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Y. Yvon Wang, "Reinventing Licentiousness: Pornography and Modern China" (Cornell UP, 2021)
Y. Yvon Wang, "Reinventing Licentiousness: Pornography and Modern China" (Cornell UP, 2021)
ratings:
Length:
76 minutes
Released:
Apr 16, 2021
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
Y. Yvon Wang draws on previously untapped archives--ranging from police archives and surveys to ephemeral texts and pictures--to argue that pornography in China represents a unique configuration of power and desire that both reflects and shapes historical processes. On the one hand, since the late imperial period, pornography has democratized pleasure in China and opened up new possibilities of imagining desire. On the other, ongoing controversies over its definition and control show how the regulatory ideas of premodern cultural politics and the popular products of early modern cultural markets have contoured the globalized world.
Reinventing Licentiousness: Pornography and Modern China (Cornell University Press, 2021) emphasizes the material factors, particularly at the grassroots level of consumption and trade, that governed proper sexual desire and led to ideological shifts around the definition of pornography. By linking the past to the present and beyond, Wang's social and intellectual history showcases circulated pornographic material as a motor for cultural change. The result is an astonishing foray into what historicizing pornography can mean for our understandings of desire, legitimacy, capitalism, and culture.
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Reinventing Licentiousness: Pornography and Modern China (Cornell University Press, 2021) emphasizes the material factors, particularly at the grassroots level of consumption and trade, that governed proper sexual desire and led to ideological shifts around the definition of pornography. By linking the past to the present and beyond, Wang's social and intellectual history showcases circulated pornographic material as a motor for cultural change. The result is an astonishing foray into what historicizing pornography can mean for our understandings of desire, legitimacy, capitalism, and culture.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Released:
Apr 16, 2021
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Elizabeth Heineman, “Before Porn Was Legal: The Erotica Empire of Beate Uhse” (University of Chicago Press, 2011): When I was in college in the 1980s, I liked to listen to Iggy Pop (aka James Newell Osterberg, Jr.). I was always mystified, however, by his song “Five Foot One,” with its odd and catchy refrain “I wish life could be/Swed-ish mag-a-zines! by New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work