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Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of SexualityPornography and Obscenity

Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality: Pornography and Obscenity [A peculiar thing began happening in the 1980s and 90s: pornography and obscenity, long relegated to the margins of serious scholarship, began showing up at the centre of influential historical work. As new generations of historians returned to vital questions — how power operates, why revolutions occur, how belief systems change — a small but important group of scholars began to consider ‘scurrilous’, ‘obscene’ and ‘pornographic’ texts. Sources that an earlier generation of historians would have dismissed as trivial or opaque were now expected to yield important information about the past. What was remarkable about this work was that it was not the history of pornography per se — the history of genres and borrowings, printers and collectors. Instead, historians were using ‘pornographic’ materials as a means of asking new kinds of questions about the past. They were also using these sources to demonstrate links between realms of experience long thought to have no relationship to one another — among them, sexuality and politics; family identity and economics. In short, these historians were in the process of breaking down boundaries that had long been kept distinct and redefining what it meant to talk about politics and the political.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of SexualityPornography and Obscenity

Part of the Palgrave Advances Book Series
Editors: Cocks, H. G.; Houlbrook, Matt
Leonard, Sarah
Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality — Nov 21, 2015
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References (6)

Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan UK
Copyright
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2006
ISBN
978-1-4039-1290-9
Pages
180 –205
DOI
10.1057/9780230501805_9
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[A peculiar thing began happening in the 1980s and 90s: pornography and obscenity, long relegated to the margins of serious scholarship, began showing up at the centre of influential historical work. As new generations of historians returned to vital questions — how power operates, why revolutions occur, how belief systems change — a small but important group of scholars began to consider ‘scurrilous’, ‘obscene’ and ‘pornographic’ texts. Sources that an earlier generation of historians would have dismissed as trivial or opaque were now expected to yield important information about the past. What was remarkable about this work was that it was not the history of pornography per se — the history of genres and borrowings, printers and collectors. Instead, historians were using ‘pornographic’ materials as a means of asking new kinds of questions about the past. They were also using these sources to demonstrate links between realms of experience long thought to have no relationship to one another — among them, sexuality and politics; family identity and economics. In short, these historians were in the process of breaking down boundaries that had long been kept distinct and redefining what it meant to talk about politics and the political.]

Published: Nov 21, 2015

Keywords: Feminist Movement; French Revolution; Modern History; Historical Profession; Annales School

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