Obscenity Studies

This article begins by noting a critical, if critically neglected truth about Giorgio Manganelli’s literary production: it is emphatically obscene. I then identify and analyse a pervasive tension between an avowal of a linguistic and rhetorical transparency developed in reference to reproductive organs, and an affirmation of illegibility. Studying ‘La letteratura come mafia’ (1968), ‘La letteratura come menzogna’ (1967), Hilarotragoedia (1964),and other writings that focus on reproductive organs and express both a frustration with cycles of tumescence and detumescence and a lurid horror feminae, this article isolates the rhetorical strategies that enable such an incongruous aesthetic union of the illegible and the obscene.

Les grammairiens latins désignent par le nom de cacenphaton un vitium (défaut du langage) qui oscille entre grammaire et rhétorique, et qui reçoit des définitions très variables. L’obscénité est le trait d’union entre différents phénomènes qui rentrent dans les domaines de la phonétique (et de la phonétique syntactique), du style, de la rhétorique, même de la morale : le grammairien en tant qu’éducateur est chargé de veiller à ce que ses élèves n’écoutent ou lisent aucune immoralité.
Cette contribution se propose d’étudier les définitions que le cacenphaton a reçu dans la tradition grammaticale latine, en accordant une attention particulière aux grammaires qui appartiennent à la lignée de Donat : pour son Ars maior notre connaissance s’appuie sur l’édition critique et le commentaire de Louis Holtz (Paris 1981), qui donne un véritable point de départ pour toute étude sur la réception du manuel le plus célèbre de l’Antiquité tardive ; pour ses principaux commentateurs, Servius (Vème siècle) et Pompée (Vème-VIème siècle), l’analyse sera fondée sur des éditions critiques entièrement renouvelées que je viens de préparer.
L’étude des différents traitements du cacenphaton dans ces œuvres nous permet d’isoler trois définitions générales du défaut:
1. cacenphaton en tant que vitium qui concerne un mot isolé, où on reconnaît de l’obscénité ;
2. cacenphaton en tant que vitium qui concerne l’union de plusieurs mots qui prononcés de suite produisent un gros mot ou similaire ;
3. cacenphaton en tant que défaut du sens.
Cette troisième définition est digne d’une particulière considération, car elle se dessine comme une innovation du grammairien Servius, puis développée par son épigone Pompée, qui nous donne des informations très intéressantes pour la connaissance de l’enseignement des poètes et des prosateurs dans les écoles de l’Antiquité tardive.

Издание  непристойной пародийной баллады Пушкина, написанной в Лицее и дошедшей в неисправных и анонимных списках, снабжено текстологическим, лингвистическим, стиховедческим, историко-литературным и биографическим комментарием. Особый раздел составляют исследования, посвященные истории, языку и поэтике русского обсценного бурлеска от Баркова до Пушкина; изучается связь этой традиции с устным народным творчеством и с фривольной французской литературой XVII—XVIII вв.
Содержание и отзывы см.: http://www.rvb.ru/philologica/series_rus/series02rus.htm
In English: http://www.rvb.ru/philologica/series_eng/series02eng.htm

Вступ до книжки "Криптадії Федора Вовка: винайдення сороміцького. Етнографія сексуальности на межі XIX–XX століть" , упоряд., підгот. текстів, комент. та покажч., археогр. і бібліогр. опрац. Марії Маєрчик і Олени Боряк; вступ. стаття Марії Маєрчик (Київ: Критика, 2018), C. 1-51.

