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The Rumor of Globalization: Desecrating the Global from Vernacular Margins
Though aunties are ubiquitous figures across global public cultures, they have received limited scholarly attention. Given the location of these women, femme, and queer figures at the periphery of nuclear families, it is little surprise that they are overlooked. Rather than fixate on their marginality, this introduction demonstrates how aunties become abundant figures to think kinship, desire, aesthetics, and politics. Examining academic and arts-based discussions of aunties, the special-issue editor connects labor associated with aunties to aesthetics they are known for. In addition to being embodied, fleshy, working figures, aunties offer methodological optics for critical study and strategies for navigating academic institutions.
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
examination of porn-performer Lily Singh (“Horny Lily”) and
aunty-themed adult web series, we argue that “aunting” in South
Asian porno-cultures is a mode produced through the interaction
between metadata, text, and performance.
The aunty appears as a common vernacular figure in South Asian film, television, memes, novels, and porn. ‘Aunty porn’ names a large body of pornography that features fat, older, South Asian women; this genre is unique in that it features aunties as protagonists. In other media, aunties are only afforded minor roles as difficult, stubborn, and traditional, and this archetype positions them as an antagonist to queer sexual futures. This article scavenges a selection of queer aunty porn from South Asian diasporic novels to demonstrate aunties’ capacity to cultivate sexual futures, showing how sex between aunties exists in continuum with archetypal aunty attributes like cooking and gossip. While aunty sexualities are usually interpreted in relation to younger generations, this article points to the many ways that ageing South Asian women rehearse queer sexual futures for and between themselves.
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 women as their protagonists. While interrogating these comics in terms of their content and effects, we suggest that the affordances of the comic book medium allow them to display a wider range of fantasies than both the amateur and soft porn that circulates in India. Thus, these comic books become sticky objects that absorb and express the dynamics of class, gender and taboo. The adult comic book visualizes sexual and moral anxieties on the two-dimensional plane of the comic book panel and becomes a canvas of fantasies that allows for vicarious boundary-crossing.
Recent film and television treatment of South Asia from UK producers have introduced new angles on the violent politics of colonial past, whether this be the activities of the East India Company in the early days of Empire, or about Partition, at the ostensible Raj’s end. The controversy over Gurinder Chadha’s 2017 film Viceroy’s House is taken as an opportunity to consider the new South Asian film and television studies and the emergent scholars that are challenging conventional media studies models. The co-constitution of here and there is given as an analytic lens through which to comprehend representation and stereotyping in films “about” politics in South Asia, and the view taken is that a debilitating divide and rule, via mechanisms of representation, remains strongly in place, despite the fighting efforts of the new South Asian media scholarship.
Time and Commodity Culture is a set of four linked essays on the cultural systems of postmodernity. Rather than taking modernity and postmodernity as real historical epochs, however, it understands them as strategies for organizing time and social order by means of a `nostalgic' division within them. Each essay explores a particular dimension of this organization of time, especially in relation to the anxieties and the possibilities created by the commodification of culture. The central essay, `Gift and Commodity', studies two areas in which the speed of commodification has increased markedly in recent years: That of the person, and that of information. Using a mix of anthropological, legal, economic, and historical materials, it investigates the privatization of the commons in information by way of such things as the development of markets in human DNA, the trade in human organs, and the creation of property rights in `personality'. `What Was Postmodernism?' analyses the structured anxiety about the commodification of culture that is called `postmodern theory'. A further essay explores tourism as a figure of modernity, and a final essay on memory explores the phenomena of `recovered memory' and of Holocaust remembrance as ways of constructing temporally ordered forms of the real.
This book concerns barter, a transaction in which objects are exchanged directly for one another without the use of money. Economists treat barter as an inefficient alternative to market exchange, and assume that it is normal only in 'primitive' economies or marks the breakdown of more developed exchange mechanisms. For their part, anthropologists have been more interested in the social and moral complexities of the 'gift', and treat barter dismissively as mere haggling. The authors of this collection do not accept that barter occupies a residual space between monetary and gift economies. Using accounts from different parts of the world, they aim to demonstrate that it is more than a simple and self-evident economic institution. Barter may constitute a mode of exchange with its own social characteristics occupying a specific moral space. This novel treatment of barter represents an original and topical addition to the literature on economic anthropology.
