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A collection of ten essays tracing the history and various uses of pornography in early modern Europe. In America today the intense and controversial debate over the censorship of pornography continues to call into question the values of a modern, democratic culture. This ground-breaking collection of ten critical essays traces the history and various uses of pornography in early modern Europe, offering the historical perspective crucial to understanding current issues of artistic censorship. The essays, by historians and literary theorists, examine how pornography emerged between 1500 and 1800 as a literary practice and a category of knowledge intimately linked to the formative moments of Western modernity and the democratization of culture. They reveal that the first modern writers and engravers of pornography were part of the demimonde of heretics, freethinkers, and libertines who constituted the dark underside of the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution. From the beginning, early modern European pornography used the shock of sex to test the boundaries and regulation of decent and obscene behavior and expression in the public and private spheres, criticizing and even subverting religious and political authorities as well social and sexual norms. Contents Introduction, Lynn Hunt • Humanism, Politics, and Pornography in Renaissance Italy, Paula Findlen • The Politics of Pornography: L'Ecole des filles, Joan Dejea • Sometimes a Sceptre is only a Sceptre: Pornography and Politics in Restoration England, Rachel Weil • The Materialist World of Pornography, Margaret C. Jacob • Truth and the Obscene Word in Eighteenth-Century French Pornography, Lucienne Frappier-Mazur • The Pornographic Whore: Prostitution in French Pornography from Margot to Juliette, Kathryn Norberg • Erotic Fantasy and the Libertine Dispensation in Eighteenth-Century England, Randolph Trumbach • Politics and Pornography in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Dutch Republic,Wijnand W. Mijnhardt • Pornography and the French Revolution, Lynn Hunt
A collection of ten essays tracing the history and various uses of pornography in early modern Europe.In America today the intense and controversial debate over the censorship of pornography continues to call into question the values of a modern, democratic culture. This ground-breaking collection of ten critical essays traces the history and various uses of pornography in early modern Europe, offering the historical perspective crucial to understanding current issues of artistic censorship.The essays, by historians and literary theorists, examine how pornography emerged between 1500 and 1800 as a literary practice and a category of knowledge intimately linked to the formative moments of Western modernity and the democratization of culture. They reveal that the first modern writers and engravers of pornography were part of the demimonde of heretics, freethinkers, and libertines who constituted the dark underside of the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution. From the beginning, early modern European pornography used the shock of sex to test the boundaries and regulation of decent and obscene behavior and expression in the public and private spheres, criticizing and even subverting religious and political authorities as well social and sexual norms.ContentsIntroduction, Lynn Hunt • Humanism, Politics, and Pornography in Renaissance Italy, Paula Findlen • The Politics of Pornography: L'Ecole des filles, Joan Dejea • Sometimes a Sceptre is only a Sceptre: Pornography and Politics in Restoration England, Rachel Weil • The Materialist World of Pornography, Margaret C. Jacob • Truth and the Obscene Word in Eighteenth-Century French Pornography, Lucienne Frappier-Mazur • The Pornographic Whore: Prostitution in French Pornography from Margot to Juliette, Kathryn Norberg • Erotic Fantasy and the Libertine Dispensation in Eighteenth-Century England, Randolph Trumbach • Politics and Pornography in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Dutch Republic,Wijnand W. Mijnhardt • Pornography and the French Revolution, Lynn Hunt
Reinventing Licentiousness navigates an overlooked history of representation during the transition from the Qing Empire to the Chinese Republic—a time when older, hierarchical notions of licentiousness were overlaid by a new, pornographic regime. Y. Yvon Wang draws on previously untapped archives—ranging from police archives and surveys to ephemeral texts and pictures—to argue that pornography in China represents a unique configuration of power and desire that both reflects and shapes historical processes. On the one hand, since the late imperial period, pornography has democratized pleasure in China and opened up new possibilities of imagining desire. On the other, ongoing controversies over its definition and control show how the regulatory ideas of premodern cultural politics and the popular products of early modern cultural markets have contoured the globalized world. Reinventing Licentiousness emphasizes the material factors, particularly at the grassroots level of consumption and trade, that governed "proper" sexual desire and led to ideological shifts around the definition of pornography. By linking the past to the present and beyond, Wang's social and intellectual history showcases circulated pornographic material as a motor for cultural change. The result is an astonishing foray into what historicizing pornography can mean for our understandings of desire, legitimacy, capitalism, and culture.
