Introduction Excerpt for Queer Obscenity
INTRODUCTION
Reflections in the Mirror
THE POLITICS OF OBSCENITY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY SPAIN
On the night of 25 August 1972, three neighbors huddled together and peered through the window of a private house in their small village. In a mirror hanging on the wall the neighbors claimed they saw reflected back two young men having sex. Pierre Bourdieu refers to the “mirror effect” that takes place when those who document their observations expose themselves.1 In this case, the words of these neighbors and the authorities would betray their pretense of offense and lay bare their crude prying and loathing. This book exposes subjects, primarily state agents, who have violated the erotic intimacy of others. Whether one operates in the epistemic mode of objectivism (the window) or subjectivism (the mirror), there is no escaping the realization that the glass “is never immaculate. There are scratches on it, blind spots, curvatures. [ . . . ] There are no innocent immediacies of reception.”2 I aim to foreground these imperfections, desires, and biases as modes of archival mediation.
The peeping neighbors alerted the authorities, and the young men were arrested and sentenced for public scandal. The defendants appealed this ruling, arguing that their neighbors had demonstrated an “unhealthy curiosity” when they deliberately violated their intimacy and expectation of privacy; however, Spain’s Supreme Court dismissed the appeal, stating that it was the defendants’ responsibility to take every precaution so that no one would find what they were doing. The magistrates considered the three neighbors’ testimony, in which they recounted how scandalized they felt by the sight of two men having sex, proving that their suspicions and motivations to spy on them were legitimate. In other words, the Supreme Court legitimated voyeurism for the sake of policing obscenity.
This book is a history of obscenity in Spain that traces a surveillance mode dependent on documenting intimacy and preserving transgression. The authorities produced archives that were discursively and materially aimed at conferring masculinity based on varying degrees of touch. Supposedly “real men” (as both consumers of mainstream pornography and state agents) would preserve their masculinity by seeing without being touched. Alternatively, state agents perceived “deviant” subjects as those who—through visual, spoken, or written evidence—remained touched by the visibility of their transgression. Authorities put transgressive desires on the stage in the witness stand and state archives to keep them off-scene—the authorities themselves became “unwitting pornographers” when “bringing on the obscenity in order to keep it off.”3 The Supreme Court magistrates established that the “heinous vice” (vicio nefando) of homosexuality, referring to private consensual acts between adults of the same sex, was not criminal per se. However, if anyone other than the participants became aware of these acts, then they became a crime.4 The Supreme Court, and state authorities more broadly, imposed obligatory invisibility on nonstraight subjects while contradictorily investing state resources to make their transgressions visible.5 Treating police officers, judges, and forensic doctors as prying observers, and the judicial files and legal compendia as a derivative form of obscenity (one more explicit and transgressive than most contemporary print culture) is not only theoretical positions I adopt, but they also emanate from contemporary subjects’ acts of resistance, perspectives, and critiques.
A file initiated in 1963 at the Málaga Vagrancy Court, for instance, includes amateur photographs of Black men and a White man having oral and anal sex, which were confiscated from a Moroccan national. He had been arrested while traveling on a train. When left alone in his cell, he tore up the photographs he had in his possession. However, the authorities, discovering the pieces, invested time and effort to skillfully reassemble them and tape them together in the manner of a jigsaw puzzle.6 One can imagine police officers hunched over and holding each piece up to the light, examining it, and then trying to fit each minute photographic trace back together into coherent images of black men performing oral sex on each other and penetrating a middle-aged white man whose face is out of frame. This is one example of how state officials carefully curated and preserved materials that, in their view, reflected and enticed revolting desires, as proof of defendants’ antisocial tendencies. This pretense was rooted in a reactionary ideology that equated the Spanish nation with virility. As the Supreme Court ruled in 1969, “[H]omosexuality is an obscene practice that is especially rejected by our culture, more tolerant and open towards relationships between people of different sex.”7 According to this sentence, the contraposition of openness toward “straight” sex, whether procreative or not, and the treatment of homosexuality as obscenity was central to Spanish mores.
