Rated A

Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India

Darshana Sreedhar Mini

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English

University of California Press
06 August 2024

Film theory & criticism; Social issues & processes; Feminism & feminist theory; Ethnic studies; Sexual behaviour

Series: Feminist Media Histories

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

In the 1990s, India's mediascape saw the efflorescence of edgy soft-porn films in the Malayalam-speaking state of Kerala. In Rated A, Darshana Sreedhar Mini examines the local and transnational influences that shaped Malayalam soft-porn cinema—such as vernacular pulp fiction, illustrated erotic tales, and American exploitation cinema—and maps the genre's circulation among blue-collar workers of the Indian diaspora in the Middle East, where pirated versions circulate alongside low-budget Bangladeshi films and Pakistani mujra dance films as South Asian pornography. Through a mix of archival and ethnographic research, Mini also explores the soft-porn industry's utilization of gendered labor and trust-based arrangements, as well as how actresses and production personnel who are marked by their involvement with a taboo form negotiate their social lives. By locating the tense negotiations between sexuality, import policy, and censorship in contemporary India, this study offers a model for understanding film genres outside of screen space, emphasizing that they constitute not just industrial formations but entire fields of social relations and gendered imaginaries.

By: Darshana Sreedhar Mini
Imprint: University of California Press
Country of Publication: United States
Volume: 8
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 18mm
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9780520397453
ISBN 10: 0520397452
Series: Feminist Media Histories
Pages: 236
Publication Date: 06 August 2024
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Darshana Sreedhar Mini is Assistant Professor of Film at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and coeditor of South Asian Pornographies: Vernacular Formations of the Permissible and the Obscene.