Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.62 (583 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0231148879 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 400 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-10-23 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
While America is not alone in its ambivalence toward sex and its depictions, the preferences of the nation swing sharply between toleration and censure. He follows the rise of the influential Citizens for Decent Literature during the 1960s and the pivotal events that followed: the sexual revolution, feminist activism, the rise of the gay rights movement, the "porno chic" moment of the early 1970s, and resurgent Christian conservatism, which now shapes public policy far beyond the issue of sexual decency. Perversion for Profit traces the anatomy of this trend and the crucial function of pornography in constructing the New Right agenda, which has emphasized social issues over racial and economic inequality. Strub also examines the ways in which the left failed to mount a serious or sustained counterattack to the New Right's use of pornography as a political tool. As he demonstrates, this failure put the Democratic Party at the mercy of Republican rhetoric. Conducting his own extensive research, Whitney Strub vividly recreates the debates over obscenity that consumed members of the ACLU in the 1950s and revisits the deployment of obscenity charges against purveyors of gay erotica during the cold war, revealing the differing standards applied to hetero
He lives in Center City, Philadelphia.. His writing has appeared in American Quarterly, Journal of the History of Sexuality, Journal of Social History, PopMatters, and Bad Subjects. Whitney Strub is an assistant professor of history at Rutgers University, Newark
Strub situates the New Right within a vibrant political landscape, not dominated by just one sliver of the politically engaged public but inhabited by pro-porn feminists, reluctant liberals, gay rights activists, influential thinkers, and pragmatic judicial appointees." Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Journal of American Studies (May 2012)"Strub does a masterful job of making the complicated postwar legal history of the shifting definitions of obscenity clear in a nuanced analysis that is always attentive to issues of gender and sexuality Examining the sexual politics of the New Right's emergence, he provides a thoughtful, compelling additio
Mary Rizzo said Thoroughly researched study of political debates over pornography. Using an extraordinary array of archival materials, Perversion for Profit is a brilliant analysis of how debates over pornography are really debates over citizenship and normalcy. Strub shows how the postwar period moved from milquetoast liberalism that hid conservative sexual pol