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

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.

Bionote:
Darshana Sreedhar Mini is an Assistant 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). Rated A is the winner of The Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in the Indian Humanities awarded by the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) in 2024.