Inventing the Obscene: the Hidden Collections of Fedir Vovk (the Ethnography of Sexuality in the Late 19th  and Early 20th  Century) edited by Maria Mayerchyk and Olena Boriak comprises an archive of Ukrainian, Russian and Jewish bawdy folklore and invectives collected at the turn of the 20th  century by Fedir Vovk (1847–1918), a well-known Ukrainian archaeologist, ethnographer and anthropologist who emigrated from the Russian Empire in 1879 and lived in Paris since 1887. The material was collected for the Kρυπτάδια: Recueil de documents pour servirà l’étude des traditions populaires (1883–1911), a Paris-based multilingual annual that specialized in publishing the “obscene” folklore of different ethnic groups. Vovk assembled and edited three collections of materials and published them in volumes V (“Folklore de l’Ukraine” and “Folklore de La Grande Russie”, 1898) and VIII (“Folklore de l’Ukraine”, 1902) of the Kρυπτάδια. The publications included ritual and lyric songs, poems, tales, anecdotes, proverbs and invectives.
This volume contains critically annotated material partly reconstructed and translated from French and Yiddish collections of Ukrainian, Russian and Jewish folklore published in the two volumes of Kρυπτάδια. In addition it contains the obscene folklore collected by Volodymyr Hnatyuk, Borys Hrinchenko, Vasyl Stepanenko and Oleksandr Rusov, well-known Ukrainian folklorists who in the late 19th and early 20th century sent their manuscripts to Vovk for publication in the Kρυπτάδια; this material, however, was not published and remained in Vovk’s archive.
An introductory chapter “ ‘Erotic Folklore’ as a Discursive Category” by Maria Mayerchyk presents a conceptual framework for scholarly rethinking of how and why the “ethnography of sexuality” emerged as a new discipline at the turn of the 20th century. The reference material in the appendices contains commentary, indexes of words and texts as well as indexes of geographical and personal names.

Mayerchyk, Maria and Olena Boriak, eds. Inventing the Obscene: The Hidden Collections of Fedir Vovk (The Ethnography of Sexuality in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries). Kyiv: Krytyka, 2018. (Introduction in Ukrainian, folklore texts and comments in Ukrainian, Yiddish, and Russian; summary in English).

Human attitudes, practices and behavior modes as determined by culturally marked spaces: the author offers a new key to a wide range of phenomena coming from different Indo-European cultures, both archaic and modern, starting from the social-semantic structure Scythian "animal style" and up to Russian "mat" as (genetically) a male obscene code.

Defining "obscenity" is a difficult task.  What is pornographic to one viewer may be merely erotic, or even uninteresting to another. As the number of bestiality cases grow, there's a growing body of evidence that child and animal pornography play a significant role. This paper briefly discusses how obscenity is defined in the United States and the United Kingdom, and how efforts are in place to reduce the social impact in both countries.

Cuando intentamos calificar el mundo inferior que asoma entre la rica iconografía de época románica, solemos aludir a su función condenatoria y admonitoria. El "sermo rusticus" ("humilis" o "vulgaris") descuella en la relativa abundancia de temas marginales calificados como frívolos y obscenos la mar de persuasivos. Un mundo bajo y rural hermanado con lo que Mijaíl Bajtín calificó como “realismo grotesco”, al servicio de los clérigos para criticar las pasiones de los "rustici" iletrados, generalmente lujuria y gula, que no merecían franquear las puertas del templo. Un mundo al revés cuajado de rústicos músicos (la antimúsica de los ministros de Satanás), juglares, contorsionistas, animales y monstruos, propio de la mascarada, que tanta popularidad alcanzó en los templos alzados al rebufo de la ruta jacobea, muchas veces entrelazado con alusiones al Génesis, donde el sexo indujo el Pecado Original (en San Quirce de los Ausines, San Pedro de Tejada o la desmantelada "Porta Francigena" compostelana). Lo mismo parece ocurrir con los exhibicionistas, los bebedores aferrados a sus tonelillos, las mujeres mordidas por sapos y serpientes, las sirenas o las parturientas. Otros motivos menos explícitos y de mayor calado moral (pugilistas o campeones combatientes, caballeros entre féminas mediadoras, herreros, hiladoras, espinarios, asnos arpistas y posibles adúlteros) se irán colando en edificios rurales bastante alejados del camino francés.

