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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues > Ethical issues & debates > Pornography & obscenity
Civil War soldiers enjoyed unprecedented access to obscene
materials of all sorts, including mass-produced erotic fiction,
cartes de visite, playing cards, and stereographs. A perfect storm
of antebellum legal, technological, and commercial developments,
coupled with the concentration of men fed into armies, created a
demand for, and a deluge of, pornography in the military camps.
Illicit materials entered in haversacks, through the mail, or from
sutlers; soldiers found pornography discarded on the ground, and
civilians discovered it in abandoned camps. Though few examples
survived the war, these materials raised sharp concerns among
reformers and lawmakers, who launched campaigns to combat it. By
the war's end, a victorious, resurgent American nation-state sought
to assert its moral authority by redefining human relations of the
most intimate sort, including the regulation of sex and
reproduction-most evident in the Comstock laws, a federal law and a
series of state measures outlawing pornography, contraception, and
abortion. With this book, Judith Giesberg has written the first
serious study of the erotica and pornography that
nineteenth-century American soldiers read and shared and links them
to the postwar reaction to pornography and to debates about the
future of sex and marriage.
Between 1900 and 1945, Britain and its empire experienced
significant technological and social changes that altered its media
and entertainment landscape. One aspect of British culture that
underwent these changes was pornography. While illegal and socially
reviled, the pornography trade adapted and flourished during this
period. In The Thorny Path Jamie Stoops situates changes within the
pornography trade in the context of an increasingly transnational
world. Those who traded in pornography circled the globe,
journeying from Britain to its colonies, from colonial holdings to
continental Europe, from Europe to North America. In the process,
pornographers and their customers developed new vocabularies and
norms with which to negotiate their trade. Based on extensive
archival research, this book grounds questions of transnationalism
and heteronormativity in the day-to-day lives of low-level
pornographers and consumers. Stoops's focus on street-level
interactions within the trade is balanced with an analysis of state
policies, legal regulations, and debates about obscenity,
illustrating the interplay between enforcers of mainstream moral
standards and those who represented deviant sexual practices.
Raising questions of queerness and sexual normativity, The Thorny
Path links these issues to contemporary conversations about
pornography, obscenity, and sexuality. It offers timely historical
context for current and vibrant debates surrounding marginalized
sexualities, gender roles, and pornography in a time of rapid
technological and social change.
In 1999, General Museveni, Uganda's autocratic leader, ordered
police to arrest homosexuals for engaging in behavior he
characterized as ""un-African"" and against Biblical teaching. A
state-sanctioned campaign of harassment of LGBT people followed.
With the approval of sections of Uganda's clergy (and the support
of U.S. evangelicals) harsh morality laws were passed against
pornography and homosexual acts. The former disproportionately
affected urban women, curtailing their freedoms. The latter - known
as the ""kill the gays bill"" - called for life imprisonment or
capital punishment for homosexuals. The author weaves together a
series of vignettes and anecdotes that trace the development of
Uganda's morality laws against a backdrop of Machiavellian
politics, religious fundamentalism and the human rights struggle of
LGBT Ugandans.
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