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

By Darshana Sreedhar Mini

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 and maps the genre’s circulation among the Indian diaspora in the Middle East. She explores the soft-porn industry’s precarious labor structure, as well as how actresses and production personnel who are marked by their involvement with a taboo form navigate their social lives. By surveying the tense negotiations among sexuality, import policy, and censorship, this study offers a model for understanding film genres as entire fields of social relations and gendered imaginaries.