Rated a: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India Volume 8

＂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 negotiate their social lives when marked by their involvement with a taboo form. 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＂--

Darshana Sreedhar Mini is Assistant Professor of Film at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and coeditor of South Asian Pornographies: Vernacular Formations of the Permissible and the Obscene.