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- ItemPorn Tube sites: how do gratifications, interactivity and contextual age predict usage and addiction?(2023) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Menon, DevadasThe advent of the internet and compact and compatible smartphones have led to a dramatic increase in the usage of Porntube sites across the globe. Guided by the uses and gratification theory, this study (N = 405) identified six gratifications obtained from tube site usage: Excitement seeking, Diversion, Fantasy, Arousal, Habitual pastime, and Information seeking. This research also located the relationship between gratifications obtained from porn tube sites, life position indicators, interactivity, and problematic usage. Some of the prominent findings of the study are: there are significant age and gender differences in tube sites' usage; life satisfaction negatively predicted tube sites' usage; excitement seeking, diversion, arousal, and habitual pastime gratifications positively predicted porn tube usage; age, gender and interactivity were positive predictors of addiction; excitement seeking arousal, and habitual pastime gratifications positively predicted tube sites' addiction.
- ItemSearch for empathy: poverty porn popular culture in Indian television(2023) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith.The bipolar political conditioning in the Cold War era was perfect for media discourses to find propagandist methods to frame stories in ways that help set special agendas. The coloniser's curiosity for the indigenous and ritualistic cultural forms of these lands was a sign of exploitation rather than inclusion; the looting and importing of natural resources and artistic assets from colonised regions attest to the desire for things that had pure materialistic value. The revulsion associated with the visual perception of these "outside spaces" is fundamental to the construction of power dominance as it signifies notions of social acceptance and rejection. [...]the notion of "disgust" gets associated with the body of the colonised Other, and the representations of the "disgusted other" essentialises cultural identities.
- ItemBetween the borders of life and art: Roman Polanski’s transgressive negotiations(2023) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.Roman Polanski’s films are noted for their subversive psychological style that explores themes of sexuality, desire, alienation, and violence. His narratives often reflect a dark sense of humour through which the director perceives the absurdity of the human condition in relation to his own cultural dislocations and artistic eccentricity. This article investigates how different connotations of transgression play a major role in defining Roman Polanski as a filmmaker. It specifically explores how the polysemy of transgression structures Polanski as an artist whose real and cinematic negotiations are often intertwined. Through the constant subversion of moral, cultural, and social discourses, his visual style and narrative ideology maintain a notorious affinity that disturbs the notion of reality and manipulates it with new narrative texts. It is the idea of transgression that changes the way Polanski’s auteur status is perceived, appreciated, and rejected for his actions and creations in the past and their repercussions in the present. Polanski’s works use historical, social, and personal realities to renegotiate his transgressive image in real life by incorporating his contested victim status and persecuted selfhood in narratives that manipulate both the past and present.
- ItemBollywood self-fashioning: Indian popular culture and representations of girlhood in 1970s Indian cinema(2023) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.This article investigates how Bollywood cinema represented girlhood experiences in India in the early 1970s. It argues that the films during this time focused on representing girls who displayed a variety of new fashion styles and attitudes, some of which were borrowed from western cultures. This was a sign that there was a new way of representing girls which broke with the submissive, dull and melancholic sari-wearing Indian female stereotype entrapped within domestic settings. The immediate result of this was the emergence of new style leaders and popular icons in Indian popular cinema. This study uses Stephen Greenblatt’s concept of self-fashioning and Guy Mankowski’s idea of self-design to examine how Indian girlhood was renegotiated in the 1970s as an individual-centric idea with more agency and power. Here, self-fashioning refers to the way girls adopt new elements of fashion, styles and attitudes to distinguish their identity from earlier archetypal modes of representation in film and culture. It specifically analyses the emergence of Jaya Bhaduri in Guddi (1971) and Dimple Kapadia in Bobby (1973) as case studies to understand the transformation of girlhood representations in early 1970s Bollywood that opened a new space for girls to redefine their selfhood through the assimilation of consumerism, western culture and fashion styles.
- ItemThe little people: a fairy tale by a real queen(2023) Wurfel, MarleneA version of The Little People by Carmen Sylva, Queen of Roumania (1901). Edited, annotated and re-arranged by Marlene Wurfel. Music Intro by Reid Alexander Whelton.