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Author

Whitney Strub

Other affiliations: University of Miami
Bio: Whitney Strub is an academic researcher from Rutgers University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Pornography & Queer. The author has an hindex of 8, co-authored 23 publications receiving 157 citations. Previous affiliations of Whitney Strub include University of Miami.

Papers
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Book
02 Dec 2010
Abstract: Introduction1. The Rediscovery of Pornography: Emergence of a Cold War Moral Panic2. Ambivalent Liberals: Theorizing Obscenity Under Consensus Constraints3. Arousing the Public: Citizens for Decent Literature and the Emergence of the: Modern Antiporn Movement4. Damning the Floodtide of Filth: The Rise of the New Right and the Political Capital of Moralism5. The Permissive Society: Porno Chic and the Cultural Aftermath of the Sexual Revolution6. Resurrecting Moralism: The Christian Right and the Porn Debate7. Pornography Is the Practice, Where Is the Theory? Second-Wave Feminist Encounters with Porn8. Vanilla Hegemony: Policing Sexual Boundaries in the Permanent Culture-War EconomyNotesAcknowledgmentsIndex

53 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examines the mechanics of such deployments in mid-twentiethcentury Los Angeles, where the national domestic politics of the cold war found shape and expression at the local level, and emphasizes the cultural work accomplished by the incessant deployment of such charges, regardless of outcome, as they served to reify mainstream assumptions about the perversity and prurience of dissident sexualities.
Abstract: As an enforcing agent of heteronormativity, obscenity law has often been used to stigmatize and suppress queer texts. This article examines the mechanics of such deployments in mid-twentiethcentury Los Angeles, where the national domestic politics of the cold war found shape and expression at the local level. While a study of obscenity case law alone might suggest more victories than losses for queer texts, this article emphasizes the cultural work accomplished by the incessant deployment of such charges, regardless of outcome, as they served to reify mainstream assumptions about the perversity and prurience of dissident sexualities. This policing served a variety of interlocking ends: the literal erasure of homosexual visibility, the cultural conflation of the queer with the obscene, and the targeting of queer community formations for destruction. From male physique magazines to avant-garde Kenneth Anger films, authorities deemed queer texts inherently obscene, regardless of their levels of graphic depictions of sexuality, as a sustained antigay moral panic engulfed cold war Los Angeles. Even public space defined as queer proved vulnerable to such efforts, as the marginalization of queer communities that pushed them into proximity with disreputable straight films and publications also allowed the heightened policing of those straight texts as cover for the actual combating of queer community formations. While this conflation of queerness and obscenity seemingly faded in the liberal 1970s, its legacy was to set the framework for the antigay agenda of the New Right, which continues to exploit such tropes into the present day.

21 citations

Journal Article
TL;DR: The New Millennium Butch fashion show in 2011 as mentioned in this paper attracted 300 people who watched rare and stunning images of "New Millennium Butches," resplendent in tailored suits of black, pink or purple, flashing before them on a thirty-foot screen.
Abstract: The 300 people that gathered in Newark, New Jersey, on a fall day in 2011 were not the typical academic crowd. That day, LGBTQ activists and high school students, street workers and church leaders, politicians and university students, professors, administrators and university staff sat rapt, watching rare and stunning images of “New Millennium Butches,” resplendent in tailored suits of black, pink or purple, flashing before them on a thirty-foot screen. The images were curated by Peggie Miller, a Newark activist and businessperson who has been organizing New Millennium Butch fashion shows in Newark since 2000. The crowd also viewed a series of photographs of Newark’s LGBTQ leaders, produced for this event by Newark black lesbian photographer Tamara Fleming. Each photograph was accompanied by an epigraph describing her subject’s vision of social change. “Mentorship is the key to our longevity as a community,” read the epigram by Sauce Leon, LGBTIQ commissioner of the City of Newark. “I want to see a community where we are all free and safe enough to unleash our unlimited potential,” urged Janyce L. Jackson, Pastor of Liberation in Truth Unity Fellowship Church. “We must individually and collectively create, organize and establish viable institutions that speak truth and realness to our lives,” Newark activist

15 citations

Book
24 Sep 2013
TL;DR: The history of obscenity's meaning as a legal concept, highlighting the influence of antivice crusaders like Anthony Comstock and John Sumner, and chronicles the shadowy career that led Roth to spend nearly a decade of his life imprisoned for the allegedly obscene materials that he sent through the mails as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: For some, he was "America's leading smut king," hauled into court repeatedly over thirty years for peddling obscene publications through the mail. But when Samuel Roth appealed a 1956 conviction, he forced the Supreme Court to finally come to grips with a problem that had plagued both American society and constitutional law for longer than he had been in business. For while the facts of Roth v. United States were unexceptional, its constitutional issues would define the relationship of obscenity to the First Amendment. The Supreme Court's 6-3 decision in Roth for the first time tried to definitively rule on the issue of obscenity in American life and law--and failed. In this first book-length examination of the case, Whitney Strub lays out the history of obscenity's meaning as a legal concept, highlights the influence of antivice crusaders like Anthony Comstock and John Sumner, and chronicles the shadowy career that led Roth to spend nearly a decade of his life imprisoned for the allegedly obscene materials that he sent through the mails. Strub then unwraps the events that produced Roth v. United States, placing the trial in the context of its times--the Kinsey Reports, the Kefauver hearings, free speech debates--by using Roth's own private papers along with the records of the various prosecutions and the memos of the justices. The significance of Roth, as Strub reveals, lay in the two faces of Justice William Brennan's majority opinion--which on the one hand reflected the liberalising attitude toward sexual matters in mid-century America, but on the other kept "obscene" expressions beyond First Amendment protection. Because that ruling points up the contradictions of a society where the prurient and repressive commingle uncomfortably, Strub shows how Roth says much more about American sexual values than Brennan's written words necessarily acknowledged. In our era of internet pornography and Fifty Shades of Grey, it may be difficult to imagine a time when obscenity was a matter for the courts. As Strub tracks the legacy of Roth and obscenity law through the ongoing policing of acceptable sexuality into the twenty-first century, his riveting narrative brings those times to life and helps readers navigate the fine line between what is socially acceptable and what is criminally obscene.

11 citations


Cited by
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01 Jan 1992
TL;DR: The body politics of Julia Kristeva and the Body Politics of JuliaKristeva as discussed by the authors are discussed in detail in Section 5.1.1 and Section 6.2.1.
Abstract: Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics

1,125 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a more inclusive and informative book than previous books on the subject, which they call "far more informative and informative than previous works on the topic".
Abstract: \"Far more inclusive and informative than previous books on the subject\". -- The New York Times

513 citations