Dr. Kathleen Lubey’s “What Pornography Knows: Sex and Social Protest since the Eighteenth Century” Out Now!

Congratulations to Dr. Kathleen Lubey on the release of her book, What Pornography Knows: Sex and Social Protest since the Eighteenth Century.

An excerpt from the book appears today at Lapham’s Quarterly.

“What Pornography Knows offers a new history of pornography based on forgotten bawdy fiction of the eighteenth century, its nineteenth-century republication, and its appearance in 1960s paperbacks. Through close textual study, Lubey shows how these texts were edited across time to become what we think pornography is—a genre focused primarily on sex. Originally, they were far more variable, joining speculative philosophy and feminist theory to sexual description. Lubey’s readings show that pornography always had a social consciousness—that it knew, long before anti-pornography feminists said it, that women and nonbinary people are disadvantaged by a society that grants sexual privilege to men. Rather than glorify this inequity, Lubey argues, the genre’s central task has historically been to expose its artifice and envision social reform. Centering women’s bodies, pornography refuses to divert its focus from genital action, forcing readers to connect sex with its social outcomes. At times inventing their own sexual anatomy and gender identity, at times having their bodies claimed and used by others, pornographic figures bring genitals to the fore, insisting they be justly treated rather than coldly transacted. Lubey offers a surprising take on a deeply misunderstood cultural form: pornography transforms sexual description into feminist commentary, she argues, revealing the genre’s deep knowledge of how social inequities are perpetuated as well as plans for how to rectify them.”

What Pornography Knows: Sex and Social Protest since the Eighteenth Century is available for purchase here; along with more information, reviews, excerpts and more!

Kathleen Lubey’s website is also the place to learn more about her, her public and academic writing, along with the information for What Pornography Knows: Sex and Social Protest since the Eighteenth Century and her first book, Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain, 1660-1760.