Darshana Sreedhar Mini, "Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India" (U California Press, 2024)

New Books in South Asian Studies

In the 1990s, India's mediascape saw the efflorescence of edgy soft-porn films in the Malayalam-speaking state of Kerala. In Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India (U California Press, 2024), 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.

Dr. Darshana Sreedhar Mini is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. She did her PhD from the University of Southern California. Her teaching and research lie at the intersection of gender, sexuality, transnational media, migrant media and screen cultures of South Asia. She is the co-editor of South Asian Pornographies: Vernacular Formations of the Permissible and the Obscene (Routledge, 2024).

Priyam Sinha recently graduated with a PhD from the South Asian Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore. Her interdisciplinary academic interests lie at the intersection of film studies, disability studies, production cultures, affect studies, anthropology of the body, creative media industries and cultural studies. She can be reached at https://twitter.com/PriyamSinha

Khadeeja Amenda is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and New Media, National University of Singapore, Singapore. She can be reached at [e-mail]

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