Most actresses who play heroine roles in the contemporary Tamil film industry are not considered, by audiences or industry insiders, to be either ethnolinguistically Tamil or competent Tamil speakers. Drawing on interviews with industry insiders in and audiences of the Tamil film and television industries, this article interrogates discourses that take up this absence and non-identity within Tamil cinema. I show how these discourses ambivalently turn on—that is, mobilize and problematize—the historical stigma of cinema and, relatedly, its gendered performative semiotics, as well as a Dravidianist politics of language, gender, and ethnolinguistic identity. The article traces out the political contours of this stigmatic performativity and the culturalist identity claims that are made through appeal to it. I focus, in particular, on how this identity politics of the image comes to be articulated and contested in a recent reality television program devoted to finding a Tamil-speaking heroine. As I show, the tensions and contradictions that underlie this televisual attempt point to the productively fraught relationship between cinema, gender, vision, language, and regional Tamil identity in a post-television, post-liberalization context.
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