Faculty Webpage
Biography
Darshana Mini is an Associate Professor at the Department of Communication Arts. Her teaching and research lie at the intersection of feminist media, gender & sexuality studies, transnational media, migrant media and screen cultures of South Asia.
Supported by Social Science Research Council (SSRC), NEH and American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS), her first book Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India (UC Press, 2024) examines the genre of soft-porn in India and how it impacts public discourse on sexuality, obscenity, sex-work and sex-education. Using archival and ethnographic methods, the project tracks the emergence of the genre in the South India-based Malayalam film industry from the 1970s-2000s, by focusing on the formation of media publics—relationships, formations and exchanges in the public sphere, facilitated by the affective power of media. The American Institute of Indian Studies awarded Rated A the Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in the Indian Humanities in 2024, and the National Communication Association (NCA) and Modern Language Association (MLA) also honored the work with awards.
Her second book project, Telegeographies of Plantation Media: Malayan Imaginaries studies media flows between South Asia and Southeast Asia—specifically, between India, Singapore, Malaysia and their shared colonial pasts. Focusing on the lifeworlds of South Indian labor transported to British Malaya and Singapore between 1850s to the 1920s under the indentured system and the colonial regime, Telegeographies examine image-making practices centered around plantation histories and how they have led to the Malaysian Indian community to be identified with a plantation-lineage. In doing so, this project tussles with questions of identity, belongingness and community formation as they appear in media forms, against the backdrop of globalization and the shifting ethnoscapes it engenders.
Dr. Mini is the Director for Media and Gender Justice at 4W Initiative, and an affiliate of Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, Center for Visual Cultures, and Center for South Asia. She is on the steering committee of Center for Visual Cultures and Performance Studies (CVCPS) and The Havens Wright Center for Social Justice.