In a 1963 speech in front of his colleagues, Judge Luis Vivas Marzal discussed in detail why and how homosexuality could be penalized without being a crime. At the core of his argument lay the essentialization of nonstraight sex as a form of obscenity that disturbs Catholic morality even when it remains unknown and unseen by the public. In other words, Vivas Marzal articulated the concept of “public scandal” redefining the social, constructing an imagined viewing public or requiring the judicial to produce/become the public as prying observers. Vivas Marzal considered how homosexuality could be catalogued as public scandal when “carried out in the dark, in closed premises, discreetly and stealthily.”8 Public scandal must thus, in his words, “transcend” to register as such. In Spanish this verb is polysemic; “transcend” might mean that it affects people other than the participants or that it is “relevant” for the body politic. For Vivas Marzal, homosexuality is always relevant because he characterized it as gross indecency. The Supreme Court, for its part, inconsistently delineated between sin and crime, producing a “highly variable” precedent that left ordinary judges beset by “bitter doubts.” Vivas Marzal cited Supreme Court rulings that would support the “radical conclusions” that homosexuality without the public’s knowledge could not be penalized as scandal.9 However and curiously, he concluded his diatribe with the Supreme Court ruling that established an opposite interpretation.
FIGURE 1. Photograph included in File 93/1963, showing a scene of anal intercourse between two anonymous subjects and the tape that authorities used to reconstruct the photograph. The image has been slightly edited. Printed with permission by the Archivo Histórico Provincial de Sevilla, fondo documental Vagos y Maleantes, Sig. 8935.
Not coincidentally, this 1961 ruling had to do with audience, reception, visibility, and visuality. Here are the details of the case: the police heard that Casimiro, a twenty-year-old barman, lived “ostentatiously” despite being unemployed. In a locked dresser drawer in his room, the police found four photographs, showing erect penises and oral sex acts, supposedly between Casimiro and a male lover. No one was aware of this relationship; the police investigated Casimiro for his lavish lifestyle but were unable to produce evidence that his lover had economically provided for him; and Casimiro clarified that he and his lover used the camera’s self-timer device such that no one else witnessed the scenes in question. For these reasons, he was acquitted of public scandal; the prosecution appealed, however, and elevated the case to the Supreme Court. The latter overruled the initial ruling, concluding that the fact of the photographs being meant to persist was precisely what made Casimiro guilty: “since the permanence in enduring images of such acts constitutes the grave transcendence that the Law condemns, and there is no need to further reason that the act reproduced in the aforementioned photographs is offensive to modesty and good customs.”10 In other words, a photograph could take the role of an offended witness because photography has the power to capture and prolong the transgressive acts through its material circulation and reception as forms of consumption. Yet it was the police who amplified this power by ensuring the long-term preservation of homoerotic materials (photographs in the case of Casimiro as well as movies, letters, and literature in other cases) in police and state archives. The state’s curatorial politics around erotica are uncanny: they catalogued the forementioned photos as the quintessential moral violation yet, by doing so, they preserved the images to establish the premise that nonstraight sex is deplorable because it lives on through its material traces.11 Vivas Marzal concluded that, no matter what the legal doctrine established, there ought to be no “sympathy” for these violators and their “propagation of evil.”12 This book explores the manifold transgressions that moved judges like Vivas Marzal to be so hyperbolic.
