What Pornography Knows: Sex and Social Protest since the Eighteenth Century

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Synopsis
What Pornography Knows offers a new history of pornography based on forgotten bawdy fiction of the eighteenth century, its nineteenth-century republication, and its appearance in 1960s paperbacks. Through close textual study, Lubey shows how these texts were edited across time to become what we think pornography is—a genre focused primarily on sex. Originally, they were far more variable, joining speculative philosophy and feminist theory to sexual description. Lubey's readings show that pornography always had a social consciousness—that it knew, long before anti-pornography feminists said it, that women and nonbinary people are disadvantaged by a society that grants sexual privilege to men. Rather than glorify this inequity, Lubey argues, the genre's central task has historically been to expose its artifice and envision social reform. Centering women's bodies, pornography refuses to divert its focus from genital action, forcing readers to connect sex with its social outcomes. At times inventing their own sexual anatomy and gender identity, at times having their bodies claimed and used by others, pornographic figures bring genitals to the fore, insisting they be justly treated rather than coldly transacted. Lubey offers a surprising take on a deeply misunderstood cultural form: pornography transforms sexual description into feminist commentary, she argues, revealing the genre's deep knowledge of how social inequities are perpetuated as well as plans for how to rectify them.
Copyright:
2022

Book Details

Book Quality:
Publisher Quality
Book Size:
312 Pages
ISBN-13:
9781503633124
Related ISBNs:
9781503633117, 9781503611665
Publisher:
Stanford University Press
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
History, Nonfiction, Literature and Fiction, Social Studies, Language Arts
Submitted By:
Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.

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