Drawing on sources as diverse as Supreme Court decisions, nightclub
comedy, congressional records, and cultural theory, Obscene
Gestures explores the many contradictory vectors of
twentieth-century moralist controversies surrounding literary and
artistic works from Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer to those of
Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Kathy Acker, Robert Mapplethorpe, 2
Live Crew, Tony Kushner, and others. Patrick S. Lawrence dives into
notorious obscenity debates to reconsider the divergent afterlives
of artworks that were challenged or banned over their taboo sexual
content to reveal how these controversies affected their critical
reception and commercial success in ways that were often determined
at least in part by racial, gender, or sexual stereotypes and
pernicious ethnographic reading practices. Starting with early
postwar touchstone cases and continuing through the civil rights,
feminist, and LGBTQ+ movements, Lawrence demonstrates on one level
that breaking sexual taboos in literary and cultural works often
comes with cultural cachet and increased sales. At the same time,
these benefits are distributed unequally, leading to the
persistence of exclusive hierarchies and inequalities. Obscene
Gestures takes its bearings from recent studies of the role of
obscenity in literary history and canon formation during the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, extending their insights
into the postwar period when broad legal latitude for obscenity was
established but when charges of obscenity still carried immense
symbolic and political weight. Moreover, the rise of social justice
movements around this time provides necessary context for
understanding the application of legal precedents, changes in the
publishing industry, and the diversification of the canon of
American letters. Obscene Gestures, therefore, advances the study
of obscenity to include recent developments in the understanding of
race, gender, and sexuality while refining our understanding of
late-twentieth-century American literature and political culture.
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