1. The “Public Circulation of
Women”:
Nineteenth-Century Photographic
Pornography
Leigh Gruwell
April 28, 2011

2. My starting points
What kind of public is called into being through
pornography?
Why do notions of public and private break down
around pornography?
How does the materiality of pornography mediate
the body?

3. What I’m Doing
If, as Warner suggests, texts are constitutive of publics, it’s worth tracing the
origins of photographic pornography in order to understand exactly what kind
of public pornography creates. More specifically, I’d like to focus on how the
emergence of photographic pornography in the nineteenth century coincided
with dramatic shifts in conceptions of public and private life.
I have found little work on the ways in which photographic pornography
functioned at its conception in the nineteenth century. This project, then, will
turn a much-needed eye to the visual in attempt to understand how
pornography functioned as a world-making text in the century that changed our
very conceptions of public and private.

4. Pornography
“Pornography (or “porn”) usually refers to representations designed to arouse and give sexual pleasure to
those who read, see, hear, or handle them” (Slade 3).
History
“Obscenity” or “erotica” has always been around--but only made it into
certain hands.
“Pornography” is a relatively modern invention. First OED definition of
pornography from an 1857 medical dictionary: “a description of
prostitutes or prostitution, as a matter of public hygiene” (qtd. in
Kendrick 1). Pornography has always been tied to issues of control.
Feminist Arguments
“In our society, a woman on view means ‘sex’...this historical social
subordination of women to the status of ‘sex’ as a gender ensures the
cultural meaning of a woman’s body as ‘sex’, ensures the objectification of
women in representation” (Kappeler 93).

5. Why the Nineteenth Century?
New social structures (publics)
growth of middle class
privileging of heterosexual family structure
New technologies (texts)
of representation (photography)
of circulation (transportation)

6. Photography
First daguerreotype: 1839
Seen as a method for objective documentation of reality rather than an art form
(Marien 74).
A way to classify and control subjects
Photographic pornography didn’t become popular until the 1860s.
Immediacy of medium: “Erotic photographs provided a unique kind of
visceral, direct satisfaction for viewers, by conveying an immediacy that
cheap yellow-covered novels and flash crime papers could not” (Dennis
202-3).
Accessibility of medium: “Because erotic photographs often sold for a
quarter or less, they were much more accessible than fancy books with
explicit engravings. Even illiterate consumers and poor people who could
not afford to purchase photographs themselves might experience such
items by seeing them on display in a shop, being peddled on a street
corner, or tucked into the knapsack of a fellow soldier” (Dennis 203).

7. Sexuality
(a la Foucault’s History of Sexuality)
Heteronormativity’s nineteenth century roots: “The discursive explosion of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries” caused “a centrifugal movement with respect to heterosexual monogamy” (38). Heterosexual
families became the norm, and initiated “the setting apart of the ‘unnatural’ as a specific dimension in the
field of sexuality” (39). Thus, those who deviate from the norm are othered, or even labeled as perverse.
What’s more, individual identity becomes inseparable from sexuality. “The machinery of power that
focused on this whole alien strain [sexuality] did not aim to suppress it, but rather to give it an analytical,
visible, and permanent reality: it was implanted in bodies, slipped in beneath modes of conduct, made into
a principle of classification and intelligibility, established as a raison d’etre and a natural order of
disorder” (44).
Sexuality was an integral element of nineteenth-century culture: “[Nineteenth-century bourgeois society]
did not exclude sexuality; but included it in the body as a mode of specification of individuals...It did not
set up a barrier; it provided places of maximum saturation” (47).
“[Sexuality] appears rather as an especially dense transfer point for relations of power” (103).

8. Connections, Implications, Questions
What kind of public does pornography call into being?
One that is problematic for women: “...the continued attempts to regulate pornography are just
one example of how women get connected to a private sphere that needs to be protected from
explicit sexual representations, where we are positioned as victims or moral regulators” (Juffer 4).
One that is transgressive: “Obscenity incorporates transgression and taboo, the violation of
boundaries, the exceeding of subconsciously consensual limits” (Caputi 5).
One that is both powerful and contested: “These private/public debates point to--without often
developing--the importance of access; that is, we must consider the history of pornography in this
country as not only a battle over representation but also a battle for access to the specific spaces
where those representations occur” (Juffer 36).
How does photography mediate the (female) body in pornography?
Questions of power emerge that return back to feminist critiques of pornography: “But there is
power, also, on the side of the subject of representation: the producer of pornography, and the
consumer of pornography- the author and the reader. And there is powerlessness embodied in the
class or gender being represented without access to the means of production of
representation” (Kappeler 93).

9. References
Caputi, Mary. Voluptuous Yearnings. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994. Print
Dennis, Donna. Licentious Gotham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009. Print.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990. Print.
Juffer, Jane. At Home With Pornography. New York: New York UP, 1998. Print.
Kappeler, Susanne. “Pornography: The Representation of Power.” Pornography: Women, Violence, and Civil
Liberties. Ed. Catherine Itzin. New York: Oxford UP, 1992: 88-101. Print.
Kendrick Walter. The Secret Museum. New York: Viking, 1987. Print.
Marien, Mary Warner. Photography: A Cultural History. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002. Print.
Slade, Joseph W. Pornography in America: A Reference Handbook. Santa Barbara, Calif: ABC-CLIO, 2000. Print.