![]() Using the Hindi film Lipstick Under My Burkha (Dir. In exploring the affective and embodied relationships forged through ‘sonic publics’, I trace the emergence of ‘pornosonic’ media that are held in a supplementary relationship with the pornographic, and their efficacy as a transactional medium where the work of sound is affective (working at the level of the body), social (working to create arrangements of public order around sonic artifacts) and cultural (filtered through cultural norms). Locating my study around a recent set of issues in India’s mediascape, this article tracks the emergence of ‘sonic publics’ that are conditioned by the figure of the listener, her imaged aurality, and the aural tactics that are developed in response to censorship and a culture of redaction. Shakeela's emergence as a “liberated” woman who flaunts her sexuality despite social norms was so strong that it destabilized Kerala's hero-centric mainstream industry for a time, leading to what was popularly called Shakeela tharangam, the “wave of Shakeela.” The mainstay of soft-porn productions was the strategic positioning of the female lead as a cultural outsider-a transient figure who is both a threat and a source of exoticized desire. By 2001 more than 70 percent of the total films produced in Malayalam were soft porn, and a good number of them featured Shakeela. 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 creating a set of parallel film practices that challenged the hierarchies of the mainstream film industry. ![]() 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. ![]()
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