Housing as Ideological Apparatus: Class, Gender, and Neoliberal Urbanism in Tamil Cinema

Abstract

This paper examines housing narratives in contemporary Tamil cinema through a Marxist theoretical framework, analyzing five films spanning four decades: Veedu (1988), To Let (2017), House Owner (2019), Kudumbasthan (2025), and 3BHK (2025). Drawing on Marx's commodity form, Althusser's ideological state apparatus, Harvey's accumulation by dispossession, and Marxist-feminist theories of social reproduction, the paper argues that these films function as cultural documents recording India's transition from a state-mediated housing regime to a neoliberal, market-dominated order. The analysis demonstrates how cinematic representations of domestic space expose the home not as refuge but as a site where class position is reproduced, gendered labour rendered invisible, and market ideology internalized as personal aspiration. Each film illuminates distinct facets of the housing crisis: bureaucratic extraction, caste-coded rental exclusion, unpaid care work, masculine precarity, and the temporal violence of long-term debt. The paper contributes to undertheorized intersections of Tamil cinema studies, urban political economy, and ideology critique, proposing the category of "critical domestic realism" to characterize films that refuse consolatory narratives of homeownership while exposing housing as capitalism's disciplinary mechanism.