In Spanish the words vicio (excessive depravity) and marica (and its derivatives maricón, maricona, and so on) mark the territory of erotic “deviation” that authorities mapped through their arrests, exams, confiscations, and rulings. On the one hand, marica historically refers to “subjects assigned male at birth who adopted a feminized persona through sexual practices, embodied and spoken languages, and social interactions, including relationships with masculine men, situational gender switching, and subcultural codes.”13 There is no letter for marica in LGBT+, yet maricas’ ways of making visible gender and sexual transgression are central to queer and trans genealogies.14Marica is a slur appropriated by those it was meant to stigmatize as a way of signifying a refusal to adopt sanitized labels external to their own experience. There are resonances, then, between queerness and mariconería. I often use marica in this book, with the cautionary note that there is no true way of accessing the interiority of defendants in order to confirm their self-identification.15 On the other hand, vicio is defined as an appetite so excessive that there is no way of satisfying it.16Vicio overlaps with but also outstrips same-sex desires: those who experience it (viciosos) are considered unredeemable, as they revel in transgressing and in passing it along to others. Males who posed for and preserved homoerotic photos were treated as viciosos, but so was an elderly gentleman who organized slide presentations of canonical art with nudity or a poet who dared to publish an erotic piece in a Catholic bulletin.
Interestingly, as the cases above highlight, the materials that police and state archives ultimately preserved are examples of erotica rather than pornography. In other words, we don’t find mainstream hard-core pornography in the police archive. Indeed, the distinctions I make between erotica and pornography are based on how they were used by historical actors in ways that pertain to this book’s central argument: while the legal definition of pornography responded to formal economic market dynamics—what sells—I use erotica to denote non-marketed intimate materials (photographs as well as letters, postcards, and recordings), which have their own intimate economies outside of formal market-based logics.17 This distinction ultimately speaks to why I was able to find the erotica of maricas but not mainstream porn preserved in judicial archives. The term obscenity was used to cover the whole spectrum, from mainstream hard-core to public awareness of nonprocreative sex.18 The centrality of Catholicism in nationalistic ideologies in Spain translated into the particularly harsh reaction on the part of the authorities to desecration through sex, which is part and parcel of the obscene.19 In sum, the politics of obscenity had two sides. Transgressive art, desecration, homoeroticism, and cis and trans women’s visual and bodily autonomy were radical gestures that undermined authorities’ tacit recognition of a “legitimate” consumer of porn: an adult Spanish male, affluent, politically obedient, and, ideally, married.20
While both homoerotic images and mainstream porn were considered obscene, they led to distinct sentences and preservation policies. Francoist authorities implicitly established that maricas were “too close” to their personal erotica, irreversibly touched and infected by it, in following the Platonic and Augustinian traditions for which “touch was the basest of senses.”21 In these cases, “images readily assume an intimate relation to the psyche and even to the body of the beholder.”22 By contrast, for “straight” men the emphasis was on sight as a tool of knowledge and domination that maintains distance between subject and object. Consuming porn that aroused heterosexual drives, often as a ritual of male bonding, was compatible with procreation as a duty to the nation. Unlike erotica, once mainstream porn was destroyed, consumers remained untouched by it; the creators and entrepreneurs, not so much. The state sanctioned “the visual economy of pornography: the gender-pleasure arising from the production of masculinity,” using philosopher Paul Preciado’s terms.23 Preciado refers to how Playboy positions its readers as voyeurs who can enjoy the “male pleasure of seeing without being seen” by “looking through a peephole, a crack, or a window into what had previously been a private space.”24Playboy’s philosophy bears an uncanny parallelism with the Supreme Court sentence that sanctioned the neighbors’ decision to look through a window and, more broadly, with state agents observing and documenting “deviance” while paradoxically distancing themselves from it through these same acts of observation and documentation.
Conversely, I aim to queer the archives produced by the reactionaries who were in power in Spain for most of the twentieth century by juxtaposing their unacknowledged permissiveness toward masculine peccadilloes or “slight offenses” (including mainstream porn) with the material, visual, and textual traces of transgressive cultures.25 Queering involves a nonessentialist reading, one that is attentive to the performative configurations of subjecthood and power positions, to underline the absurdities, contradictions, and tensions in judicial transcripts. Courtrooms are “little theaters” where the law puts on a show even when the public is not allowed in. Following Michelle Castañeda, the theatrical presentation of the law’s cruel contradictions becomes “strange” in the sense of “parodic, nonsensical, and absurd.”26 The prosecution of public scandal involved citizens’ obligation to narrate for the state, producing a documentation that originates in aurality yet buries it below layers of bureaucratic language. The absurdity of the law consists in mediating those facets of subjects’ lives that feel more intimate, sexual, and unspeakable, forcing subjects to verbalize them on the court bench to translate embodied experience into a dry text full of jargon, interjections, the use of the third person, and the occasional lapsus linguae.
