Rated a: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India Volume 8 (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780520397453)

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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.

Author: Darshana Sreedhar Mini
ISBN-10: 0520397452
ISBN-13: 9780520397453
Publisher: University of California Press
Language: English
Published: 08/06/2024
Pages: 236
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.60w x 0.70d