Porn is the theory: pornography, obscenity and the politics of affect in the American sexual revolution
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Abstract
This dissertation examines the developments following the report of the 1970 Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, which described obscenity as an archaic legal category and recommended entirely decriminalizing the sale of pornography to consenting adults in the United States. In 1986, after over a decade of explicit representations of sex flooding the mainstream media, Attorney General Edwin Meese's federal commission on pornography arrived at a contradictory conclusion, condemning pornography as a catalyst of violence toward women and insisting on increased national regulation of obscenity. This project examines the public discourse surrounding pornography in the United States during the period between these two reports, focusing particularly on the shift in the ways in which that discourse represented pornography's impact on its audience.
The first three chapters of the dissertation analyze the preoccupation with pornography in the early 1970s, when many experts and cultural elites viewed graphic depictions of sexuality as productively transgressive and potentially liberating. These chapters juxtapose legal rulings on obscenity with the work of journalists, directors, and literary authors (most notably Thomas Pynchon), who depicted pornography as a playful challenge to traditional cultural hierarchies. Chapter four demonstrates that increasing tolerance toward pornography provoked pornographers to explore more threatening and violent aspects of human sexuality. This, in turn, incited a hostile reaction from the elites who had formerly championed pornography as a tool of sexual revolution. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, feminist intellectuals like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin claimed that pornography constituted a violation of women's civil rights and promoted violence against women, an argument that lent academic credibility to the legal case for censorship. The epilogue examines the consequences of the burgeoning anti-porn movement for artists like John Waters who had previously embraced pornography. Ironically, as this project highlights, at the heart of both the efforts to deregulate sexual expression and the renewed push for the regulation of sexual frankness was a perception of pornography's working-class audiences as uncritical and susceptible to the manipulations of cultural producers. This dissertation challenges those assumptions and addresses the persistent specter of class-bias in current academic constructions of pornography.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University
PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you.
PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you.