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 whale teeth from the nineteenth century featuring naked women and sexual scenarios. This creative, adventurous research pays off in The People’s Porn, bringing rich descriptive and analytical layers to two centuries worth of handmade pornography. Sigel’s project here is essentially twofold. She seeks to expand our histories of pornography beyond market-shaped narratives focused solely on commercial goods, and furthermore, she argues that amateur craft pornographies “tell us something important about the past,” at times offering direct windows into “personal sexual desire, complete with all its contradictions, variances, infelicities, and questionable tastes,” a set of tensions whose fundamental irresolution is, in the end, “profoundly human” (9, 24). And indeed, she has uncovered a wealth of material, which includes artisanal crafts, crude etchings, altered coins, pornography made by prisoners, sexual outsider art, and more. In the end, The People’s Porn delivers a rousing counterhistory of pornography outside of commerce. Sigel’s close readings of largely overlooked texts are often masterful, and her research diligence awe-inspiring. If I was left at times wondering whether noncommercial meant counterhegemonic and wishing for some greater comparative attention to the extent to which people’s private sexual imaginaries reflected and/or resisted dominant cultural ones—well, that speaks to The People’s Porn’s effects as a generative text. This may not be the final word on some of these topics, but it certainly is the foundational text.

Amateur · Craft · Human sexuality · Lesbian · Narrative · Pornography · Queer · Sexual desire · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Sex work and related issues · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology