Darshana Sreedhar Mini
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 354661 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Darshana Sreedhar Mini |
| NOMBRES | Darshana Sreedhar |
| APELLIDO | Mini |
| FIRMA | MINI D S |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Wisconsin–Madison |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5668-7815 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 29 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 14 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 29 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2015 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 2 |
Streaming in the Time of the Plague
Amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, streaming television subscriptions and media consumption surged at an unprecedented scale in the U.S. While audiences turned to streaming TV to cope with the lockdown, streaming platforms experimented with content delivery and packaging to adapt to emerging viewership trends. In this mixed-method study that combines surveys and focus groups with undergraduate students we found that students used streaming media both …
Respectability, Reform and the Data Trap
Political economy as an approach to media industries has long relied on data as raw material for knowledge production. However, the positivist pursuit of data can sometimes take away from the contextual nuances and lived realities of human labour in the industry. My aim, in this short piece, is to explore how localised power formations and cultural values must be accounted for, in order to interrogate the very process by which we claim knowledge …
Feminist ethics in media ethnography
In this paper, I draw from my decade-long fieldwork based on the production of soft-porn films in Malayalam language cinema produced in the South-Indian state of Kerala, to tease out the varied ways media ethnographers navigate the research process when they work on questions of sexuality, desire, and intimacy. The pseudonym-mediated soft-porn production foregrounded female characters as pleasure-seeking subjects. If feminist media ethics is pred…
‘S’ certification and sex-education films in India
Between the 1960s-1990s, the Films Division of India (FD) produced a slew of family planning films that aligned with India’s national development goals and advocated for the nuclear family. By the 1990s, AIDS-awareness also became a key thematic in FD films. Simultaneously, a parallel set of privately produced ‘sex-education’ films also began to emerge since the 1970s, functioning quite differently from the FD films by employing an almost voyeuri…
Soft-Porn Beyond Soft-Porn
This paper explores the subcultural tendencies and negotiations that go into the scripting process of Malayalam soft-porn cinema, one of the low-budget formations that emerged in the late 1980s and peaked into prominence in the early 1990s and 2000s. Drawing from fieldwork conducted from 2011 to 2017 among film personnel, including directors, scriptwriters and production managers who worked with soft-porn, I locate how soft-porn can be theorized …
Thinking Globally as Feminist Method
What does thinking globally entail? Why does it matter for studying communication and women’s studies today? Does the global simply encompass material outside the Euro-American or Western canons, o...
(Dis)locating South Asia
This paper maps how South Asian media is marketed by streaming aggregators such as Sling TV and ZEE5 Global for diasporic audiences in the United States and Canada. Examining questions of access, availability, and marketing, and analyzing popular press coverage, media industry reports, advertisements, as well as the platforms themselves, we show how South Asian diasporic consumers are envisaged as a target constituency by streaming platforms. In …
Censorship, A Hurt Story
This article examines intertwined trajectories of Hindutva and populism in India by focusing on the repertoire of works by Leena Manimekalai, a queer independent, Indian filmmaker whose work unsettles heteronormative notions of gender, caste, sexuality, and the family. By addressing how the state mandated censorship regulates not only what audiences see, but also fosters a culture of “hurt” which is co-opted by the right-wing idealogues, our clos…
Soft Pleasures
Malayalam soft-porn cinema of the 1990s cast female leads in the role of madakarani (sex sirens), a label that symbolized both their diegetic role and professional distinction as second-tier laborers. In this essay, I explore the contradictory framings within which the figure of the madakarani came to be identified through the soft-porn films as an embodiment of screen pleasures and the different spectatorial relations built through her presence.…
Cinema and Pleasure
There has been no concept as foundational as pleasure in the history of film studies and film theory in particular. During the 1970s, film scholars debated pleasure as a deeply ambivalent promise, some finding it an outright synonym for the self-delusion and alienation driven by the market forces that shape commercial cinema’s narrative language and ideological apparatus. Today, scholars and cinephiles alike are still haunted by an unresolved, la…
‘Think global, act local’
Beyond a consciousness-raising hashtag, #MeToo has become a transnational movement, crossing the borders of many societies. However, outsized attention has been paid to the manifestations of #MeToo in the US and on Twitter when the reach of this movement was not restricted to a single country, language, or platform. Drawing from the concept of hybridization, we seek to understand how the uses of #MeToo are contextualized across cultures, language…
