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Thursday 13 April 2023 08.30 - 10.30
E-5 SEX03 International Aspects of the Pornography Trade (1850-2000)
B23
Network: Sexuality Chair: Wannes Dupont
Organizer: Leon Janssens Discussant: Wannes Dupont
Leon Janssens : Auguste Brancart and the Fear of Pornography, 1851-1911
In this paper, the life and career of Auguste Brancart will be used as a case study to analyze the link between the democratization of international mailing and the problematization of pornography. In the literature the introduction and democratization of new communication technologies has been interpreted as crucial in the ... (Show more)
In this paper, the life and career of Auguste Brancart will be used as a case study to analyze the link between the democratization of international mailing and the problematization of pornography. In the literature the introduction and democratization of new communication technologies has been interpreted as crucial in the history of pornography (Coopersmith, 1996). The second part of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of a globalized world in which people could easily move, communicate, ship packages and make payments in a global context. This was a major breakthrough for the trade in pornography, as it offered people privacy and protection against the authorities. Auguste Brancart made good use of these technological developments using mail for advertising, building up client relationships and sending his material around the world. However, at the same time, the international infrastructure of Brancart’s business gave the authorities a new way for getting a grip on his trade.
Brancart’s advertisements were read by police officers and ‘worried’ civilians who reported his whereabouts to the authorities. Most importantly, the correspondence Brancart had with his consumers was seized, giving the authorities the means to track his consumers all over Europe. Increased speed in international mailing and the introduction of effective juridical bureaucracies made it possible for the Brussels prosecutor to contact police officers in France, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. People who ordered pornography from Brancart were then questioned about their orders. All of this contributed to the emergence of a new understanding of the nature of the ‘pornography problem’. It was no longer understood as a local problem, but as an internationally organized criminal network that could reach anyone, anywhere at any time. (Show less)

Claudio Monopoli : The Agency of Pornographic Photography: Sexuality and Visual Culture in Italian Censorship Nets, 1839-1919
Can the rising of innovative technologies change habits and everyday life within a society? The attempt to give an answer lies at the root of this research on the origins of pornographic photography. Was the newborn photographic medium able to change intimate habits of the 19th century Italian society?
These ... (Show more)
Can the rising of innovative technologies change habits and everyday life within a society? The attempt to give an answer lies at the root of this research on the origins of pornographic photography. Was the newborn photographic medium able to change intimate habits of the 19th century Italian society?
These questions suggest that photography could have had a role of social actor, an active element in cultural context. As the Actor-Network Theory in anthropology field suggested, nonhumans and non-living object can actively take part in social phenomena through networks and relationships. In the perspective of art and visual culture, images can actively participate to human life, even look at people (Bredekamp, 2010), and perform their agency within a defined context and a specific relationship net (Gell, 1997). With these premises, it is possible to look for any agency that pornographic photography could exercise on habits and ideas on sexuality.
The approach traced above implies to precisely define the context and the nature of relationship net. As mentioned before, the context selected for this research is 19th century Italy, starting from the first decades of photographic history. The second chronological boundary is defined by the chosen relationship net: censorship. The struggle pursued by police and institutions in defining public opinion, identity, and morality was built through restrictions and permissions in the circulation of textual, material, and visual culture: in this perspective, censorship can be intended as a relationship between people and objects, books, photos, or any artwork that might be, whose result could be repression or acceptation. The agency of artifacts, therefore, could be the attraction of censors’ attention and the activation of censorship restrictions. In Italy, this occurred in particular from the second half of 19th century, until the second decade of 20th century, when pornography and its photographic products became the main targets of moralists and censors. Since this result was realized also because of a global struggle against pornography, the research also explores the international connections both in legal measures and in illicit trades.
The sources for this research are police documents about censorship operations against obscenity from different Italian State Archives. The chronology chosen lead to a transnational comparison within the former Italian States after 1815, which also involves the Kingdom of Italy and its developing over the decades after 1861. This implies that research explores the State Archives related to the main political entities before the Unification of Italy, in Rome, Venice, Turin and Naples, and Central State Archive in Rome concerning the last years considered. Sources need to be reconnected to their own context, where specific censorship law ruled, addressed to specific contents and media: these documents can tell us if, how and when pornographic photography could direct censorship against obscene contents and visual culture. (Show less)

