The fourth chapter introduces several ‘personal voices’, immediately complicating our understanding of how personally to take them: the authors discussed here seem to offer us an unmitigated look at their inner lives, but Latin literature does not, for the most part, work like that. Through discussions of Lucilius, in-depth treatment of Catullus, and exploration of the letters of Cicero, we show the public nature even of what seems most personal.

This introduction gives an overview of the scope of “bitch”, following its twists and turns from its humble beginnings as a word for a female dog, through to its popularity in the present day.

This chapter examines the print cultural history of queer pulp fiction in the 1950s, paying special attention to obscenity challenges as well as to the cultural afterlives of pulps in contemporary queer culture.

A variety of social and political tensions have historically shaped the interconnections between sexuality and public history, including the display of sexually explicit materials for the general public, concerns about censorship and the role of institutional funders, and debates about the role of mainstream institutions to document the history of communities long targeted by the guardians of official memory. Some aspects of sexuality, such as marriage, have long been part of public history, while others, such as sex work, have only rarely been mentioned. LGBTQ+ history has been particularly controversial, so this chapter focuses primarily on LGBTQ+ sexualities in public history, including organizations, archives, museums, publications, exhibitions, grassroots history projects, digital media, and other venues.

The massive cultural and social changes brought about by World War II and its aftermath enabled what came to be known as the “sexual revolution.” This chapter highlights some key novels and literary movements that responded to and helped shape the postwar discourse of sexual freedom. It attends first to battles over literary censorship in the first half of the 1960s, focusing on celebrated obscenity trials of the work of Henry Miller and William Burroughs. The chapter then turns to novelistic engagements with queer liberation, discussing the work of James Baldwin, Edmund White, Rita Mae Brown, and Leslie Feinberg, among others. Using these literary examples, it demonstrates how tensions between individualism and collectivism that are longstanding in the American political project play out in and are transformed by ideas of sexual liberation.

Easily overlooked desires and pleasures are also central to the project of Chapter 2, which argues that literary obscenity can be constituted by suggestion and desire, rather than explicit sex. Beginning with the Ulysses trials, obscenity law has conflated obscenity with pornography and opposed it to literary value. By this logic, the category of obscenity contains only those works that employ direct and explicit depiction of certain body parts and actions to incite a prurient response, excluding work that mingles the erotic with the aesthetic, or operates via indirect means. Going against this scholarly and popular convention, this chapter recuperates the category of the obscene by centering appetite, rather than explicitness. Turning to the twin appetites, “Hunger and Lust,” that give the chapter its title, it locates obscenity in writing that allows transgressive or excessive desire to dictate its form, inviting readerly complicity and arousing readers’ own appetites. Juxtaposing texts by James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, and Rabindranath Tagore, this account of obscenity reminds us of literature’s power to unsettle our understanding of desire itself.

This chapter examines how and when British government officials considered the nation’s reputation and international standing in decisions about whether to censor literature or theatrical performances. In the early twentieth century, officials in the Home and Lord Chamberlain’s Offices, among others, were eager to appear rational to their Parisian counterparts in the hope that French officials would increase efforts to suppress obscene publications. Simultaneously, British administrators expressed disapproval of American censors, whom they viewed as unduly prudish. As the century wore on, the Americans would outpace British censors in their toleration of obscene materials, and an increasing number of British citizens came to view their government’s response to texts like Lady Chatterley’s Lover as benighted and paternalistic. The chapter argues that British censorship was not a strictly national activity but rather took place within the larger framework of international relations and a pursuit of global prestige.

This chapter examines several passages in Aristophanes’ Wasps where I argue that obscene language and sexual elements in the dramatic action have been missed by readers and commentators.

This chapter discusses Chaucer’s language, the difficulties it posed for early modern readers, and the competing claims of superior accuracy and comprehensibility made by contemporary prints. Representing various texts in the Chaucer canon, the manuscripts discussed in this chapter have in common a unique aspect of their provenance – their words have all been corrected, glossed, or emended by different early modern annotators. Through analysis of hundreds of annotations in their manuscript context, the chapter argues that early modern readers sought to perfect the outmoded, error-prone, and sometimes illegible Chaucerian manuscript text, often on the basis of printed editions. These readerly interventions reveal contemporary anxieties about linguistic archaism and textual corruption, and strive to resolve them by recourse to glosses and readings contained in new books.

The chapter discusses cultural and legal varieties in the definitions of ‘indecent’ and ‘immoral’ arts, as well as the varieties in our understanding of ‘obscenity’. It questions the existence of a universal standard of morality, pointing to the influence of the Platonic perception of art on UNESCO and other UN bodies and agencies. The chapter discusses two hard cases as case studies: first, extremist contemporary visual arts and performances such as those involving bodily harm and the so-called cadaver art, and second, child pornoraphy, specifically in the Japanese manga tradition and the particular genre of Lolicons. The legal challenges arising therein are largely premised on a discussion of the contextuality of moral considerations (as evidenced for instance in temporal and regional varieties and the variations of the ‘average person’ standard in domestic jurisdictions, including even in the acceptance of the artistic genre of the nude in painting and sculpture ). In international law this debate is translated into a lack of consensus in defining universal standards and an extraordinary variety of domestic standards (for instance, in relation to the ‘average person’ morality standards), which allows for broader State discretion.

