1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910874539303321

Autore

Mini Darshana Sreedhar

Titolo

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

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Berkeley : , : University of California Press, , 2024

©2024

ISBN

9780520397460

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (238 pages)

Collana

Feminist Media Histories Series ; ; v.8

Disciplina

791.43/6538

Soggetti

Pornographic film industry - India - Kerala - 20th century

Pornographic films - India - Kerala - 20th century

PERFORMING ARTS / Film & Video / General

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di contenuto

Cover -- Series -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Soft-Porn 101 -- 1. Madakarani -- 2. Waiting for Kodambakkam -- 3. Embodied Vulnerabilities -- 4. The Alternative Transnational -- 5. (Dis)Appearances -- Conclusion: In Praise of Bad Women -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

Sommario/riassunto

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.    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.