It also troubled the self-appointed gatekeepers of indecency: the producers and publishers of elite erotica. However, the development of new technologies that permitted the cheap offset printing of lavishly illustrated essays, postcards and print and photographic folios, now turned readers into mass viewers across social and economic divides. Throughout Europe, erotic material became an increasing source of moral concern – lest it should corrupt impressionable young minds – spawning diverse methods of state control.
The reform and regulation of sexual life and its scientific study, as well as the re-evaluation of the bourgeois family unit and its restrictive sexual standards, made sex into a central topic of public scrutiny (Kirsten Leng, Sexual Politics and Feminist Science: Women Sexologists in Germany, 1900–1933, Ithaca and London, 2018).
CALL FOR PAPERS: Graphically Graphic Art: The making of modern print erotica, 1850–1950 Session at the Association for Art History’s 2021 Annual Conference, University of Birmingham (U.K.), 14th-17th April, 2021 Session conveners: Abbey Rees-Hales, University of Birmingham, Camilla Smith, University of Birmingham, latter half of the 19th century witnessed a proliferation of erotic visual material that marked the beginning of a period celebrated by some for its sexual ‘freedoms’ and chastised by others for its excess.
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