“Erotics” engages questions of homoeroticism and bawdy poetry, two interconnected themes that appear throughout the Persianate literary heritage and the tazkirah tradition but pose problems for modern literary historiographers. While pre-nineteenth-century Persianate writing abounds in frank, unabashed depictions of homoerotic sexuality -- the dominant literary convention for depicting love -- modernizers of Persianate literature adopt a Victorian-influenced approach that emphasized bashful silence about sexuality, particularly homoeroticism. As Persian literary historians were faced with making sense of the ribald erotic poetry at the heart of the tradition they wrote about, homoerotic conventions coalesced as objects of scorn and relics of the premodern world against which modernizing historiographers positioned themselves

Obscene speech is always unprotected speech. When states ratified the First Amendment, many already criminalized obscene speech. They saw no conflict between the amendment's speech protection and bans on obscenity and profanity. Obscenity law, as intially defined in R. v. Hicklin, assumed that one bad word could render an entire work obscene. Over time, courts tempered obscenity bans by considering a work as a whole, and whether any questionable language was offset by the work's scientific, artistic, or social importance.We look at Hicklin; the obscenity trials in the UK of Henry Vizetelly for publishing translations of Emile Zola novels; the US Senate debates in 1929–30 on an obscenity clause in a new tariff bill; and the regulation of obscenity in film, and on radio and later, TV. Although the definition of obscene language remains difficult to pin down, courts assume "you'll know it when you see it." In practice, although obscenity remains outside the law, defining what counts as obscene has swept more and more language that was once considered obscene into the category of protected speech.

Juvenal was the satirist’s satirist, a writer whose output consisted only of poems in that genre. An uncompromising cataloguer of the crimes of Romans, Juvenal was also intensely masculine, his oeuvre implicitly addressed to men, with one satire (vi) devoted to the shameful derelictions of women (the source of much unimaginatively imitative misogyny during the Restoration). Juvenal’s obscenity, and the exclusion of women from classical learning, added to the sense that Juvenal was not suitable source material for aspirant women writers. This chapter, however, working from Penny Wilson’s sense of an “economy of makeshifts” in women’s engagement in classical literature, examines the cracks in that monolithic facade, starting with Juvenal’s own text, which contains an oddly sympathetic female satirist. Women did read Juvenal fairly extensively, albeit often in translation, and women writers did confront, adapt, and rework Juvenalian phrasing and attitudes in a wide range of forms – poetry, fiction, journalism, diaries. While there was no linear process of rapprochement between women writers and the foundational text of male satire, nor any single “female” mode of responding to that legacy, women writers found a surprising number of ways to absorb and transform it in their own satiric work.

This chapter contends that Manto’s trials signify a paradoxical sociopolitical context when it came to questions of women and sexuality: middle-class women became more visible in public and more highly educated in the formal sense, but there was also a shift in expressions of sexuality. This chapter argues that a complex and critical reassessment of Manto’s ethical self-fashioning through an examination of official documents, literary materials, and debates within progressive literary circles over representations of sexuality, enhances an understanding of the larger cultural and political developments of a turbulent period when it comes to the politics of sexuality. Finally, moral discourses, particularly around sexuality, were also prevalent within progressive, communist, and socialist intellectual circles as well, giving rise to hegemonic definitions and distinctions about who constituted the ideal literary progressive.

Chapter 7 draws together the arguments presented in the preceding chapters, to underline the way that traditions around bringing disputes to court interacted with a written bill of rights to make courts the fora for disputes over expression in Massachusetts, as it dealt with the challenges to authority posed by challengers to religious and social orthodoxy and the gradual unfolding of its own version of democracy. Though no less concerned with individual reputation, Nova Scotians’ struggles over the jurisdiction of political institutions and greater distance from reform movements shaped disputes over expression and the way that defenses to libel claims were conceived. In these two kindred places, legal cultures, constitutional understandings, publishing practices and the quirks of personality interacted with sociopolitical pressures to shape libel law in general and the defenses of truth and privilege in particular, matters vital to individuals and to the institutions of democracy.

In this chapter, I discuss obscenities.

Chapter 5 describes the law regarding speech aimed at religion and morality. Against a backdrop of oppressive prosecutions and antiabolitionist violence, Massachusetts saw denials of the constitutionality of libel law and a rising insistence on individual rights to freedom of conscience and expression. Both the pornographic classic Fanny Hill and the first birth control texts became cheaply available in Massachusetts, and lawyers adapted the law to prosecute obscenity. Nova Scotia likely had fewer such texts, and outside Halifax legal actors also had fewer texts to refer to in drafting indictments. On the religious front, Nova Scotia’s basically voluntaristic environment made religion political, with the Anglican elite on the defensive, but disputes over belief reached neither the legislature nor courts. Massachusetts, however, gradually eliminated establishment, leaving winners and losers. Free Thinkers evoked concern, especially the Englishwoman Frances Wright, whose lectures challenged Christianity, capitalism, slavery and patriarchy. Many understood republican ideals as justifying majoritarian violence, a logic that did not resonate in Nova Scotia, where disputes centered instead on configurations of institutional power.

Chapter 2 follows the rise of Anthony Comstock from being a dry goods clerk and vigilante against all things he deemed immoral, to becoming the nation’s most prominent and powerful censor. He was responsible for enacting federal legislation banning obscene materials from the US Mail and served as a special agent for the Post Office, enforcing the law. He founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, an anti-vice organization that was emulated in numerous other states. From this position, he waged a lifelong crusade against contraceptives, free love, free thought, literature, art, and everything that offended his Puritan sensibilities. The chapter describes the key events in his long career, including his rise to prominence, his prosecution of Victoria Woodhull for revealing Reverend Henry Ward Beecher’s affair with a parishioner, his various campaigns against free thought, art, and literature, and his prosecution of birth control advocates.