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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.
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.
Price: $34.95
Pages: 236
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Series: Feminist Media Histories
Publication Date:
06 August 2024
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780520397453
Format: Paperback
"An impressive contribution to the field."
"With its thoughtful analysis and engaging prose, Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India stands as a testament to the power of critical scholarship in challenging societal norms and opening up new avenues of thought. Mini’s work is not just an academic achievement but also a cultural intervention, encouraging readers to look beyond stereotypes and appreciate the complexities of a genre that continues to shape the cultural landscape of India."
"The book makes a critical contribution to low rung cine industrial practices largely overlooked in histories of production in South Asian film and media studies. . . . By critically engaging with questions of agency and desire, she also challenges reductive narratives and resists the fetishization of her objects of inquiry. In so doing, she exemplifies a model for ethical ethnographic engagement with precarious subjects, prompting us to rethink what it means to attend to informal and low brow cultural economies."
"A wonderful book on an urgent historical and political media corpus. Mini uses the hottest new media studies concepts for her study, uncompromisingly, without ever talking down, but delivers a thundu-rich study that will be accessible for students, cinephiles, pornophiles, and South Asia-
philes alike. . . Grab it in paper while it’s hot."
"Darshana Sreedhar Mini’s Rated A is at the cutting edge of scholarship in feminist porn studies, media and communications studies and the new scholarship redefining the ubiquitous term ‘transnational’."
"The images are a collector’s dream. Rated A succeeds brilliantly in making the 'obscene' gloriously seen."
"While there have been significant books on the erotic and embodied dynamics of stigmatized performance forms in South Asia, Rated A opens up new terrains for investigation by focusing on the diffuse and non-linear trajectories of soft-porn cinema in the Malayalam-speaking state of Kerala."
"With its thoughtful analysis and engaging prose, Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India stands as a testament to the power of critical scholarship in challenging societal norms and opening up new avenues of thought. Mini’s work is not just an academic achievement but also a cultural intervention, encouraging readers to look beyond stereotypes and appreciate the complexities of a genre that continues to shape the cultural landscape of India."
"The book makes a critical contribution to low rung cine industrial practices largely overlooked in histories of production in South Asian film and media studies. . . . By critically engaging with questions of agency and desire, she also challenges reductive narratives and resists the fetishization of her objects of inquiry. In so doing, she exemplifies a model for ethical ethnographic engagement with precarious subjects, prompting us to rethink what it means to attend to informal and low brow cultural economies."
"A wonderful book on an urgent historical and political media corpus. Mini uses the hottest new media studies concepts for her study, uncompromisingly, without ever talking down, but delivers a thundu-rich study that will be accessible for students, cinephiles, pornophiles, and South Asia-
philes alike. . . Grab it in paper while it’s hot."
"This book is not merely an extensive account of the darker, yet immensely popular, side of the Malayalam film industry; it is essential reading for anyone deeply interested in the Malayalam film industry."
"Darshana Sreedhar Mini’s Rated A is at the cutting edge of scholarship in feminist porn studies, media and communications studies and the new scholarship redefining the ubiquitous term ‘transnational’."
"The images are a collector’s dream. Rated A succeeds brilliantly in making the 'obscene' gloriously seen."
"While there have been significant books on the erotic and embodied dynamics of stigmatized performance forms in South Asia, Rated A opens up new terrains for investigation by focusing on the diffuse and non-linear trajectories of soft-porn cinema in the Malayalam-speaking state of Kerala."
“Mini’s archival method, rooted in radical abundance, offers a vital intervention into debates on absence, authorship, and circulation in star studies and film historiography.”
“Darshana Sreedhar Mini distinguishes her work through its intellectually innovative and ethically grounded theoretical framework.”
“An extraordinary and riveting book that rescues Malayalam soft porn films from the prudishness of posterity and brings to life, almost cinematically, the lives, the spaces and the evocations of illicit desire.”
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.