Pornography and Sexual Representation: A Reference Guide - Vol. 1

The title of an essay¹ by Joan Hoff asks, “Why Is There No History of Pornography?” The question is familiar, having been asked by lots of Americans, including members of the Meese Commission. There are also lots of answers, the most obvious of which is that pornography is not a monolithic category but is instead a number of different genres and/or discourses and that there are histories of various periods and genres, inadequate as they individually may be. A better answer is that pornography, virtually by definition, has operated for most of its history at the margins of culture, in varying degrees of secrecy, and that its artifacts routinely suffered destruction. That fact limits accurate information and works against smoothly constructed chronologies. Moreover, pornography has always functioned as a carrier of sexual folklore, a realm notoriously difficult to map. Nowadays, thanks to voracious media that fetch and carry material from margins, cultural edges become centers far more quickly than in centuries past, and tracking ephemeral ideas and artifacts as they move from fringe to fad is a good deal easier.

By far the best answer, however, is that the history of pornography is really many histories, not only of specific genres and their gender and ethnic variations but also of specific sectors of different cultures. An incomplete listing of American sectors, for example, would include a history of:

American morality, as shaped by religious and secular sensibilities;
ideologies, since American schools of thought from Puritanism to feminism have tradi-
tionally institutionalized attitudes and opinions toward sexual representations;
the First Amendment, since free speech is an important category of American law;
capitalism, since a secularized America still clings to the notion of sex as the last refuge

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