Oct. 25 talk looks at soft-porn in South Asian cinema

Posted by Jenee Wilde on
South Asian film
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In Malayalam soft-porn cinema of the 1990s, female leads were cast as madakarani (sex-siren), a label that symbolized both their narrative role and professional distinction as second-tier contract laborers.

Darshana Sreedhar Mini, assistant professor of communication arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will be giving a talk Friday, Oct. 25, on "Madakarani as Screen Pleasure: Scandal and Soft-porn Imaginary." The free lecture will be held 3–5 p.m. in 145 Straub Hall, 1451 Onyx St, at the University of Oregon, Eugene. 

Prof. Darshana Mini

In Malayalam soft-porn cinema of the 1990s, female leads were cast as (sex-siren), a label that symbolized both their narrative role and professional distinction as second-tier contract laborers. In this talk, Mini explores soft-porn’s invocation of the figure of madakarani to chart out different spectatorial relations built through her presence as an embodiment of screen pleasures. She will look at how film weeklies became important dealers in this economy of screen-pleasures by performing as an interface between Malayalam cinema’s diegetic and non-diegetic lifeworlds. She will look at the ways being cast as a madakarani limited opportunities, forcing actresses to find ways to wade off efforts to delegitimize their work. She will place these resistive moves in the light of how repetitive bodily labor contributed by these actresses, extras, and background artists force us into thinking about labor practices in Indian film industry as a process that is necessarily unwieldy and heterodox.

Mini is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India (UC press, 2024) and co-editor of South Asian Pornographies: Vernacular Formations of the Permissible and Obscene (Routledge, 2024). Rated A is the winner of the Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in the Indian Humanities awarded by the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) in 2024. Her research interests broadly include South Asian cinema, feminist media, global media cultures, and migrant media.

The event is presented by the Center for the Study of Women in Society and co-sponsored by the Oregon Humanities Center, School of Global Studies and Languages, and the departments of Cinema Studies, Comparative Literature, and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.