Main/streaming porn discourse
Sounding Out Accent
Hit like, please subscribe
This article explores camming practices in India where performers like Oasi Das utilize platforms such as Instagram to invite subscription to their OnlyFans profiles. Focusing on the intersection between Instagram reels, OnlyFans, and escort services, the article locates the varied entrepreneurial modes used by such adult performers. This marks a distinct shift in the Indian adult media ecology that also includes web series and adult OTT platform…
The anti-caste alter-network
As a pan-South Asian phenomenon that marks certain groups and bodies as untouchable, caste-based discriminatory practices have also traveled with the South Asian diaspora. This article examines the case of anti-caste activism, especially in the context of its transnational potentials which have blossomed with the ubiquitous uptake of digital technology worldwide. We examine anti-caste activism in the US through the work of Equality Labs, an anti-…
Feminism Not for All? The Discourse Around White Feminism Across Five Social Media Platforms
BIPOC scholars have criticized that feminism and feminist activism have often failed to include race, class, and intersectional identities in the feminist agenda. Using theoretical concepts from framing, rhetoric, and cross-platform activism, we examine (a) the discourse in social media posts around white feminism and (b) the platform differences of this content across five different social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, a…
Towards an incomplete repertoire of South Asian pornographies
We give sex a good name’
Figuring the aggregated aunty
This paper examines aunties as South Asia’s salient pornographic product. Aunties, whether in pornography or more mainstream South Asian cultural production, are usually coded through visual associations with the home or sartorial conventions such as the sari. The inclusion of “aunty” in netporn video titles and search tags renders aunty a metadata category that imposes auntyness on a wider range of sexualized bodies and practices. Through an exa…
Body
Satellites of Belonging
The proliferation of Malayalam satellite television in the Gulf indicates the primacy that Indian nationals from Kerala have attained as a significant televisual demographic. In this paper I locate Malayali diasporic media formations from the late 1990s onward and examine how they contribute to the construction of the ‘Gulf-Malayali’ as a prominent vector for the satellite television industry based in the south Indian state of Kerala. The enterta…
Book Interview for The Digital Frontier
Sangeet Kumar’s book The Digital Frontier: Infrastructures of Control on the Global Web (Indiana University Press, 2021) explores how universalist perceptions of the web as a “democratic” space often obfuscate the operation of power asymmetries in digital infrastructures and global media flows. By interrogating how geopolitics, unequal access to digital technology and social and cultural values shape such infrastructures, Kumar’s book offers us i…
Translating porn studies
Why compile a special issue of Porn Studies on South Asia? What, indeed, can be gained from looking at pornographic cultures and conventions through a regional lens? Does invoking South Asia in thi
Saving New Sounds
Is this thing on?Part microphone check, part technical support query; the question seems a fitting way to start this collection, which is not just the book you hold in your hands (or the PDF you see on your screen) but also a vibrant, growing, and slightly temperamental database that indexes millions of podcasts
The Rise of Soft Porn in Malayalam Cinema and the Precarious Stardom of Shakeela
This paper looks at the genre of soft pornography in the Malayalam-speaking south Indian state of Kerala and the precarious stardom of its female stars through a close look at the career of Shakeela, an actress who became the emblematic soft-porn star of the 1990s. It interrogates how Shakeela's outsider status and her heavyset body type foregrounded her as the locus of Malayali society's conflicted relationship with sex and desire while also cre…
Translating porn studies
Why compile a special issue of Porn Studies on South Asia? What, indeed, can be gained from looking at pornographic cultures and conventions through a regional lens? Does invoking South Asia in thi
Figuring the aggregated aunty
This paper examines aunties as South Asia’s salient pornographic product. Aunties, whether in pornography or more mainstream South Asian cultural production, are usually coded through visual associations with the home or sartorial conventions such as the sari. The inclusion of “aunty” in netporn video titles and search tags renders aunty a metadata category that imposes auntyness on a wider range of sexualized bodies and practices. Through an exa…
Public interest television and social responsibility
This article maps the intricate ways televisual spaces build a sense of community and access to transnational networks of solidarity. Taking the programme Pravasalokam or ‘The World of Expatriates’ as a specific instance, this article tracks the imagination of ‘Gulf’ and the affective community who responds to such transnational television programmes. The show has been described as a ‘part-reality’ show on account of the fact that it hybridizes t…
Main/streaming porn discourse
The anti-caste alter-network
