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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.
Open Access
Rated A Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India
About the Book
Reviews
"A model for future film scholars. The decade-long research that went into making this book is evident in its rich historical details, insightful conversations, and multisited fieldwork. Perhaps even more impressive is Darshana Sreedhar Mini's ability to pull together such vast and diverse material in a riveting story, so absorbing and beautifully written that I often felt like I was reading a novel. This exemplary work will produce lively discussions about film historiography, diaspora, stardom, authorship, and sexuality."—Monika Mehta, author of Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema"Don't be tempted to think you know porn if you see it. Mini's analysis invites us to see soft-core porn as a social construction that has reflected the borders of sexual agency and gendered respectability in Indian society for more than fifty years. Through a mosaic of methods, Mini strips down layers of mediated meanings, precarious labor, urban politics, and transnational consumption flows. Mini's work is exemplary of how soft-porn is a part of people's lived experiences. Her own confessions about the research process unfold as a subplot to a story of frustrated desires, circuitous pathways, and patient perseverance."—Vicki Mayer, author of Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy
"Mini delivers a deeply impressive, groundbreaking historical analysis of the Malayalam-language soft-core pornography that emerged in Kerala, India, during the transformative decades of the 1990s and 2000s. This comprehensive study explores industrial processes and regulatory challenges, traces production intricacies, foregrounds the lived experiences of performers, and highlights exhibition dynamics and audience responses, shedding light on a rich but previously unexamined subject. In doing so it immediately joins the ranks of essential porn-studies texts."—Peter Alilunas, author of Smutty Little Movies: The Creation and Regulation of Adult Video
"This remarkable book on the Malayalam-language soft-core porn industry of Kerala arrives as a bold feminist and 'southern' intervention in porn studies. Its mesmerizing mapping of evolving social relations and gendered aspirations, dueling economies of desire and regulatory regimes, emergent transnational media circuits, and piratical publics is bound to animate conversations across disciplines."—Bhaskar Sarkar, author of Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition
"A formidably researched counterhistory of Indian cinema through the regional mode of the sex film and a brilliantly synthetic work of adult-film history. Rated A dazzles with insight, relaying how Malayalam soft-porn produced complexly mobile and contested media publics. Exploring films that center female sexual autonomy and rely on the bounteous allure and non-normative sexuality of their stars, Rated A is a deeply feminist account of an era's cultural productions, its stars and makers, and the networks and economies of their often invisible labor. Committed to examining the ways precarity, class, and caste politics inflect the unruly circulations of sexually coded media forms, this is a fascinating, vital, and essential work of film and cultural history."—Elena Gorfinkel, author of Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s
"Mini takes readers on a truly fascinating exploration of Malayalam soft-porn cinema, which emerged in the 1980s and has captivated millions of viewers across India and the Middle East. Extensive archival and ethnographic research reveals the local and global influences that shaped the genre, the social and gendered dynamics of the industry, and the complex politics of sexuality and censorship in contemporary India. By challenging the dominant narratives of pornography as a Western phenomenon, this book provides a new model for studying soft-core film genres in diverse cultural contexts."—Clarissa Smith, author of One for the Girls!: The Pleasures and Practices of Reading Women's Porn and coeditor of Porn Studies
"Rated A is a captivating cultural history of Malayalam soft-porn cinema, and moreover of its afterlives—how it is remediated across a range of sites, reverberating in the cultural imagination. In the unfolding of that history, Mini shows how soft-porn and the debates and desires that it provokes are entangled with the building of gender, sexuality, politics, and social life. A major new contribution to the study of pornographies."—Feona Attwood, author of Sex Media and coeditor of Porn Studies
"Rated A delivers a richly layered account of the precarious and often invisible world of Malayalam soft-porn cinema. Employing creative and tenacious research strategies, Mini adroitly delineates the textual logics and quotidian practices of a popular film industry that perseveres as Bollywood's forsaken other."—Michael Curtin, coeditor of Voices of Labor: Creativity, Craft, and Conflict in Global Hollywood
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"A formidably researched counterhistory of Indian cinema through the regional mode of the sex film and a brilliantly synthetic work of adult-film history. Rated A dazzles with insight, relaying how Malayalam soft-porn produced complexly mobile and contested media publics. Exploring films that center female sexual autonomy and rely on the bounteous allure and non-normative sexuality of their stars, Rated A is a deeply feminist account of an era's cultural productions, its stars and makers, and the networks and economies of their often invisible labor. Committed to examining the ways precarity, class, and caste politics inflect the unruly circulations of sexually coded media forms, this is a fascinating, vital, and essential work of film and cultural history."—Elena Gorfinkel, author of Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s
"Mini takes readers on a truly fascinating exploration of Malayalam soft-porn cinema, which emerged in the 1980s and has captivated millions of viewers across India and the Middle East. Extensive archival and ethnographic research reveals the local and global influences that shaped the genre, the social and gendered dynamics of the industry, and the complex politics of sexuality and censorship in contemporary India. By challenging the dominant narratives of pornography as a Western phenomenon, this book provides a new model for studying soft-core film genres in diverse cultural contexts."—Clarissa Smith, author of One for the Girls!: The Pleasures and Practices of Reading Women's Porn and coeditor of Porn Studies
"Rated A is a captivating cultural history of Malayalam soft-porn cinema, and moreover of its afterlives—how it is remediated across a range of sites, reverberating in the cultural imagination. In the unfolding of that history, Mini shows how soft-porn and the debates and desires that it provokes are entangled with the building of gender, sexuality, politics, and social life. A major new contribution to the study of pornographies."—Feona Attwood, author of Sex Media and coeditor of Porn Studies
"Rated A delivers a richly layered account of the precarious and often invisible world of Malayalam soft-porn cinema. Employing creative and tenacious research strategies, Mini adroitly delineates the textual logics and quotidian practices of a popular film industry that perseveres as Bollywood's forsaken other."—Michael Curtin, coeditor of Voices of Labor: Creativity, Craft, and Conflict in Global Hollywood
Awards
- Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in the Indian Humanities, American Institute of Indian Studies
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