Item Songs and their Audiences

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.