultural landscape: aggressive economic liberalization, truncation of socialist state policies, spread of capitalist consumer culture, and the rapid penetration of visual media in urban and rural India. Although consumer culture’s alluring canvases in postliberalized India tempt us to believe that