Bound And Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America is a 1996 book by Laura Kipnis. It attempts to approach pornography in a new way, focusing not on whether pornography is a serious social ill, but rather on its nature and what its function and meaning might be in the lives of its audience as well as the lives of those who seek to ban or suppress it.
The book is divided into five sections, each of which can stand more or less independently as individual essays:
- "Fantasy In America: The United States v. Daniel Thomas DePew" presents an account of the first computer bulletin board entrapment case, in which Daniel DePew is convicted of conspiring to make a snuff film and sentenced to thirty-three years in prison even though there was little evidence that his "plans" were anything other than kinky sexual fantasy.
- "Clothes Make The Man" is a look at transvestite pornography, specifically the self-portrait personal advertistements, comparing them to the more "respectable" work of photographer Cindy Sherman.
- "Life In The Fat Lane" is about fat fetish pornography and contemporary American culture's anxiety and hypocrisy about fat and desire. She argues that pornography featuring obese subjects is a revolt against the cultural esthetic of thinness.
- "Disgust And Desire: Hustler Magazine" discusses Larry Flynt's use of pornography as a political, class-conscious act. It also examines feminists' disgust with Hustler and similar magazines because they are class-based.
- "How To Look At Pornography," the book's conclusion, discusses (among other things) the marriage of anti-pornography writer Catharine MacKinnon and anti-psychoanalytic writer Jeffrey Masson.
Kipnis rejects the more militant anti-pornography views expressed by feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and dismisses the conservative movement to exempt pornography from First Amendment protection. She sets out her view that pornography is a legitimate cultural expression which exposes class prejudices and sexual hypocrisy while it deliberately seeks to transcend taboos. The book involves themes including Freudian analysis, consumer capitalism, and societal taboos.
Famous quotes containing the words bound, politics, fantasy and/or america:
“I don’t know but a book in a man’s brain is better off than a book bound in calf—at any rate it is safer from criticism. And taking a book off the brain, is akin to the ticklish & dangerous business of taking an old painting off a panel—you have to scrape off the whole brain in order to get at it with due safety—& even then, the painting may not be worth the trouble.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
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—Jane Mayer, U.S. journalist, and Jill Abramson b. 1954, U.S. journalist. Strange Justice, p. 8, Houghton Mifflin (1994)
“It’s the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it. Everybody has their own America, and then they have the pieces of a fantasy America that they think is out there but they can’t see.”
—Andy Warhol (1928–1987)
“... the Black woman in America can justly be described as a “slave of a slave.””
—Frances Beale, African American feminist and civil rights activist. The Black Woman, ch. 14 (1970)