Whitney Strub
Biographic Data
| ID | 114566 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Whitney Strub |
| GIVEN NAMES | Whitney |
| FAMILY NAME | Strub |
| SIGNATURE | STRUB W |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4943-6070 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 33 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Cities Made of Cinema
ReFocus: The Films of Roberta Findlay: The Films of Roberta Findlay
ReFocus: The Films of Roberta Findlay covers a variety of angles, using queer, feminist, historical, and close textual reading methods to grapple with the complicated and contradictory politics and meanings of this pioneering culture-worker. Chapters examine Findlay’s marketing strategies, the gender politics of her exploitation and hardcore films, 1980s horror productions, and several case studies of key individual films, in addition to a new in…
ReFocus: The Films of Roberta Findlay
Drag Queens and Beauty Queens: Contesting Femininity in the World’s Playground
Whitney Strub, reviewing Drag Queens and Beauty Queens: Contesting Femininity in the World’s Playground, by Laurie A. Greene
Pornography beyond the Marketplace
When scholars research pornography, they head to the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Indiana or perhaps Cornell University’s Human Sexuality Collection; if their focus is LGBTQ pornography, maybe also the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles. They do not, generally, set out for the Mystic Seaport Museum and Library in Connecticut. Yet, this is exactly where Lisa Sigel went to find erotic scrimshaw artifacts such as engraved sperm…
Porno Dialectics at Work
Trans Porn Genealogy beyond the Queer Canon
While placing transgender pornography under the sign of queerness has been a necessary feature of queer politics, much of the genealogy of trans porn falls more within the orbit of heteronormative capitalism and was enacted through the problematic figure of the “she-male.” Queer and trans scholars have been eager to seize on the work of queer trans culture workers but less attentive to the pioneering efforts of Kim Christy and Joey Silvera, who o…
David Church, Disposable Passions: Vintage Pornography and the Material Legacies of Adult Cinema
Sanitizing the Seventies
During the 1980s US feminist sex wars, pornography edited its own history, leaving a distorted record both less problematic and less queer than scholars have yet recognized. Academic inquiry into pornography coincided with home-video boom years, and research often took place in adult backrooms, necessarily because pornography was so poorly archived. Yet even as access has shifted from VHS to digital, the field has yet to reckon with how its inter…
E mily S kidmore . True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
In 1883, Frank Dubois, who had been assigned female at birth but lived as a man in Wisconsin with his wife, attracted press attention and became the last “female husband” ever reported. That same year, a medical journal used the term “lesbian” for the first time in the United States. The natural impulse for historians is to see in this striking coincidence the supplanting of vernacular folk understandings of gender and sexuality with new medicali…
Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity
Black on Both Sides traces the “condensation of transness into the category of transgender,” through race, and particularly blackness (p. 8). C. Riley Snorton ambitiously develops a capacious trans genealogy, which culminates in transgender but arrives there through the motion across categories contained in such derivatives as transitivity and transversality. Not a conventional history, the book is more a set of associative assemblages, a racial …
Bacchanale (John Amero and Lem Amero, 1970)
Bacchanale (1970), an early American hardcore feature film, shows the genre taking shape at the dawn of the 1970s, but also reflects the queer influences of the gay brothers who made it, John and Lem Amero. This article uses Bacchanale as a window into both the pornographic careers of the Ameros and also the generally overlooked influence of queer filmmakers on the development of hetero hardcore cinema
Amateur Cinema: The Rise of North American Moviemaking, 1923–1960 by Charles Tepperman
Sex Wishes and Virgin Dreams
As a gay man directing straight hardcore pornographic films in the 1970s, Zebedy Colt smuggled a certain queer eros into the visual culture of heterosexuality. Indeed, he belonged to a queer cohort of hetero-pornographers whose subversive flourishes have gone largely unrecognized by porn studies and queer studies scholars, in part because of the incomplete archives generally used to narrate and analyze pornography. Yet Colt's work, in such films …
The Homophile Is a Sexual Being: Wallace de Ortega Maxey’s Pulp Theology and Gay Activism
A Community’s Response to the Problem of Invisibility: The Queer Newark Oral History Project
The 300 people that gathered in Newark, New Jersey, on a fall day in 2011 were not the typical academic crowd. That day, LGBTQ activists and high school students, street workers and church leaders, politicians and university students, professors, administrators and university staff sat rapt, watching rare and stunning images of “New Millennium Butches,” resplendent in tailored suits of black, pink or purple, flashing before them on a thirty-foot …
How Sex Became a Civil Liberty
Journal Article How Sex Became a Civil Liberty Get access Leigh Ann Wheeler. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. xiv, 327 pp. $34.95.) Journal of American History, Volume 100, Issue 4, March 2014, Pages 1274–1275, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jau123 Published: 01 March 2014