As a pan-South Asian phenomenon that marks certain groups and bodies as untouchable, caste-based discriminatory practices have also traveled with the South Asian diaspora. This article examines the case of anti-caste activism, especially in the context of its transnational potentials which have blossomed with the ubiquitous uptake of digital technology worldwide. We examine anti-caste activism in the US through the work of Equality Labs, an anti-…
Feminism Not for All? The Discourse Around White Feminism Across Five Social Media Platforms
BIPOC scholars have criticized that feminism and feminist activism have often failed to include race, class, and intersectional identities in the feminist agenda. Using theoretical concepts from framing, rhetoric, and cross-platform activism, we examine (a) the discourse in social media posts around white feminism and (b) the platform differences of this content across five different social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, a…
Saving New Sounds
Is this thing on?Part microphone check, part technical support query; the question seems a fitting way to start this collection, which is not just the book you hold in your hands (or the PDF you see on your screen) but also a vibrant, growing, and slightly temperamental database that indexes millions of podcasts
The house of ill repute
This paper maps the production history of Malayalee House (2013) a reality television show telecast by Surya TV, one of the many Malayalam satellite channels in the southern Indian state of Kerala. Publicized as a Malayalam edition of Bigg Boss, it soon ran into controversy with the filing of the injunction at the Bombay High Court by Endemol group, the makers of Bigg Boss who alleged copyright infringement. This was followed by protests by women…
Public interest television and social responsibility
This article maps the intricate ways televisual spaces build a sense of community and access to transnational networks of solidarity. Taking the programme Pravasalokam or ‘The World of Expatriates’ as a specific instance, this article tracks the imagination of ‘Gulf’ and the affective community who responds to such transnational television programmes. The show has been described as a ‘part-reality’ show on account of the fact that it hybridizes t…
The Rise of Soft Porn in Malayalam Cinema and the Precarious Stardom of Shakeela
This paper looks at the genre of soft pornography in the Malayalam-speaking south Indian state of Kerala and the precarious stardom of its female stars through a close look at the career of Shakeela, an actress who became the emblematic soft-porn star of the 1990s. It interrogates how Shakeela's outsider status and her heavyset body type foregrounded her as the locus of Malayali society's conflicted relationship with sex and desire while also cre…
Transgressions in Toonland
While India is no stranger to titillating imagery, its pornographic circuits remain underground due to stringent laws. The emergence of Indian pornographic comics under the aegis of the adult entertainment company Indian Porn Empire has destabilized this framework through their dispersed production practices and viral circulation. This article examines two of the most popular comic book titles, Savita Bhabhi and Velamma, that feature married wome…
Porno Cultures Podcast
The Porno Cultures Podcast was created in 2017 by Brandon Arroyo while finishing his PhD in Film & Moving Image studies at Concordia University. After being a fan of podcasts for years, Brandon became frustrated that there were hardly any shows featuring the authors or ideas that he became familiar with while writing a dissertation centred on pornography studies. So, he decided to start his own show featuring academics writing about pornography. …
Translating porn studies
Why compile a special issue of Porn Studies on South Asia? What, indeed, can be gained from looking at pornographic cultures and conventions through a regional lens? Does invoking South Asia in thi
Saving New Sounds
Is this thing on?Part microphone check, part technical support query; the question seems a fitting way to start this collection, which is not just the book you hold in your hands (or the PDF you see on your screen) but also a vibrant, growing, and slightly temperamental database that indexes millions of podcasts
Body
Satellites of Belonging
The proliferation of Malayalam satellite television in the Gulf indicates the primacy that Indian nationals from Kerala have attained as a significant televisual demographic. In this paper I locate Malayali diasporic media formations from the late 1990s onward and examine how they contribute to the construction of the ‘Gulf-Malayali’ as a prominent vector for the satellite television industry based in the south Indian state of Kerala. The enterta…
Book Interview for The Digital Frontier
Sangeet Kumar’s book The Digital Frontier: Infrastructures of Control on the Global Web (Indiana University Press, 2021) explores how universalist perceptions of the web as a “democratic” space often obfuscate the operation of power asymmetries in digital infrastructures and global media flows. By interrogating how geopolitics, unequal access to digital technology and social and cultural values shape such infrastructures, Kumar’s book offers us i…
Towards an incomplete repertoire of South Asian pornographies
We give sex a good name’
Figuring the aggregated aunty
