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ABSTRACT
In India's censorial climate where debates about pornography exist only in terms of criminality, illegality, and the underground circuit, a feminist and pleasure-positive space has emerged under the aegis of (non-state-sponsored) sex education. In this playing field, the multimedia project and website Agents of Ishq (AoI) has emerged as a major voice in normalizing conversations about sex, pleasure, and even porn. Founded by the feminist filmmaker, artist, and curator Paromita Vohra, AoI carries essays, videos, and images that focus on fostering a community of readers/interlocutors that talk, teach, and learn freely about sex. In a sense, AoI approaches these matters in the same spirit as Vohra does in her filmmaking and her other work. In this interview, Paromita Vohra speaks to us about her films, artwork, AoI, and the effort to create a stigma-free ‘private public’ where people can talk about their desires, pleasure and sexuality.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 See the ‘About Us’ page on AoI. https://agentsofishq.com/about-us/.
2 See Paromita Vohra, ‘Tumhara Ishq Ishq…? The Double Meanings Of Desire, Porn And Erotica’, Outlook. August 13, 2021. https://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/entertainmentnews-tumhara-ishq-ishq-the-double-meanings-of-desire-porn-anderotica/304872.
3 For a contemporary report of the incident, see ‘Love in the Time of Media’ in the Times of India (2006).
4 Charu Gupta describes this as an Islamophobic conspiracy theory floated by the Hindu right wing. Love Jihad is ‘supposed to have been launched by Muslim fundamentalists and youthful Muslim men to convert Hindu and Christian women to Islam through trickery and expressions of false love’ (‘Hindu Women, Muslim Men: Love Jihad and Conversions,’ Economic and Political Weekly, 2009, 44 (51): 13–15, at 13).
5 See Paromita Vohra's ‘What Sunny Leone's Success Tells Us about Indian Society’ in The Ladies’ Finger! (June 24, 2015 http://theladiesfinger.com/the-baffling-success-of-sunny-leone/#:~:text=She%20owns%20her%20work%20completely,themselves%20apart%20from%20other%20natives.).
6 See Paromita Vohra's ‘Sexist ya feminist? Whose selfie is it anyway?’ in the Times of India (July 5, 2015, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-times/all-thatmatters/Sexist-ya-feminist-Whose-selfie-is-it-anyway/articleshow/47940649.cms).
7 For the AoI website, visit https://agentsofishq.com/.
8 For a description of the project on the Goethe Institut Indien website, see https://www.goethe.de/ins/in/en/kul/art/fmi/pav.html.
9 For instance, Facebook's advertising policy puts it as: ‘Ads must not promote the sale or use of adult products or services. Ads promoting sexual and reproductive health products or services, such as contraception and family planning, must be targeted to people aged 18 and older, and must not focus on sexual pleasure.’ See https://www.facebook.com/policies/ads/prohibited_content/adult_products_or_services.
10 The Delhi gang rape of 2012, often called the ‘Nirbhaya’ case (after the media-endowed moniker meaning ‘fearless’), involved the brutal rape and murder of a young woman on a bus at night in Delhi, and sparked off a series of conversations about women's safety (and later the death penalty) in India, particularly in the city of Delhi. The event also saw the outbreak of major public protests in Delhi which were met by repression and violence by the police. For more details see, Esha Shah's ‘Delhi Gang Rape – Understanding the Structure of Violence’ in Kafila (February 2, 2013, https://kafila.online/2013/02/01/delhi-gang-rape-understanding-thestructure-of-violence/).
11 Paromita Vohra, ‘Sexist ya feminist? Whose selfie is it anyway?’ (2015).
13 AIB or ‘All India Bakchod’ is a comic collective. The Creep Qawwali video was created with the Indian mobile phone dating app, Truly Madly, which promoted itself as a ‘safe’ dating app for women, drawing on the discourses of safety after the 2012 Delhi gang rape and murder. For more details see, Vishnupriya Das’s ‘Dating Applications, Intimacy, and Cosmopolitan Desire in India’, in Global Digital Cultures: Perspectives from South Asia, edited by Aswin Punathambekar and Sriram Mohan, 2019, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 125–141.
14 Clearly making an implication that the ‘vernacular’ is a lower-class space rife with danger – an idea that this special issue of Porn Studies and the one preceding it actively push against.
15 See Ini’s ‘I Took a Nude Selfie: It Changed My Life’ on AoI (13 July 2020).
16 See Ankita Salian's ‘What Emraan Hashmi Couldn't Teach Me About Dhichak’ on AoI (19 August 2019).
17 Which brings us back squarely to the question of the vernacular.