Obscenity Rules: Roth v. United States and the Long Struggle over Sexual Expression
Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy
Journal Article Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy Get access Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy. By Carrie Pitzulo. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. x, 240 pp. $25.00, ISBN978-0-226-67006-5.) Whitney Strub Whitney Strub Rutgers University, Newark Newark, New Jersey Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 98, Issue 4, March 2012,…
Mondo Rocco
Pat Rocco shot and exhibited the first openly erotic gay films in the United States, beginning in the summer of 1968, near downtown Los Angeles. Yet he has been remembered primarily as a transitional figure, relegated to a marginal position in the narrative of gay history. This article argues for a recovery of his work, reading his films as bold acts of place-claiming on cultural, social, and also spatial geographies, resisting a hegemonic, heter…
Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right
While America is not alone in its ambivalence toward sex and its depictions, the preferences of the nation swing sharply between toleration and censure. This pattern has grown even more pronounced since the 1960s, with the emergence of the New Right and its attack on the "floodtide of filth" that was supposedly sweeping the nation. Antipornography campaigns became the New Right's political capital in the 1960s, laying the groundwork for the "fami…
David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government
April 01 2009 David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government Whitney Strub Whitney Strub Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Whitney Strub Online Issn: 1531-3298 Print Issn: 1520-3972 © 2009 Massachusetts Institute of Technology2009 Journal of Cold War Studies (2009) 11 (2): 158–160. https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws.2009.11.2.1…
Freedom of the Screen: Legal Challenges to State Censorship, 1915–1981
Further into the Right: The Ever-Expanding Historiography of the U.S. New Right
Journal Article Further into the Right: The Ever-Expanding Historiography of the U.S. New Right Get access Whitney Strub Whitney Strub American Studies Program, Temple University, 941 Anderson Hall, Philadelphia, PA 19122 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 42, Issue 1, Fall 2008, Pages 183–194, https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh.0.0036 Published: 01 October 2008
The Clearly Obscene and the Queerly Obscene: Heteronormativity and Obscenity in Cold War Los Angeles
As an enforcing agent of heteronormativity, obscenity law has often been used to stigmatize and suppress queer texts. This article examines the mechanics of such deployments in mid-twentiethcentury Los Angeles, where the national domestic politics of the cold war found shape and expression at the local level. While a study of obscenity case law alone might suggest more victories than losses for queer texts, this article emphasizes the cultural wo…
Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right
While America is not alone in its ambivalence toward sex and its depictions, the preferences of the nation swing sharply between toleration and censure. This pattern has grown even more pronounced since the 1960s, with the emergence of the New Right and its attack on the "floodtide of filth" that was supposedly sweeping the nation. Antipornography campaigns became the New Right's political capital in the 1960s, laying the groundwork for the "fami…
Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity
Black on Both Sides traces the “condensation of transness into the category of transgender,” through race, and particularly blackness (p. 8). C. Riley Snorton ambitiously develops a capacious trans genealogy, which culminates in transgender but arrives there through the motion across categories contained in such derivatives as transitivity and transversality. Not a conventional history, the book is more a set of associative assemblages, a racial …
Sex Wishes and Virgin Dreams
As a gay man directing straight hardcore pornographic films in the 1970s, Zebedy Colt smuggled a certain queer eros into the visual culture of heterosexuality. Indeed, he belonged to a queer cohort of hetero-pornographers whose subversive flourishes have gone largely unrecognized by porn studies and queer studies scholars, in part because of the incomplete archives generally used to narrate and analyze pornography. Yet Colt's work, in such films …
Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy
Journal Article Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy Get access Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy. By Carrie Pitzulo. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. x, 240 pp. $25.00, ISBN978-0-226-67006-5.) Whitney Strub Whitney Strub Rutgers University, Newark Newark, New Jersey Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 98, Issue 4, March 2012,…
The Clearly Obscene and the Queerly Obscene: Heteronormativity and Obscenity in Cold War Los Angeles
As an enforcing agent of heteronormativity, obscenity law has often been used to stigmatize and suppress queer texts. This article examines the mechanics of such deployments in mid-twentiethcentury Los Angeles, where the national domestic politics of the cold war found shape and expression at the local level. While a study of obscenity case law alone might suggest more victories than losses for queer texts, this article emphasizes the cultural wo…
