The People's Porn

A History of Handmade Pornography in America

By: Lisa Z. Sigel

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Hardcover | 15 December 2020

At a Glance

Hardcover
256 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
21.6 x 16.7 x 2.7

Hardcover

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The first history of American handmade and homemade pornography, The People's Porn offers the backstory to the explosion of amateur pornography on the web. In doing so, it provides a much-needed counterweight to ahistorical and ideological arguments that dominate most discussions of pornography.

Critics tend to focus on mass-produced materials and make claims about pornography as plasticized or commodified. In contrast, eminent historian Lisa Z. Sigel looks at what people made, rather than what they bought, revealing how people thought about sexuality for themselves. She explores periods when these sexual artifacts were pilloried, ransacked, and destroyed, providing a unique document of rare nineteenth- and twentieth-century objects. Whalers and craftsmen, prisoners and activists, African Americans and feminists all made their own pornography.

Ranging across the full sweep of this output, The People's Porn challenges preconceptions as it tells a new and fascinating story about American sexual history.

About the Author

Lisa Z. Sigel is Professor of History at DePaul University. Her previous books include Governing Pleasures, International Exposure (2002), and Making Modern Love (2012).

Industry Reviews

"A magnificent and highly original book that convincingly argues homemade and handmade 'porn' objects can tell us important things about history and about sexuality. The People's Porn will be indispensable to anyone with an interest in the continuing debates about the relations between sex, media, and culture."
Feona Attwood author of "Sex Media" and coeditor of "Porn Studies"

"From the delicately obscene anonymous scrimshaw carvings of the early nineteenth century to the primitively obscene imaginings of the prolific Henry Darger in the twentieth century, to the contemporary obscene repurposing of the anatomy of Barbie Dolls, The People's Porn refutes the overblown truism that commercial pornography has been the only game in town."
Linda Williams Professor Emerita of Film, Media, and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of "Screening Sex and Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the 'Frenzy of the Visible"

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