Talk Title: ‘S’ Certification and Sex-Education Films in India: From Family Planning to Poaching Pleasure
March 5, 2026, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm CT
206 Ingraham Hall
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Presentation Description
Between the 1960s-1990s, the Films Division of India (FD) produced a slew of family planning films that aligned with India’s national development goals and advocated for the nuclear family. By the 1990s, AIDS-awareness also became a key thematic in FD films. Simultaneously, a parallel set of privately-produced ‘sex-education’ films also began to emerge since the 1970s, functioning quite differently from the FD films by employing an almost voyeuristic medicalized gaze. These films also offered moments of surreptitious pleasure, through an intertextual relay with the global form of sex-documentaries that were imported from the U.S and Europe through the NRI (Non-resident Indian) film import scheme. In time, they enforced the creation of a new certification category—the ‘S’ category— for specialized audiences, pointing to the conundrum they posed for the censorial gaze of the state. Often alleged to border on the pornographic, sex-education films also inspired low-budget filmmakers, and by the late 1990s soft-porn filmmakers, who used the ‘sex-education’ label to bypass censorship. Tracing such disjunctures, this paper shows how considering family planning, sex-education and soft-porn films together offers us insights into how sexual pleasure, desire and censorship co-create the conditions for sexual citizenship in contemporary India.
About the Speaker
Darshana Sreedhar Mini is an Associate Professor at the Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India (UC press, 2024) and co-editor of South Asian Pornographies: Vernacular Formations of the Permissible and Obscene (Routledge, 2024) with Anirban Baishya, and The Intellect Handbook on Adult Film History, with Patrick Keilty and Peter Alilunas (Intellect Books, 2026).