Female celebrities in digital age: the changing notions of stardom in Malayalam cinema

Stardom in the present day has evolved into a comprehensive apparatus with its intersection with emerging digital media paving way to myriad star varieties. This paper tries to analyse the diverse ways in which female stardom manifests in the Malayalam film industry with the emergence of new digital domains and virtual sensibilities. This article traces the evolution of female stardom in India and explores the new possibilities of Malayalam female stardom in the current technoscape. To exemplify this, the paper takes into account two female star personas from the Malayalam film industry, Parvathy Thiruvoth and Aparna Balamurali, to unravel the changed landscape of stardom today which is made possible through interventions of digital media where the female stars exhibit a deviation from the traditional associations of glamour/body to that of political and gendered articulations. It is substantiated by analysing digital media articles and social media issues circulating in Kerala's digital landscape to establish how the present complexities in the new kinds of stardom requires a restructuring of ideas of gender discourses in new media spaces.