In this groundbreaking collection of essays, historians and literary theorists examine how, between 1500 and 1800, pornography emerged as a literary practice and a category of knowledge intimately linked to the formative moments of Western modernity and the democratization of culture. The first modern writers and engravers of pornography were part of the demimonde of heretics, freethinkers, and libertines who constituted the dark underside of the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution. From the start, early modern European pornography used the shock of sex to test the boundaries and regulation of obscene behavior and expression in the public and private sphere. As such, pornography criticized and even subverted political authorities as well as social and sexual relations.
Sexuality in modern western culture is central to identity but the tendency to define by sexuality does not apply to the premodern past. Before the 'invention' of sexuality, erotic acts and desires were comprehended as species of sin, expressions of idealised love, courtship, and marriage, or components of intimacies between men or women, not as outworkings of an innermost self. With a focus on c. 1100–c. 1800, this book explores the shifting meanings, languages, and practices of western sex. It is the first study to combine the medieval and early modern to rethink this time of sex before sexuality, where same-sex and opposite-sex desire and eroticism bore but faint traces of what moderns came to call heterosexuality, homosexuality, lesbianism, and pornography. This volume aims to contribute to contemporary historical theory through paying attention to the particularity of premodern sexual cultures. Phillips and Reay argue that students of premodern sex will be blocked in their understanding if they use terms and concepts applicable to sexuality since the late nineteenth century, and modern commentators will never know their subject without a deeper comprehension of sex's history.
This volume's contributors explore the links among sexuality, ethnography, race, and colonial rule through an examination of ethnopornography—the eroticized observation of the Other for supposedly scientific or academic purposes. With topics that span the sixteenth century to the present in Latin America, the United States, Australia, the Middle East, and West Africa, the contributors show how ethnopornography is fundamental to the creation of race and colonialism as well as archival and ethnographic knowledge. Among other topics, they analyze eighteenth-century European travelogues, photography and the sexualization of African and African American women, representations of sodomy throughout the Ottoman empire, racialized representations in a Brazilian gay pornographic magazine, colonial desire in the 2007 pornographic film Gaytanamo, the relationship between sexual desire and ethnographic fieldwork in Africa and Australia, and Franciscan friars' voyeuristic accounts of indigenous people's “sinful” activities. Outlining how in the ethnopornographic encounter the reader or viewer imagines direct contact with the Other from a distance, the contributors trace ethnopornography's role in creating racial categories and its grounding in the relationship between colonialism and the erotic gaze. In so doing, they theorize ethnography as a form of pornography that is both motivated by the desire to render knowable the Other and invested with institutional power. Contributors. Joseph A. Boone, Pernille Ipsen, Sidra Lawrence, Beatrix McBride, Mireille Miller-Young, Bryan Pitts, Helen Pringle, Pete Sigal, Zeb Tortorici, Neil L. Whitehead
This is a revised and updated edition of the book, including more recent information, footnotes, a bibliography, page numbers (print edition) and more beautiful fonts! In a groundbreaking reappraisal of European history, award-winning historian Brian M. Watson gives the secret history of smut through the literature, art, photography, and historical figures you didn't learn about in school. Watson combs the bawdy and forgotten corners of Western civilization to reveal the hidden story of a topic that still causes anger, arousal, excitement and scandal. Combining an entertaining style with brand-new research, Annals of Pornographie: How Porn Became Bad explores not only the salacious history of pornography, but also explains the evolution of Western sexuality, the 'creation' of privacy (and public life), and the 'invention of manners.' The book analyzes Western culture's tortured and rapturous relationship with erotic representation by probing the underside of its culture, art, literature, philosophy, sexology, psychology and its law. Covering everything from the fifteenth century Renaissance all the way up to the twentieth century Playboy magazine, Watson takes the reader on a grand tour of the forgotten debauchery of Western history. Along the way, we meet a variety of colorful characters who rarely get their historical due: Lord Rochester, the royal Pimp; Pietro Aretino, the Renaissance godfather of pornography; Edmund Curll, the first Hugh Hefner; along with many other tax-dodging street pornographers and radicals who roamed the streets of London, Paris, New York, and other major metropoles. Watson takes us from the hallowed halls of the Council of Trent, where Popes and kings fought over the future of the west, to Grub Street, a narrow and disgusting London alley filled with hack writers, aspiring poets and pushers of dirty French pictures and many other sights and sounds from Western Civilization's glorious and seedier locales.Annals of Pornographie: How Porn Became Bad reveals, for the first time, exactly how pornography went from being beautiful to being bad.
