ABSTRACT
One might think that ‘Looking at Sex’ would be an easy essay to write given the prevalence of pornography and the long history of campaigns against it. Such essays generally review historical periodization, define terms, mention sources, and then discuss generations of scholars as they work through methods, arguments, and questions. Usually these essays conclude with the need for future work so that scholars new to the field have a clear idea of how to proceed. This essay will follow that organization but it will show the ways that the topic refuses to follow parameters – even simple essay-writing parameters – much as it refuses to conform to other expectations. Thus, the messy essay you get will stand both as descriptor and as evidence of a broader chaos of the topic. This messiness demonstrates what has been a central problem in understanding pornography – too many scholars have tried to find universals about the genre and too few historians have written about its particularities. Thus, even while showing the problems in writing a classic historiographical essay, this essay will focus on the gaps in historiography to show what historians have yet to do. In doing so, it will chart out the areas into which historians – with their penchant for focusing on specifics and particularities – can usefully intervene. The messiness begins with the issue of periodization and the question of how historians
mark out the emergence of pornography as a form. In The Invention of Pornography Lynn Hunt suggests that pornography emerged as a genre over the course of the eighteenth century. According to Hunt, before that period pornography ‘was almost always an adjunct to something else’.1 A change began to occur as writing primarily interested in sexual arousal emerged from the intellectual currents provided by humanism, the scientific revolution, and the Enlightenment. As the sexual realm became the main focus of certain writings, it created a new type of literature – pornography. Hunt’s work thus dates the emergence of the genre to around 1750, creating a certain felicity to the chronological break between Ian Moulton’s essay and my own. However, Walter Kendrick in The Secret Museum suggests that pornography names an argument, not a thing in and of itself, and that this argument was first made in the nineteenth century. According to Kendrick, pornography emerged from the older term ‘pornographos’ meaning ‘to write about whores’. In banning such writings, authorities labelled them as pornographic. According to Kendrick, the term denoted a form of cultural censure even as it emerged from its older linguistic roots.2 Thus, the two most prominent scholars on the topic date the emergence of pornography to different centuries and to two distinct phenomena. What began as a review of periodization becomes muddled before the discussion even gets under way.