Alessio Ponzio : Homophile Ambivalence: Respectability, Transnational Porn, and Erotic Escapades
In the 1950s, by using the language of human and civil rights, homosexuals in Europe and North America began to coordinate their activities through the organization of transnational homophile networks. Homophiles spoke the language of respectability and tried to avoid the sexualization of their identities. However, reading the letter exchange ... (Show more)
In the 1950s, by using the language of human and civil rights, homosexuals in Europe and North America began to coordinate their activities through the organization of transnational homophile networks. Homophiles spoke the language of respectability and tried to avoid the sexualization of their identities. However, reading the letter exchange between a few Italian and Swiss homophiles involved in transnational projects, it is possible to come across documents concerning not only the purchase and exchange of pornographic pictures and drawings, but also photo shootings with young Italian hustlers, and the organization of erotic weekends for men only on Lake Garda. By focusing in particular on the correspondence between the Italian Bernardino del Boca and the French editor of Der Kreis, Charles Welti, this paper wants to sexualize the “homophile international.” It wants to problematize our understanding of “homophile respectability,” show the complicated attitude of a few homophiles towards intergenerational sex, and expose the personal struggles experienced by homophiles in finding a balance between homoerotic desires, sexual urges, and the necessity of maintaining an upright image. (Show less)

Jens Rydstrom : Into the Wild: Swedish Pornographic Discourse 1954–1986
LGBTQ historiography most often focused on biographical accounts, legal contexts or LGBTQ movement history. Less attention has been directed to commercial initiatives and their importance for networking and identity building, sometimes displaying an extraordinary quer and diverse understanding of human sexuality. As Jack Halberstam has shown in his latest book ... (Show more)
LGBTQ historiography most often focused on biographical accounts, legal contexts or LGBTQ movement history. Less attention has been directed to commercial initiatives and their importance for networking and identity building, sometimes displaying an extraordinary quer and diverse understanding of human sexuality. As Jack Halberstam has shown in his latest book Wild Things (2020), the realm outside the narrow heteronormative matrix has been, and to a certain extent still is, a disorderly and provocative discursive jungle, full of unexpected ruptures and convergences.

Swedish porn publisher Kurt Hugo Nilsson, better known as Curth Hson (pronounced HAW-son, 1924–1988), produced a number of porn magazines that were read and relished throughout Scandinavia from the 1950s into the 1980s. His targeted audience consisted mainly of straight men, but he had a radical sex-liberationist agenda, and was also invited to talk to young left-leaning liberals, motors of the sexual revolution in Sweden, who fought for the legalization of pornography, a struggle which was crowned with success in 1971.

The flagships of Hson’s production, porn magazines Piff (1956–1986), Raff (1957–1982), and Paff (1962–1982) contained not only pornographic straight novels and erotic pictures of women. It gradually involved images of increasingly sexualized naked men that obviously drew the attention of gay men, who constantly requested more advanced poses. The sexual fantasies presented in the magazines gradually broadened into a wide variety of practices and also led to more politically informed demands for legal reform. Hson’s columns not only demanded the removal of the law against public indecency, but also the lowering of the age of consent for same-sex relations, better access to sex for disabled people, and a more “enlightened” legislation concerning legal sex. He also made a strong case against racism and segregation, and the magazines’ imagery of racialized bodies gradually changed from sensationalist and exoticizing reports on “barbaric” sexuality into a more subtle – albeit still problematic – fetishization of “black beauties” or “oriental seducers.”

Hson’s pornographic magazines provided a forum for discussion, advise and contact in their columns, attracting men and women, straight and gay, who shared experiences and demanded recognition for a wide variety of sexual practices and desires, such as BDSM, polyamory, and trans identities. It also served as a contact forum for the first transvestite organization in Sweden, Club Transvestia.

Combining text and visual analysis, the paper proposes to discuss the gradual broadening of the magazines’ target groups as well as the changing sexual and gendered landscapes as the legal framework changed. Also, it will comment on the growing anti-porn feminist movement and its effects on sexual discourses in Sweden in the 1970s and 1980s.

Reference
Halberstam, Jack (2020). Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Durham: Duke University Press. (Show less)



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