Rokudenashiko's mission is to demystify female genitalia, a mission that has led to a vulva-shaped kayak and her arrest.

An examination of the landmark 1957 Supreme Court case Roth v. United States, which for the first time attempted to define what constitutes obscenity in American life and law. Explores this problematic ruling within the broad sweep of American social and legal history.

A comprehensive history of censorship in modern Britain For Victorian lawmakers and judges, the question of whether a book should be allowed to circulate freely depended on whether it was sold to readers whose mental and moral capacities were in doubt, by which they meant the increasingly literate and enfranchised working classes. The law stayed this way even as society evolved. In 1960, in the obscenity trial over D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, the prosecutor asked the jury, "Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?" Christopher Hilliard traces the history of British censorship from the Victorians to Margaret Thatcher, exposing the tensions between obscenity law and a changing British society. Hilliard goes behind the scenes of major obscenity trials and uncovers the routines of everyday censorship, shedding new light on the British reception of literary modernism and popular entertainments such as the cinema and American-style pulp fiction and comic books. He reveals the thinking of lawyers and the police, authors and publishers, and politicians and ordinary citizens as they wrestled with questions of freedom and morality. He describes how supporters and opponents of censorship alike tried to remake the law as they reckoned with changes in sexuality and culture that began in the 1960s. Based on extensive archival research, this incisive and multifaceted book reveals how the issue of censorship challenged British society to confront issues ranging from mass literacy and democratization to feminism, gay rights, and multiculturalism.

The Brethren is the first detailed behind-the-scenes account of the Supreme Court in action. Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong have pierced its secrecy to give us an unprecedented view of the Chief and Associate Justices—maneuvering, arguing, politicking, compromising, and making decisions that affect every major area of American life.

Explicit material is more widely available in the internet age than ever before, yet the concept of 'obscenity' remains as difficult to pin down as it is to approach without bias: notions of what is 'obscene' shift with societies' shifting mores, and our responses to explicit or disturbing material can be highly subjective. In this intelligent and sensitive book, Kerstin Mey grapples with the work of twentieth-century artists practising at the edges of acceptability, from Hans Bellmer through to Nobuyoshi Araki, from Robert Mapplethorpe to Annie Sprinkle, and from Hermann Nitsch to Paul McCarthy. Mey refuses sweeping statements and 'knee-jerk' responses, arguing with dexterity that some works, regardless of their 'high art' context, remain deeply problematic, whilst others are both groundbreaking and liberating.

With Reading the Obscene, Jordan Carroll reveals new insights about the editors who fought the most famous anti-censorship battles of the twentieth century. While many critics have interpreted obscenity as a form of populist protest, Reading the Obscene shows that the editors who worked to dismantle censorship often catered to elite audiences composed primarily of white men in the professional-managerial class. As Carroll argues, transgressive editors, such as H. L. Mencken at the Smart Set and the American Mercury, William Gaines and Al Feldstein at EC Comics, Hugh Hefner at Playboy, Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights Books, and Barney Rosset at Grove Press, taught their readers to approach even the most scandalizing texts with the same cold calculation and professional reserve they employed in their occupations. Along the way, these editors kicked off a middle-class sexual revolution in which white-collar professionals imagined they could control sexuality through management science. Obscenity is often presented as self-shattering and subversive, but with this provocative work Carroll calls into question some of the most sensational claims about obscenity, suggesting that when transgression becomes a sign of class distinction, we must abandon the idea that obscenity always overturns hierarchies and disrupts social order. Winner of the 2022 MLA Prize for Independent Scholars, sponsored by the Modern Language Association

Exploring motion pictures, burlesque, and Broadway theater--three forms of entertainment that were regularly condemned by anti-obscenity activists in the early 1900s--Friedman shows how the struggle to define and regulate obscenity played out in New York before it was codified nationally by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Sartwell presents an extreme and provocative philosophy of life. He explores what happens if we love this world precisely as it is, with all of its pain, with all of its evil, with all of its bizarre and arbitrary and monstrous thereness. In a highly personal and brutally direct style, Sartwell explores the themes of transgressive sexuality, political anarchism, addiction, death, and embodiment. The author engages contemporary and historical debates in cultural criticism, metaphysics, ethics, and political philosophy, and expresses deep suspicions about them. He asserts that scientific philosophical conceptualization is a movement toward death, a rejection of reality. Moral and political values - the ethical rejection of the particular precisely from within the particular - are, Sartwell claims, an assault on human authenticity. Thus, transgression - which is described as the affirmation of embodiment through obscenity - is something we radically require.