ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some of the ways in which Bollywood stars contribute to a deeper understanding of celebrity studies in India. The celebrity ecology around these victims is crucial for any understanding of the subsequent cele-meme of women's empowerment that the films generate and transmit. A discourse of victimhood generated in the media and through public debates is already in place, from which the film feeds and feeds into. The cele-meme of empowerment emerges because there is already a victim-discourse. The cele-meme of women's empowerment in the films based on real-life incidents and around celebrity victims generates the desirable and necessary idea of agency and individual choice through the construction of two victim models. Each model offers a version of female agency, decision-making and choice-making. Both films produce the cele-meme that women's oppression demands a response. The therapeutic victim generates a key cele-meme that links the socially induced helplessness of the vulnerable woman and the necessity for social resilience.