By targeting scandal—both as a violation per se and as an aggravating circumstance—courtrooms operated as a magnifying glass for history, leaving us a fragmented erotic record that overrepresents subversive material culture and texts while obliterating objects aligned with dominant gender regimes and hegemonic masculinity. This is a radical intervention in the history of obscenity and porn, which has primarily revolved around print culture in liberal legal frameworks. From its inception, the academic subfield that historicizes obscenity has maintained the core premise that modern pornography came into existence during the nineteenth century through restricted access, in that the general public was denied access to pornographic materials and literature, reserved for an elite class of white men.27 Rather than magnifying subversiveness, print culture often toned it down. For example, eighteenth-century British literature gave voice to female characters who related genital sexuality in their own terms, but over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries those passages were redacted in multiple republications.28
In contrast, Spanish authorities staged, echoed, and projected transgression in order to evaluate and judge it, taking the position of the scandalized spectator as a procedural precondition for the crime. I focus on dictatorial periods (the Primo de Rivera and Franco regimes), when authorities that had a fraught relationship with modernity implemented reactionary programs in the face of mass politics.29 They responded to drastic changes in sexual mores during the twentieth century by mediating the erotic through archives and the courts: they fragmented novels and recited explicit passages out loud to ritualize defendants’ degradation and purge obscenity from literature (reinscribing it in judicial records and the state’s publications); they touched homoerotic photographs, letters, and drawings while feigning disgust; and they destroyed sexually explicit materials to protect defendants who kept a straight personae. Whereas courtroom archives were originally conceived as architectures of containment, I show how the poetics of touch—visual, haptic, and material—generate intoxicating and unbounded intimacies with erotic objects.30
My reading methods take the dramatization of moral exceptionalism in courtrooms under reactionary regimes to be the paradoxical hotbed for obscenity, through an economy of the senses that moves between stigma and the potential of repair. Here the Spanish tocado (touched) is closer to the sense in which authorities aimed to touch or affect defendants by using their testimonies and material culture to shame, wound, or stigmatize them.31 By curating and archiving defendants’ explicit images of gay sex or queer authors’ literature, reactionary authorities intended to keep them wounded and within reach. The acts of confiscation also meant that creators and transgressive communities could no longer enjoy the haptic qualities of their own erotic possessions; where touching an image of someone you desire, care for, or had sex with is a potent experience of affective connection with one’s erotic past. State policies mobilized the senses to surveil and discipline: saturating the courtroom’s soundscape with voices that conveyed repentance or producing reports about how dildos and sex toys felt when police officers touched them. The judiciary had to move across media: from visual and moving images to textual descriptions of “obscenity,” constantly translating embodied actions into text.
I translate across media as well to reimagine how the archival materials that I have gathered touch on marica, queer, and trans affects. Inspired by microhistory, I move between the verbal, the visual, and the haptic through the texture of sources.32 As an additional mediation layer, I translated the quotes from originally Spanish sources into English (often including both versions so that readers can compare them). In the last instance, this book can be read as a compendium of objects that have in common their fragmentary nature, the fact that they were singled out and extracted for preservation because of their subversiveness. When gathering them both at institutional archives and beyond, I became aware of how the police acts like Walter Benjamin’s collector: “What is decisive in collecting is that the object is detached from all its original functions in order to enter into the closest conceivable relation to things of the same kind.”33 The material culture studied in this book is often untraceable; what remains is a constellation of objects (physical or textual) related through their punitive consequences. In many cases, consumption of these materials mediated by sympathy or identification with the transgressors is what made them scandalous and obscene—something to keep in mind when reading the next chapters.
