Indecent Detroit: Regulating Race, Sex, and Adult Entertainment, 1950-1975

Media Studies;Film History;Porn Studies;Urban Studies;Media Censorship;Detroit;Film and Video Studies;Screen Arts and Cultures;African-American Studies;History (General);Women"s and Gender Studies;Arts;Humanities;Screen Arts and Cultures

Strassfeld, BenjaminSchaefer, Eric ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Media Studies;    Film History;    Porn Studies;    Urban Studies;    Media Censorship;    Detroit;    Film and Video Studies;    Screen Arts and Cultures;    African-American Studies;    History (General);    Women";    s and Gender Studies;    Arts;    Humanities;    Screen Arts and Cultures;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/144174/bstrass_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation examines the history of censorship and anti-porn politics in Detroit, beginning with the city’s literary censorship campaign in the immediate postwar era and moving up through efforts to curtail the rapid growth of adult entertainment in the early 1970s. I chart the city’s evolving methods of censoring ;;indecent” media, along with the activism spurring it, through the lens of the city’s rapidly changing demographics. Rather than treating anti-porn politics as static and unchanging, I explore the shifts that occurred over time as both activists and city officials increasingly drew on the rhetoric and tactics used in contemporaneous fights over race. Thus, the literary censorship based in overt religious-tinged moralizing of the 1950s fell out of fashion by the end of the 1960s, a shift that coincided with the narrowing of obscenity law, the preferred legal means of censorship. By the early 1970s, pornography had become a visible part of the urban landscape as never before, which forced Detroit to develop new methods of regulating businesses offering adult entertainment. What city officials settled on was the use of zoning law, which seemingly was unconcerned with issues of morality or decency. Not coincidentally, this morality-neutral discourse developed concurrently with color-blind racial politics of the day, with shared rhetorical strategies confirming the overlap between the two. I thereby make the case that anti-porn politics in Detroit was shaped by, and in turn shaped, the broader history of racial politics in the city. Through an examination of this history, I argue that Detroit has long played an outsized role in the history of media censorship, with the city’s methods of regulating pornography exported as the ;;Detroit Model” to numerous cities across the country.