Figuring the aggregated aunty: netporn, metadata and South Asian aunties

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Aunty
• pornography
• South Asia
• metadata
• performance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As Anomol Nayak writes, “In the Indian imagination, an ‘Aunty’ is a middle-aged, usually fat woman who is married and has children […] In this imagination the woman, whom the world now addresses as ‘Aunty’, has basically served her purpose of marriage and childbearing, and is hence rendered useless.”

2 We would like to thank Patrick Keilty for providing additional clarifications about this (email-conversation, January 2022).

3 See for instance, the video “HornyLily showing off her dirty panties and pussy close-up” uploaded on the Xvideos.com Horny Lily channel, where some of the user comments express disgust – “I do not want to imagine how that vagina will stink,” “Are we just going to act like that's not a genital wart on that asshole?” and “Just so that you know, you have piles … !!!” (Horny Lily, Xvideos [a]). Such comments align with Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay’s observation that online discussions about pornographic, South Asian female bodies are a contested terrain where the same images draw comments of both admiration and disgust. This reveals a “historic fracture in the vernacular libido – which is deeply divided between an “archaic” sensuality and a half-hearted, “surface” desire for modernity and “civilizing” good taste” (170).

4 A promo video shot for the Kanchan Aunty series features the background music from a song in the Bollywood film Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu (Dir. Shakun Batra, 2012). The song is titled “Aunty Ji” is set at a New Years’ party in which the song sequence exhorts all the middle-aged aunties to “get up and dance” (which forms the song’s main chorus), thus implying that the “aunty” who usually does not dance and has given up on her youth, is full of potential, social energy. The Kanchan Aunty promo draws from this stereotype of the aunty, but simultaneously overturns it to expose the aunty’s libidinal energy, and in the process, hints at a dense web of intertextual relationships between the familial and the pornographic aunties (See Aagmaal [a]).

5 However, it remains to be seen how the web-series industry adapts to the February 2021 the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021 meant to regulate social media platforms and OTT and digital providers in India. Further the arrest of businessman Raj Kundra, for publishing allegedly pornographic web-series on the app “Hotshots” in August 2021 put adult OTT platforms such as Neufliks, Ullu, Hothits, Kindibox and others under increased scrutiny by the state. At the time of writing, we have been unable to find any fresh examples of similar web-series uploaded after August 2021.