South Asian Pornographies

South Asian Pornographies is the first consolidated volume that explores the relationships between pornography, obscenity, law and desire in South Asia. Focusing on case studies from India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh while gesturing towards other countries in South Asia, the authors of this volume come from fields as varied as history, literature, media and communication, and the visual arts. The book proposes that as a geo-political location, South Asia has a unique relationship to pornography, given the multiplicity of cultural and legal-censorial regimes that define the obscene and the permissible. South Asian case studies can demonstrate how pornography in the region is often defined in oblique terms, finding reflection in various modes of popular (and sometimes underground) culture, bypassing legal and censorial constraints. Like questions of identity that can only be answered in the plural (identities rather than identity), this book demonstrates how a range of pornographies constitutes the force field of sexualized media in South Asia. It will be of interest to researchers and advanced students of Communication Studies, Cultural Studies, Film Studies, History, Sociology, and Social and Cultural Anthropology. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal Porn Studies.

Darshana Sreedhar Mini is Assistant Professor of Film at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the author of Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India (2024), which explores the media-ecology produced by Malayalam soft-porn films by mapping their transnational journeys. Her research interests broadly include South Asian Cinema, Feminist Media, Global Media Cultures and Migrant media. Her work has been published in Feminist Media Histories, Film History, Porn Studies, Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, South Asian Popular Culture, South Asian Film and Media, Journal for Ritual Studies and International Journal for Digital Television.

Anirban K. Baishya is Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is currently working on a book project tentatively titled Viral Selves: Selfies and Digital Cultures in India. His research interests include new media and digital cultures, social media and political culture, media aesthetics, surveillance studies, and global media. His work has been published in International Journal of Communication, Communication, Culture & Critique, South Asian Popular Culture, Porn Studies, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, and Media, Culture & Society.