Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Item Songs and Their Audiences: Desire, Aurality, and Identity in Contemporary Youth Culture

Item Songs and Their Audiences: Desire, Aurality, and Identity in Contemporary Youth Culture

Sarma, Simona

Hardcover

Series: Pop Music, Culture and Identity

General Racism & Ethnic StudiesGeneral SociologyPop/Rock

PREORDER - Expected ship date February 24, 2027

ISBN10: 303238074X
ISBN13: 9783032380746
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Published: Feb 24 2027
Pages: 250
Language: English

This book investigates one of Bollywood's most controversial yet ubiquitous media forms - the item number - a hyper-sexual, erotic song-and-dance genre, through the lived experiences of its audiences. It examines how desire, fantasy, shame, and aspiration are negotiated through everyday acts of listening and viewing, rather than assuming fixed meanings of erotic spectacle. Drawing on in-depth interviews and focus group discussions with Assamese youth aged 18-25, the book challenges dominant narratives that reduce item numbers to either feminist reclamation or patriarchal exploitation. Instead, it foregrounds the contradictory, affective, and contextual ways audiences engage with sexualized performance, positioning the item number as a site of contestation where cultural norms around gender, sexuality, and morality are both reinforced and contested. The book makes four key interventions: it reveals heterogeneous reception patterns, uses a multisensory framework of media engagement, examines the congruent existence of desire and anxiety, and unfurls the regional adaptation of Bollywood item songs within Assamese identity and cultural politics. By centering youth from Northeast India, a region largely absent from mainstream media scholarship, the book also intends to expand the geographic and epistemic scope of South Asian reception studies. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of media and film studies, feminist theory, cultural studies, as well as readers interested in youth culture, popular music, and audience reception studies in the Global South.

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