In writing this book, I consulted over 1,400 files from courts in Madrid, Barcelona, Granada, Sevilla, Málaga, Bilbao, Las Palmas de Gran Canarias, and València. These records are held in different types of archives, from court and provincial archives to the national administration’s central archives. To obtain access to these records, I had to present pleas to courts and government agencies at the national and regional levels. Many archives do not have a catalogue on their collection of vagrancy and dangerousness files. Most often, researchers must request special access by demonstrating their credentials and committing to maintain defendants’ anonymity.34 For this reason, I use random pseudonyms when referring to defendants judged at Vagrancy and Social Dangerousness courts, and I only incorporate photographs that were authorized by archives’ supervisors. Furthermore, in most archives I was only allowed to transcribe, a time-consuming task that I occasionally expedited by dictating the contents of the files aloud.35 Apart from these files, I have also consulted the public scandal files from the Audiencia Provincial de Madrid, held at the Archivo Histórico Nacional (AHN); the Supreme Court sentences; reports on the activities of the purging commissions appointed in 1937 (held in the archives of several universities); the proposals and minutes resulting from the 1970 debate on pornography in the Cortes; censorship files; the historic films at the Centro de Documentación Cinematográfica of València; the Biblioteca Pública Arús nude photographs collection; and the Biblioteca Nacional’s collection of historical newspapers, among others.
With all these documents I draw a sort of navigational chart to historicize obscenity throughout the twentieth century.
Notes
1. Pierre Bourdieu, Science of Science and Reflexivity, trans. Richard Nice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 4.
2. George Steiner, “Ten (Possible) Reasons for the Sadness of Thought,” Salmagundi, no. 146/147 (2005): 22.
3. Linda Williams, “Porn Studies: Proliferating Pornographies on/scene: An Introduction,” in Porn Studies, edited by Linda Williams (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 3.
4. STS 2546/1974 (STS stands for Sentencias del Tribunal Supremo, which signifies Supreme Court cases). Histórico del Tribunal Supremo/Centro de Documentación Judicial (digital database, hereafter CENDOJ).
5. As Matt Houlbrook affirms: “Queer lives always occupied spaces that were simultaneously and to varying degrees public and private, subject to surveillance and invisible, dangerous and safe.” See Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 41.
6. File 93/1963, Signatura 8935, Archivo Histórico Provincial de Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain (hereafter AHPS). These photos had been kept by a British subject who had been deployed in Africa (most likely Nigeria, where he returned after being expelled from Spain). At some indefinite moment after Nigeria gained its independence from the United Kingdom in 1960, he moved to Spain. There he established a relationship with the arrested Moroccan. Both the Moroccan and the British were eventually declared to be threats to society and expelled from Spain.
7. Ruling on April 28, 1969, cited in STS 2546/1974, CENDOJ.
8. Luis Vivas Marzal (Speech of 26 de November 1963, reply by Eduardo Molero Massa), “Contemplación jurídico-penal de la homosexualidad. Discurso de ingreso en la Academia Valenciana de Jurisprudencia y Legislación,” Publicaciones de la Academia Valenciana de Jurisprudencia y Legislación 53 (1963): 19.
9. Vivas Marzal, “Contemplación jurídico-penal,” 21.
10. STS 730/1961, CENDOJ.
11. Judges treated homoerotic images inconsistently: while the Barcelona Vagrancy Court preserved explicit photographs confiscated from homosexual defendants as evidence, the Madrid Vagrancy Court destroyed them. See Ruling on 20 May 1967, File 326/1967, Legajo 1830, Juzgado Especial de Vagos y Maleantes de Madrid, Archivo General de la Administración. Alcalá de Henares, Spain (hereafter AGA).
12. Vivas Marzal, “Contemplación jurídico-penal,” 23–24.
13. Javier Fernández-Galeano and Mir Yarfitz, “Serious Maricas and Their Male Concubines: Seeking Trans History and Intimacy in Argentine Police and Prison Records, 1921–1945,” Hispanic American Historical Review 103, no. 4 (2023): 654.