This paper addresses an etymological study of the word "cunt",  the history of its usage, and the potential problems/obstacles it faces to ameliorate the word in post-modern society because of it's phoentic origins, relating to pre Indo-European languages and it's taboo in correspondence to Biblical ties of the fall of mankind

Erotic Nights of the Living Dead (1980) may have featured both animated corpses and hardcore sex scenes, but only recently have Re-Penetrator (2004) and Porn of the Dead (2006) managed to fully eroticise the living dead, allowing these creatures to engage in intercourse. In doing so, the usually a-subjective zombie is allotted a key facet of identity - sexuality. This development within the sub-genre needs accounting for outside of the contexts of porn studies, where it has only been briefly touched upon in relation to its "extremity".

Moreover, the gendering of the undead opens a discussion which expand the horizons of zombie studies away from the overt critiques of capitalism, race and psychoanalysis that have pervaded analyses of these narratives. The dichotomy of binary oppositions so often associated with psychoanalytic approaches dictates that "passive (non-phallic) = female", and "active (phallic) = male". In these terms, the zombies are feminine - soft-bodied and passive, despite their murderous intent (which has been accounted for, by Barabara Creed (1993) amongst others, by invoking the vagina-dentata motif). Humans (active) are deemed masculine, not least since they tend to dispatch zombies with "phallic guns". Taking this logic to an extreme, the zombie may be read as allegorising feminism: the "feminised" figures (zombies) become fearsome in their will to exert themselves despite their seeming disempowerment in the face of "masculine" hegemony. Ultimately, by grouping together as a force, they overthrow or at least significantly damage that "normality" (an ideological paradigm usually read in terms of race, class and economics).

The nearly twenty essays in this volume deal with obscenity in medieval culture. They represent the most wide-ranging attempt ever to probe the natures, origins, and consequences of obscenity in medieval literature, art, theater, and law. Although a core is devoted to obscenity in medieval French literature (where the fabliaux have elicited more previous attempts to come to terms with obscenity than has any other type of medieval literature), other contributions to the volume explore manifestations of obscenity in cultures and languages of Scandinavia, Germany, Ireland, Wales, Byzantium, and even western Slavdom.

This petition argues that erotic comics are an important cultural record of the way in which diverse sexualities are understood and portrayed, and sexual fantasies explored. An Erotic Comics Anglophone Archive (ErotiCAA) will preserve these works for research by scholars in many different disciplines.

One of the biggest problems facing anyone researching pornography/erotica or comics, and therefore doubly so for anyone researching erotic/pornographic comics, is finding and gaining access to primary materials. So we have decided to have a go at establishing an archive in the UK to collect and catalogue English-language porn and erotic comics.

We intend to approach a number of libraries and research institutions to host and/or fund the archive. Persuading them to support us will be a lot easier if we an show that there is a need for this archive, so to help with that we’ve started this petition.

We’ve already got this kick-ass logo designed for us by Alison Lucy Stone and meetings set up with a couple of big libraries. Help us out by signing the petition? And if you’d like to be more involved, please tweet Dr Anna Madill @UKFujoshi or Dr Jude Roberts @tangendentalism - we’d love to hear from you!

Despite its prevalence, the term " extreme " has received little critical attention. " Extremity " is routinely employed in ways that imply its meanings are self-evident. However, the adjective itself offers no such clarity. This article focuses on one particular use of the term – " extreme porn " – in order to illustrate a broader set of concerns about the pitfalls of labelling. The label " extreme " is typically employed as a substitute for engaging with the term's supposed referents (here, pornographic content). In its contemporary usage, " extreme " primarily refers to a set of context-dependent judgements rather than absolute standards or any specific properties the " extreme " item is alleged to have. Concurrently then, the label " extreme " carries a host of implicit values, and the presumption that the term's meanings are " obvious " obfuscates those values. In the case of " extreme porn, " that obfuscation is significant because it has facilitated the cultural and legal suppression of pornography.

Antiquorum Romanorum opera plena sunt obscenitatis, quae tamen obscenitas in lexicis Latino-Polonis minime apparet - vocabula erotica et obscena pessime explanantur aut omnino omittuntur. Etiam Poloni interpretes Catulli, Martialis, Petronii nec non ceterorum auctorum Latinorum obscenitate abstinent aut ea solum interpretanda eligentes, quibus obscenitas absit, aut eo modo interpretant, ut nullo modo obscenitas appareat. Hac de causa multo differt vera antiquitatis imago ab illa, quae interpretationum lectoribus proicitur. Complura ergo opera Latina Polonice (et melius quidem) adhuc interpretanda manent.