A Community’s Response to the Problem of Invisibility: The Queer Newark Oral History Project
The 300 people that gathered in Newark, New Jersey, on a fall day in 2011 were not the typical academic crowd. That day, LGBTQ activists and high school students, street workers and church leaders, politicians and university students, professors, administrators and university staff sat rapt, watching rare and stunning images of “New Millennium Butches,” resplendent in tailored suits of black, pink or purple, flashing before them on a thirty-foot …
Trans Porn Genealogy beyond the Queer Canon
While placing transgender pornography under the sign of queerness has been a necessary feature of queer politics, much of the genealogy of trans porn falls more within the orbit of heteronormative capitalism and was enacted through the problematic figure of the “she-male.” Queer and trans scholars have been eager to seize on the work of queer trans culture workers but less attentive to the pioneering efforts of Kim Christy and Joey Silvera, who o…
Bacchanale (John Amero and Lem Amero, 1970)
Bacchanale (1970), an early American hardcore feature film, shows the genre taking shape at the dawn of the 1970s, but also reflects the queer influences of the gay brothers who made it, John and Lem Amero. This article uses Bacchanale as a window into both the pornographic careers of the Ameros and also the generally overlooked influence of queer filmmakers on the development of hetero hardcore cinema
Mondo Rocco
Pat Rocco shot and exhibited the first openly erotic gay films in the United States, beginning in the summer of 1968, near downtown Los Angeles. Yet he has been remembered primarily as a transitional figure, relegated to a marginal position in the narrative of gay history. This article argues for a recovery of his work, reading his films as bold acts of place-claiming on cultural, social, and also spatial geographies, resisting a hegemonic, heter…
Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980 (review)
Black and White and Banned All Over: Race, Censorship and Obscenity in Postwar Memphis
Memphis, Tennessee was renowned for its restrictive censorship policies in the mid-20th century. This article argues that racial considerations overrode traditional concerns regarding sex or violence in the formulation of those policies. More specifically, the article outlines three stages of race-based censorship. The first stage developed in the 1940s, as a censorial regime predicated upon suppressing threats to the racial status quo of white s…
Further into the Right: The Ever-Expanding Historiography of the U.S. New Right
Journal Article Further into the Right: The Ever-Expanding Historiography of the U.S. New Right Get access Whitney Strub Whitney Strub American Studies Program, Temple University, 941 Anderson Hall, Philadelphia, PA 19122 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 42, Issue 1, Fall 2008, Pages 183–194, https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh.0.0036 Published: 01 October 2008
The Clearly Obscene and the Queerly Obscene: Heteronormativity and Obscenity in Cold War Los Angeles
As an enforcing agent of heteronormativity, obscenity law has often been used to stigmatize and suppress queer texts. This article examines the mechanics of such deployments in mid-twentiethcentury Los Angeles, where the national domestic politics of the cold war found shape and expression at the local level. While a study of obscenity case law alone might suggest more victories than losses for queer texts, this article emphasizes the cultural wo…
David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government
April 01 2009 David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government Whitney Strub Whitney Strub Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Whitney Strub Online Issn: 1531-3298 Print Issn: 1520-3972 © 2009 Massachusetts Institute of Technology2009 Journal of Cold War Studies (2009) 11 (2): 158–160. https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws.2009.11.2.1…
Freedom of the Screen: Legal Challenges to State Censorship, 1915–1981
Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right
While America is not alone in its ambivalence toward sex and its depictions, the preferences of the nation swing sharply between toleration and censure. This pattern has grown even more pronounced since the 1960s, with the emergence of the New Right and its attack on the "floodtide of filth" that was supposedly sweeping the nation. Antipornography campaigns became the New Right's political capital in the 1960s, laying the groundwork for the "fami…
Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy
Journal Article Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy Get access Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy. By Carrie Pitzulo. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. x, 240 pp. $25.00, ISBN978-0-226-67006-5.) Whitney Strub Whitney Strub Rutgers University, Newark Newark, New Jersey Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 98, Issue 4, March 2012,…
Mondo Rocco
Pat Rocco shot and exhibited the first openly erotic gay films in the United States, beginning in the summer of 1968, near downtown Los Angeles. Yet he has been remembered primarily as a transitional figure, relegated to a marginal position in the narrative of gay history. This article argues for a recovery of his work, reading his films as bold acts of place-claiming on cultural, social, and also spatial geographies, resisting a hegemonic, heter…
Obscenity Rules: Roth v. United States and the Long Struggle over Sexual Expression