14. This is the central argument in Javier Fernández-Galeano, Maricas: Queer Cultures and State Violence in Argentina and Spain, 1942–1982 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2024).
15. I have not yet found any judicial file that includes erotic visual materials produced by lesbian women and transgender men. For historical studies on these subjectivities during the Franco regime and the democratic transition, see Matilde Albarracín Soto, “Identidad(es) lésbica(s) en el primer franquismo,” in Mujeres bajo sospecha: Memoria y sexualidad, 1930–1980, edited by Raquel Osborne (Madrid: Fundamentos, 2012), 69–87; Lucas Platero, “‘Su gran placer es usar calzoncillos y calcetines’: la represión de la masculinidad femenina bajo la dictadura,” in Mujeres bajo sospecha: Memoria y sexualidad, 1930–1980, edited by Raquel Osborne (Madrid: Fundamentos, 2012), 175–90; Lucas Platero, “Lesboerotismo y la masculinidad de las mujeres en la España franquista,” Bagoas 3 (2009): 15–38.
16. Diccionario de la Real Academia Española, s.v. “vicio,” accessed August 16, 2023, www.rae.es/drae2001/vicio.
17. There is a common slippage between terms such as obscenity, erotica, pornography, and smut. For different historical definitions of these terms, see Jay A. Gertzman, Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica, 1920–1940 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 3; Lynn Hunt, “Introduction: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800,” in The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800, ed. Lynn Hunt (New York: Zone Books, 1996), 10; Ronald K. L. Collins and David M. Skover, “The Pornographic State,” Harvard Law Review 107, no. 6 (1994): 1378; Whitney Strub, Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 4; Elizabeth D. Heineman, Before Porn Was Legal: The Erotica Empire of Beate Uhse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 12; Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (London: Pandora, 1990), 6, 22; Sarah L. Leonard, Fragile Minds and Vulnerable Souls: The Matter of Obscenity in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 2; Kelly Dennis, Art/Porn: A History of Seeing and Touching (Oxford: Berg, 2009), 10.
18. Lisa Z. Sigel points out that pornography can be equally encompassing. See Sigel, “Introduction: Issues and Problems in the History of Pornography,” in International Exposure: Perspectives on Modern European Pornography, 1800–2000, edited by Lisa Z. Sigel (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 7. Eliot Borenstein argues in the same volume that initially “pornography was a subset of obscenity” and that they became autonomous categories in the West as blasphemy ceased to be a primary concern and porn abandoned any artistic pretensions. Borenstein, “Stripping the Nation Bare: Russian Pornography and the Insistence on Meaning,” in International Exposure, 236. Since neither of these developments consolidated in Spain until the late 1970s, obscenity is a more fitting term.
19. On desecration, see Ilan Stavans and Jorge J. E. Gracia, “On Desecration: Andrés Serrano, Piss,” Michigan Quarterly Review 52, no. 4 (2013); Carolyn J. Dean, “Empathy, Pornography, and Suffering,” Differences 14 (2003): 102–3; Zeb Tortorici, Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2018).
20. Similar ideas reoccur in other academic works. See Carolyn Dean, The Frail Social Body: Pornography, Homosexuality, and Other Fantasies in Interwar France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Alexander Monea, The Digital Closet: How the Internet Became Straight (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2022); Paul B. Preciado, Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics (New York: Zone Books, 2019), 40; Natalia Milanesio, Destape: Sex, Democracy, and Freedom in Postdictatorial Argentina (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), 19; Dennis, Art/Porn, 96; Sigel, “Introduction,” 3.