Selon Henry Miller, « discuter la nature et le sens de l'obscénité est presque aussi difficile que parler de Dieu » (Henry Miller, 2001, p.7). Il en découle que ce propos laisse entendre qu'interroger la notion de l'obscène n'est pas une chose aisée en raison des différentes connotations que nous pouvons lui assigner. Cependant, nous pensons que l'obscène relève de ce qui est dégoutant, grossier, immonde, immoral, impudique. Dans ce sens, l'obscène est une notion qui a pour vocation d'heurter ouvertement et avec cynisme la conscience conventionnelle. De Sade comme de Tchak, la notion d'obscène est omniprésente dans leurs romans. Elle est un élément à partir duquel la mise en lumière de thématiques telles que la sexualité ou la mort, structure la dynamique interne de leurs fictions romanesques. Cette communication se propose d'analyser celle-ci et de démontrer à partir de certaines modalités thématiques voire esthétiques la filiation entre Sade et Tchak. Il sera également question d'étudier comparativement l'oeuvre des deux écrivains à l'aune d'une poétique de Todorov afin de mettre en évidence la problématique majeure de l'écriture de l'obscène.

This article explores the various ethical and legal limitations faced by researchers studying extreme or ‘ shock’ pornographies, beginning with generic and disciplinary contexts, and focusing specifically upon the assumption that textual analysis unproblematically justifies certain pornographies, while legal contexts utilize a prohibitive gaze. Are our academic freedoms of speech endangered by legislations that restrict our access to non-mainstream images, forcing them further into taboo locales? If so, is the ideological normalization of sexuality inextricable from our research methodologies? Simultaneously, can we justify researchers being allowed access to materials that are not deemed suitable for general consumption, which may further bolster normalized hierarchies of class-privilege and cultural capital?

Le 29 juillet 1881 est promulguée la loi instaurant la liberté de la presse proclamant ainsi la fin de la censure. Cette liberté acquise, le nombre de journaux se multiplie, de même que l’image qui les accompagne, envahissant ainsi la rue par l’affichage et le colportage.
Pourtant, des limites vont bientôt apparaître avec la loi du 2 août 1882 relative à l’obscénité. En effet, les journaux devenus plus simples à créer, la presse légère se développe considérablement. On cherche alors à empêcher la publication d’articles et d’images, dénoncés comme obscènes et pornographiques, portant atteinte aux bonnes mœurs. Par manque d’une définition juridique précise de ce qu’est l’obscénité, la lutte contre ces textes et images va se révéler floue et arbitraire. Alors que cette lutte prend place dans le débat public, c’est le retour d’une censure qui ne dit pas son nom que l’on constate.
Mais que censure-t-on ? Sans définition précise, ce sont les images censurées qui peuvent seules nous apprendre en quoi elles sont outrageantes, en quoi elles sont obscènes. En se focalisant sur les dix années suivant la promulgation de la loi de 1881, il s’agira de chercher ce qui réunit l’ensemble des images censurées afin de construire un aperçu de l’obscénité et des motivations qui poussent la Justice à déclarer une image obscène.

The term ‘apasanskriti’ (crass/bad/ decaying culture) connotative of ‘vulgarity’ and ‘obscenity’ of audio-visual media forms created a furor in Bengali public sphere during the mid-late 1970s and 1980s. Within this context I would like to signpost a popular Bengali film magazine, Anandalok and its peculiar identity as a film magazine to demonstrate how the ‘vernacular’ and the ‘regional’ can be important constructs in determining the permissible and the pornographic. Curiously the material I examine here would not be considered pornographic at first look – the magazine Anandalok is owned by a major mainstream press and carries articles and images related to mainstream Bengali and Hindi cinema. However the discussion demonstrates, the magazine’s tabooed status as ‘apasanskriti’ drew on a longer history of print culture including the publication of erotic stories, gossip, mysteries and scandals. A study of Anandalok reveals how the sexual imaginaries and its censorships in print and visual culture in South Asia can be indicative of broader perceptions of region, regional culture,  linguistic community, race and class hierarchy.

