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- Title
Political Pornography in the West German Underground Press.
- Authors
Lee, Mia
- Abstract
This article focuses on sexually explicit texts and images that were prevalent across a spectrum of self-published and underground journals in West Germany. In these publications, sex became a vehicle of protest: protest against the flattening tendencies of late capitalism, protest against authoritarian government, protest against the persistence of patriarchy. Pornography as an expression or practice of emancipation, however, quickly showed its limitations. Pornography's potentially liberating value diminished as emancipatory sex became prescriptive in its own way. As it became clearer that sexual liberation had not created a new revolutionary subject, that issues concerning normative sexuality and the commodification of desire were not being adequately addressed, or that practical issues such as non-hierarchical relationships between men and women, shared child-rearing, and reproduction rights still demanded attention, activists regrouped and new collective forms emerged. In the end, these images did not shatter the existing social order, but they did provoke women and men to analyze critically what sexual difference meant and how it came to order social relations.
- Subjects
GERMANY (West); PORNOGRAPHY; PERIODICALS; EROTIC literature; SOCIAL order; SEXUAL freedom; UNDERGROUND press publications; NEW left (Politics); HUMAN sexuality &; politics; TWENTIETH century; HISTORY
- Publication
History Workshop Journal, 2014, Vol 78, Issue 1, p186
- ISSN
1363-3554
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/hwj/dbt031