Darshana Mini

Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India

April 18, 2024

In the 1990s, India’s mediascape saw the efflorescence of edgy, soft-porn films that emerged in the Malayalam-speaking state of Kerala. In this talk, the author examines local and transnational influences such as vernacular pulp fiction, illustrated erotic tales, and American exploitation cinema that influenced Malayalam soft-porn cinema. Through a mix of archival and ethnographic research, the talk locates how actresses and production personnel negotiated their social lives marked by their involvement with a taboo form. Mapping the soft porn industry’s utilization of gendered labor and trust-based arrangements, the author 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.

About the Speaker

Darshana Sreedhar Mini is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication Arts, UW–Madison. She is the author of Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India forthcoming from University of California Press. She is the co-editor of “South Asian Pornographies: Vernacular Formations of the Permissible and the Obscene” published in Porn Studies in 2020.