21. Dennis, Art/Porn, 3.
22. Dennis, Art/Porn, 2.
23. Preciado, Pornotopia, 41. Thomas Waugh presents similar arguments regarding American stag film. See Waugh, “Homosociality in the Classical American Stag Film: Off-Screen, On-Screen,” in Porn Studies. According to Preciado, Playboy maintained a strict separation between the subject and the object of the gaze by not publishing images of male bodies. See Preciado, Pornotopia, 43. Hustler broke from this tradition by publishing images of erect penises. Dennis, Art/Porn, 97–99. As Linda Williams notes, hardcore eventually became defined by the visualization of masculine pleasure, in contraposition with softcore’s focus on female nudity. Williams, Hard Core.
24. Preciado, Pornotopia, 42.
25. Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, s.v. “peccadillo,” accessed August 16, 2023, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/peccadillo.
26. Michelle Castañeda, Disappearing Rooms: The Hidden Theaters of Immigration Law (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2023), 1–2.
27. The history of obscenity emerged as an academic field as hardcore films became mainstream during the “porno chic” era, from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. See Williams, Hard Core, 9–10. Steven Marcus’s The Other Victorians (1966) and Walter M. Kendrick’s The Secret Museum (1987) were groundbreaking works that prefigured some of the field’s main concerns: access restrictions, forbidden spaces, and elite males’ privileges as historical dynamics that have shaped the meaning of obscenity; the relationship between content, medium, and consumer; and the role of “pornography” in Western modernity. Walter M. Kendrick, The Secret Museum: The History of Pornography in Literature (New York: Viking, 1987); Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1966). There is an extensive body of scholarship on liberalism and obscenity, including Leigh Ann Wheeler, How Sex Became a Civil Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); and Stuart P. Green, Criminalizing Sex: A Unified Liberal Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
28. Kathleen Lubey, What Pornography Knows: Sex and Social Protest since the Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022).
29. Lynn Hunt argues that pornography as a category took shape “concomitantly with the long-term emergence of Western modernity,” through print culture and mass politics. Hunt, “Introduction,” 10–11. Recent shifts in obscenity studies have expanded the geographical and thematic scope of the field. See, for instance, Anjali Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009); Yvon Wang, Reinventing Licentiousness: Pornography and Modern China (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2021); Milanesio, Destape; Richa Kaul Padte, Cyber Sexy: Rethinking Pornography (Gurgaon, India: Penguin Books, 2018). There is a debate among historians of Latin America on whether democratization and sexual permissiveness are correlated. See Milanesio, Destape; Pablo Ben and Santiago Joaquín Insausti, “Race and Politics in Peruvian and Argentine Porn under the Transition to Democracy, 1975–1985,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, forthcoming; Benjamin A. Cowan, Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
30. On archival touch and intoxicating affects, see Marika Cifor, “Presence, Absence, and Victoria’s Hair: Examining Affect and Embodiment in Trans Archives,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 2 (2015): 645–47.
31. Diccionario de la Real Academia Española, s.v. “tocado,” accessed August 16, 2023 https://dle.rae.es/tocado.
32. On “the affective texture of porn,” see Strub and Bronstein, “Introduction,” 4; On social history methods and the history of vernacular porn’s material culture, see Lisa Z. Sigel, The People’s Porn: A History of Handmade Pornography in America (London: Reaktion Books, 2020); and Lisa Z. Sigel, “Handmade and Homemade: Vernacular Expressions of American Sexual History,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 25, no. 3 (2016): 438–43.
33. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland, Kevin MacLaughlin, and Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press, 2002), 204–5. On how Benjamin’s notion of the collector applies to erotica, see Zeb Tortorici, “Circulating Erotica: Flea Markets, Collections, and Archives in Mexico,” Journal of Popular Culture 53 (2020): 1339.
34. In addition, vagrancy and dangerousness files generally become accessible to researchers only after fifty years pass from their closing date, which makes it difficult to elaborate reliable statistics on the nationwide implementation of these laws.
35. On the implications of these self-recording techniques, see Javier Fernández-Galeano, “Performing Queer Archives: Argentine and Spanish Policing Files for Unintended Audiences (1950s–1970s),” in Turning Archival: The Life of the Historical in Queer Studies, edited by Zeb Tortorici and Daniel Marshall (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2023).