D Tejaswini Niranjana economic independence of women. Questions of choice, agency and autonomy are becoming central to the portrayal of women, not just in fictional features but in documentary-style depictions as well. Access to new commodities is increasingly suggested as a solution to women's problems; now they have only themselves to blame if they are not able to change their lives. The market now promises women not just the goods that it advertises, but pleas- 5 ure, perfection, happiness; goals imaged as attainable through a training in consumerism. Far less obvious than the narratives of physical perfection the ads celebrate is the promise of equality (and not just equality between men and women), which is seductively linked to the new abundance of goods in the marketplace. The fact that women who are not upper caste, or who do not belong to the majority community, have severely restricted access to "economic independence" and the market often tends to be glossed over in the celebratory portrayal of the new woman. One of the objectives of the workshop was to investigate the class-caste composition of the female consumer imaged by the media, and evaluate its significance for the formation of contemporary socia.1 identities and for feminist politics today. Feminists have never doubted that the media was a significant area in which political intervention was required, but there has been a great deal of confusion as to how exactly to intervene. We often use terms like "sexist" or "objectifying", without seeking to clarify how a particular media representation is sexist or objectifies and commodifies women. The process by which the objectification or commodification occurs seems to become transparent, taken for granted. And all we see then are "negative" portrayals of women, with feminist intervention consisting of their substitution by "positive" portrayals. Again, we tend to draw on commonsensical ideas of good and bad images, so that we are never really called upon to explain beyond a point why particular representations are problematic. This sort of analysis of the media often oversimplifies not only the nature of the problem but also the nature of our critical task both as theorists and as cultural practitioners. Take some recent examples of women's media interventions: the agitation against the 1996 Miss World beauty contest in Bangalore, blackening of cinema posters in Hyderabad, the petition seeking a ban on the Telugu film Alluda Majaka, and the burning of a print of Rangeela elsewhere in Andhra Pradesh. We might recall here that the groups involved in these activities were leftwing as well as rightwing. The common thread running through the analyses is the charge of "obscenity", and the related charge of undermining "our" (or "Indian") cultural values. The links between obscenity, sexism and commodification are once again treated as self-evident, allowing these criticisms, coming as they do from disparate political frameworks (conservative neo-nationalism, the feminist critique of patriarchy, bourgeois nationalism, marxist political economy), to be collapsed one into the other. The danger of doing this needs to be recognized more clearly than it usually is by women's groups. Collapsing critical categories that are politically antithetical to each other leads to confusion regarding our modes of intervention as well as the creation of unlikely political alliances. In particular, the defence of Indian culture argument is something feminists ought to find deeply problematic if they hold a perspective which actively critiques the hegemonic understanding of what Indian culture is, Numbers 32-33