Pornography: The force for change that has been written out of the history of world culture. From cave painting to photography to the internet, pornography has always been at the cutting edge in adopting and exploiting new developments in mass communication. And in so doing, it has helped to promote and propel those developments in ways that are rarely acknowledged. Without pornography, the internet would not have grown so quickly. The e-commerce payment systems that are now commonplace would be at a far more primitive stage security and usability. Without video streaming software developed for pornography sites, CNN would be struggling to deliver news clips. Without advertising from sex sites, Google could not have afforded YouTube. This smart, witty and well-researched history shows how a vast secret trade has bankrolled and shaped mainstream culture and its machines.
Punctuated with remarkable case studies, this book explores extraordinary encounters between hermaphrodites--people born with "ambiguous" sexual anatomy--and the medical and scientific professionals who grappled with them. Alice Dreger focuses on events in France and Britain in the late nineteenth century, a moment of great tension for questions of sex roles. While feminists, homosexuals, and anthropological explorers openly questioned the natures and purposes of the two sexes, anatomical hermaphrodites suggested a deeper question: just how many human sexes are there? Ultimately hermaphrodites led doctors and scientists to another surprisingly difficult question: what is sex, really? Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex takes us inside the doctors' chambers to see how and why medical and scientific men constructed sex, gender, and sexuality as they did, and especially how the material conformation of hermaphroditic bodies--when combined with social exigencies--forced peculiar constructions. Throughout the book Dreger indicates how this history can help us to understand present-day conceptualizations of sex, gender, and sexuality. This leads to an epilogue, where the author discusses and questions the protocols employed today in the treatment of intersexuals (people born hermaphroditic). Given the history she has recounted, should these protocols be reconsidered and revised? A meticulously researched account of a fascinating problem in the history of medicine, this book will compel the attention of historians, physicians, medical ethicists, intersexuals themselves, and anyone interested in the meanings and foundations of sexual identity.
This is not a comprehensive study of every sexual quirk, kink and ritual across all cultures throughout time, as that would entail writing an encyclopaedia. Rather, this is a drop in the ocean, a paddle in the shallow end of sex history, but I hope you will get pleasantly wet nonetheless. The act of sex has not changed since people first worked out what went where, but the ways in which society dictates how sex is culturally understood and performed have varied significantly through the ages. Humans are the only creatures that stigmatise particular sexual practices, and sex remains a deeply divisive issue around the world. Attitudes will change and grow – hopefully for the better – but sex will never be free of stigma or shame unless we acknowledge where it has come from. Based on the popular research project Whores of Yore, and written with her distinctive humour and wit, A Curious History of Sex draws upon Dr Kate Lister’s extensive knowledge of sex history. From medieval impotence tests to twentieth-century testicle thefts, from the erotic frescoes of Pompeii, to modern-day sex doll brothels, Kate unashamedly roots around in the pants of history, debunking myths, challenging stereotypes and generally getting her hands dirty. This fascinating book is peppered with surprising and informative historical slang, and illustrated with eye-opening, toe-curling and meticulously sourced images from the past. You will laugh, you will wince and you will wonder just how much has actually changed.