Sex-­Performances stellen sexuelle Handlungen explizit dar. Sie zeigen also etwas, das sonst nicht dargestellt wird. Oft bleibt es zumeist bei Andeutungen. Die explizite Darstellung des Sexualaktes wird häufig ver­ mieden und so der Szene verwiesen. Sie ist also abseits, ob der Szene, mit anderen Worten ob­szön. Was verraten diese verbannten Darstel­ lungen, dieses sonst so häufig verborgene Theater des Obszönen? Wie wird das in Szene gesetzt, was sonst allzu oft verworfen wird? In diesem Aufsatz beschäftige ich mich mit Sex­-Performances, die im Rahmen von Live­-Sex-­Shows aufgeführt werden.

Torture porn has been vilified on grounds that are at best unconvincing and at worst incoherent. The subgenre’s remonstrators too often ignore the content of the films themselves, and fail to make sufficiently detailed connections between the subgenre and the cultural sphere. Reactions to torture porn rarely consider what values the films apparently contravene, and why, if the films are offensive, they are simultaneously so popular. The central derisive mechanism in operation is the ill-conceived combination of ‘torture’ and ‘porn’ itself. The use of ‘porn’ as a label works to illegitimate torture porn and demand that body-horror retreat to its more ‘fitting’ position on the outskirts of the cultural radar. However, this approach is too busy pointing at violence, and fails to deal with the fact that sex is displaced. If violence is now pornographic, it is unclear what position sexual portrayals occupy, or whether they are still perceived as more offensive than violent representations. Furthermore, it is uncertain how we are to describe sexual images if that is the case, since the lexicon of offense has been waylaid. Torture porn’s critics commonly fail to account for the new context of ‘porn plus horror’, and what that combination says about visual representation and its limits. This chapter is a step towards rectifying that oversight.

Early (from 2018) undergrad piece on visual arts: discussing the language and arguments used in the discourse surrounding 'artistic nudity' and 'pornography', with reference to two traditional British art historians: Roger Scruton and Kenneth Clark.

In a recent article, Joseph Cotter argues for a new supplement at
Hipponax fr. 95.3 Dg. = 92.3 W., and on that basis proposes revising the
definition of ὄρχις in LSJ. Cotter’s arguments raise important methodological considerations having to do with how we discuss problematic words and texts, and the matter accordingly deserves closer scrutiny.

This chapter explores the tentative line between erotic spectacle and horror; a judgement that is problematic given that is based on an axis of moral or ideological normality. The contexts of viewing impact on the status of ‘obscene’ images, both in terms of the communities that view them and their motivation for viewing; for sexual arousal, out of morbid curiosity or malevolence, or perhaps all three simultaneously. The reception of an obscene image is largely based upon the issue of viewer consent, but this itself comes at the expense of the reality of bodies depicted, that are pushed to (and beyond) their limits. The chapter examines the moral and philosophical implications of desires that place the body in extreme states of sexualized deconstruction - both real and faked – and how these apply to images and communities in cyberspace.

There is a particular rhetorical facet of Arabic poetry that I argue is analogous to camp (see e.g. in my forthcoming article, ‘“Last Night I Dreamt that Somebody Loved Me”: The frustrated narrative of an anonymous Ottoman-era Arabic love poem’). I propose to explore one such example of this tendency in poetic discourse—what I would describe as caricatured obscenity—in this article. I will attempt to compare this phenomenon in pre-modern Arabic mujūn poetry with a like mode in contemporary hip-hop by female rappers, some of whom have decided to redeploy masterfully the so-called vulgar discourse of ‘gangsta rap’ to exaggerate—and, I would argue, caricature—stereotypical depictions of hyper-masculinity (or machismo) in hip-hop culture.