This paper examines aunties as South Asia’s salient pornographic product. Aunties, whether in pornography or more mainstream South Asian cultural production, are usually coded through visual associations with the home or sartorial conventions such as the sari. The inclusion of “aunty” in netporn video titles and search tags renders aunty a metadata category that imposes auntyness on a wider range of sexualized bodies and practices. Through an exa…
Hit like, please subscribe
This article explores camming practices in India where performers like Oasi Das utilize platforms such as Instagram to invite subscription to their OnlyFans profiles. Focusing on the intersection between Instagram reels, OnlyFans, and escort services, the article locates the varied entrepreneurial modes used by such adult performers. This marks a distinct shift in the Indian adult media ecology that also includes web series and adult OTT platform…
The anti-caste alter-network
As a pan-South Asian phenomenon that marks certain groups and bodies as untouchable, caste-based discriminatory practices have also traveled with the South Asian diaspora. This article examines the case of anti-caste activism, especially in the context of its transnational potentials which have blossomed with the ubiquitous uptake of digital technology worldwide. We examine anti-caste activism in the US through the work of Equality Labs, an anti-…
Feminism Not for All? The Discourse Around White Feminism Across Five Social Media Platforms
BIPOC scholars have criticized that feminism and feminist activism have often failed to include race, class, and intersectional identities in the feminist agenda. Using theoretical concepts from framing, rhetoric, and cross-platform activism, we examine (a) the discourse in social media posts around white feminism and (b) the platform differences of this content across five different social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, a…
‘Think global, act local’
Beyond a consciousness-raising hashtag, #MeToo has become a transnational movement, crossing the borders of many societies. However, outsized attention has been paid to the manifestations of #MeToo in the US and on Twitter when the reach of this movement was not restricted to a single country, language, or platform. Drawing from the concept of hybridization, we seek to understand how the uses of #MeToo are contextualized across cultures, language…
Main/streaming porn discourse
Sounding Out Accent
Censorship, A Hurt Story
This article examines intertwined trajectories of Hindutva and populism in India by focusing on the repertoire of works by Leena Manimekalai, a queer independent, Indian filmmaker whose work unsettles heteronormative notions of gender, caste, sexuality, and the family. By addressing how the state mandated censorship regulates not only what audiences see, but also fosters a culture of “hurt” which is co-opted by the right-wing idealogues, our clos…
Soft Pleasures
Malayalam soft-porn cinema of the 1990s cast female leads in the role of madakarani (sex sirens), a label that symbolized both their diegetic role and professional distinction as second-tier laborers. In this essay, I explore the contradictory framings within which the figure of the madakarani came to be identified through the soft-porn films as an embodiment of screen pleasures and the different spectatorial relations built through her presence.…
Cinema and Pleasure
There has been no concept as foundational as pleasure in the history of film studies and film theory in particular. During the 1970s, film scholars debated pleasure as a deeply ambivalent promise, some finding it an outright synonym for the self-delusion and alienation driven by the market forces that shape commercial cinema’s narrative language and ideological apparatus. Today, scholars and cinephiles alike are still haunted by an unresolved, la…
Streaming in the Time of the Plague
Amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, streaming television subscriptions and media consumption surged at an unprecedented scale in the U.S. While audiences turned to streaming TV to cope with the lockdown, streaming platforms experimented with content delivery and packaging to adapt to emerging viewership trends. In this mixed-method study that combines surveys and focus groups with undergraduate students we found that students used streaming media both …
Respectability, Reform and the Data Trap
Political economy as an approach to media industries has long relied on data as raw material for knowledge production. However, the positivist pursuit of data can sometimes take away from the contextual nuances and lived realities of human labour in the industry. My aim, in this short piece, is to explore how localised power formations and cultural values must be accounted for, in order to interrogate the very process by which we claim knowledge …
Feminist ethics in media ethnography
In this paper, I draw from my decade-long fieldwork based on the production of soft-porn films in Malayalam language cinema produced in the South-Indian state of Kerala, to tease out the varied ways media ethnographers navigate the research process when they work on questions of sexuality, desire, and intimacy. The pseudonym-mediated soft-porn production foregrounded female characters as pleasure-seeking subjects. If feminist media ethics is pred…
Sociology (14 obras) · South Asian Cinema and Culture (14 obras) · Media studies (12 obras) · Political science (11 obras) · Art (8 obras) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (8 obras) · Cinema and Media Studies (6 obras) · Computer Science (6 obras) · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology (6 obras) · Law (5 obras)