Rated A

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.

“A groundbreaking historical analysis that immediately joins the ranks of essential porn-studies texts.” — Peter Alilunas, author of Smutty Little Movies: The Creation and Regulation of Adult Video

“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.” — Monika Mehta, author of Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema

“A formidably researched counterhistory of Indian cinema and a brilliantly synthetic work of adult-film history, Rated A dazzles with insight.” — Elena Gorfinkel, author of Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s

“Don’t be tempted to think you know porn if you see it. Mini’s analysis invites us to see soft-porn as a social construction that reflects the borders of sexual agency and gendered respectability.” — Vicki Mayer, author of Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy

“This remarkable book on the Malayalam-language soft-core porn industry of Kerala arrives as a bold feminist and ‘southern’ intervention in porn studies that is bound to animate conversations across disciplines.” — Bhaskar Sarkar, author of Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition

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.