This essay argues that U.S. judicial decisions in obscenity cases at the beginning of the twentieth century reveal a systematic social process of emotion management that supported, in ways not previously recognized, the emotional culture of the middle class and, through it, middle-class status policy. Using a grounded theory analysis on a sample of 256 U.S. federal judicial opinions between 1873 and 1956, the analysis shows how the evidentiary rules developed by judges in anti-obscenity cases at the turn of the twentieth century were actually “feeling rules” meant to penalize lust, assert social control over women via normative shame, and define normalcy as self-control over inner life.

English abstract: Previous scholars have focused thematically on each discipline tackled by Bataille in order to show that all of his works amount to various journeys ending at the moment when the author perceives the impossibility of reaching the sacred, because of its intrinsic incompatibility with discursive thought (he defines the sacred as the Other of rationality). Following the same scheme, his literary works would then consist of representing the threshold beyond which the sacred is hinted at without being explicitly formulated. However, I argued that rather than being a perpetual variation over the same theme, his oeuvre follows a chronological evolution in three phases, emphasizing more subtly that his conception of the sacred varied every time he changed his paradigm. This enabled me to discuss the normally contended idea that his literary works copy the strategy he endorsed in his philosophical, anthropological, economic and theological works. According to me, literary eroticism as he created it had the power to succeed where the other disciplines failed in reaching the sacred.
ISBN: 9782745325587

Yaoi/BL Fandom Survey (only takes 10 mins to complete): https://leeds.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/blfandomsurvey

Abstract: Boys’ Love (BL) is a genre of manga which portrays sexual and romantic relationships between young, often adolescent, men. Perhaps surprisingly, most BL mangaka (artist-authors) are female and most consumers are teenage girls and young women. However, despite a renowned artistic pedigree and global associated youth subculture - consisting of one of the most sexually-benign demographics - BL distributors and audience are vulnerable to prosecution under recent English prohibited images of children legislation (Coroners and Justice Act 2009). English child pornography laws have become increasingly stringent. Legislation was first against production and dealing and then extended also to possession; moved from a narrow, actual-age-based definition of ‘child’ to a wider, impression-of-age-based one; and expanded the type of prohibited image from the photographic to include also free-hand drawings of fantasy encounters which might involve imaginary beings. This paper argues that BL problematises key assumptions of the prohibited images of children legislation in that the law invites a literal, and privileges a singular, reading of such fantasy, erotic, visual texts. The legislation invites a literal reading through implying that given criteria coherent for the assessment of representational texts (e.g., photographs of real children) can be applied also to non-representational texts (i.e., fantasy drawings): specifically, that protagonist age can, within the ordinary everyday parameters of impression, be determined but also that a series of problematic foci (genitals or anal region) and acts can be described void of context and awarded moral status similar to that of the real. Perhaps even more problematic, the legislation invites a singular reading of texts through priming a search for the specified and reified elements by a defined audience (magistrates, District Judge, or jury) under the remit that a certain constellation may warrant prohibition. That is, it alerts hegemonically-empowered or hegemonically-representational groups to a paedophilic reading and disavows other possible readings as irrelevant if these groups can find that reading. Importantly, as an interpretative community, BL fans’ own reading practices and understanding of genre conventions are discounted. Hence, paradoxically, a demographic the legislation is designed to protect (young people) is now, under its auspices, potentially vulnerable to prosecution through their BL fanship.

Sunohara Yuuri and Akita Masami’s series of six seppuku films (1990) are solely constituted by images of fictionalized death, revolving around the prolonged self-torture of a lone figure committing harakiri. I contend that the protagonist’s auto-immolation mirrors a formal death, each frame ‘killing’ the moment it represents. My analysis aims to explore how the solipsistic nature of selfhood is appositely symbolized by the isolation of the on-screen figures and the insistence with which the six films repeat the same scenario of protracted agony across the cycle. The centralization of suffering, I argue, parallels the distance between viewer and image with the isolating nature of embodied existence. Thus, this article seeks to probe the relationship between form and content, asking what the image of death reveals about the death of the image