A Community’s Response to the Problem of Invisibility: The Queer Newark Oral History Project
The 300 people that gathered in Newark, New Jersey, on a fall day in 2011 were not the typical academic crowd. That day, LGBTQ activists and high school students, street workers and church leaders, politicians and university students, professors, administrators and university staff sat rapt, watching rare and stunning images of “New Millennium Butches,” resplendent in tailored suits of black, pink or purple, flashing before them on a thirty-foot …
How Sex Became a Civil Liberty
Journal Article How Sex Became a Civil Liberty Get access Leigh Ann Wheeler. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. xiv, 327 pp. $34.95.) Journal of American History, Volume 100, Issue 4, March 2014, Pages 1274–1275, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jau123 Published: 01 March 2014
The Homophile Is a Sexual Being: Wallace de Ortega Maxey’s Pulp Theology and Gay Activism
Bacchanale (John Amero and Lem Amero, 1970)
Bacchanale (1970), an early American hardcore feature film, shows the genre taking shape at the dawn of the 1970s, but also reflects the queer influences of the gay brothers who made it, John and Lem Amero. This article uses Bacchanale as a window into both the pornographic careers of the Ameros and also the generally overlooked influence of queer filmmakers on the development of hetero hardcore cinema
Amateur Cinema: The Rise of North American Moviemaking, 1923–1960 by Charles Tepperman
Sex Wishes and Virgin Dreams
As a gay man directing straight hardcore pornographic films in the 1970s, Zebedy Colt smuggled a certain queer eros into the visual culture of heterosexuality. Indeed, he belonged to a queer cohort of hetero-pornographers whose subversive flourishes have gone largely unrecognized by porn studies and queer studies scholars, in part because of the incomplete archives generally used to narrate and analyze pornography. Yet Colt's work, in such films …
Sanitizing the Seventies
During the 1980s US feminist sex wars, pornography edited its own history, leaving a distorted record both less problematic and less queer than scholars have yet recognized. Academic inquiry into pornography coincided with home-video boom years, and research often took place in adult backrooms, necessarily because pornography was so poorly archived. Yet even as access has shifted from VHS to digital, the field has yet to reckon with how its inter…
E mily S kidmore . True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
In 1883, Frank Dubois, who had been assigned female at birth but lived as a man in Wisconsin with his wife, attracted press attention and became the last “female husband” ever reported. That same year, a medical journal used the term “lesbian” for the first time in the United States. The natural impulse for historians is to see in this striking coincidence the supplanting of vernacular folk understandings of gender and sexuality with new medicali…
Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity
Black on Both Sides traces the “condensation of transness into the category of transgender,” through race, and particularly blackness (p. 8). C. Riley Snorton ambitiously develops a capacious trans genealogy, which culminates in transgender but arrives there through the motion across categories contained in such derivatives as transitivity and transversality. Not a conventional history, the book is more a set of associative assemblages, a racial …
Trans Porn Genealogy beyond the Queer Canon
While placing transgender pornography under the sign of queerness has been a necessary feature of queer politics, much of the genealogy of trans porn falls more within the orbit of heteronormative capitalism and was enacted through the problematic figure of the “she-male.” Queer and trans scholars have been eager to seize on the work of queer trans culture workers but less attentive to the pioneering efforts of Kim Christy and Joey Silvera, who o…
David Church, Disposable Passions: Vintage Pornography and the Material Legacies of Adult Cinema
Porno Dialectics at Work
Drag Queens and Beauty Queens: Contesting Femininity in the World’s Playground
Whitney Strub, reviewing Drag Queens and Beauty Queens: Contesting Femininity in the World’s Playground, by Laurie A. Greene
Pornography beyond the Marketplace
When scholars research pornography, they head to the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Indiana or perhaps Cornell University’s Human Sexuality Collection; if their focus is LGBTQ pornography, maybe also the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles. They do not, generally, set out for the Mystic Seaport Museum and Library in Connecticut. Yet, this is exactly where Lisa Sigel went to find erotic scrimshaw artifacts such as engraved sperm…
ReFocus: The Films of Roberta Findlay: The Films of Roberta Findlay
ReFocus: The Films of Roberta Findlay covers a variety of angles, using queer, feminist, historical, and close textual reading methods to grapple with the complicated and contradictory politics and meanings of this pioneering culture-worker. Chapters examine Findlay’s marketing strategies, the gender politics of her exploitation and hardcore films, 1980s horror productions, and several case studies of key individual films, in addition to a new in…
Sociology (20 works) · Political science (15 works) · Gender Studies (14 works) · History (13 works) · Art (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Cinema and Media Studies (11 works) · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology (11 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (9 works) · History (8 works)