What Pornography Knows

Sex and Social Protest Since the Eighteenth Century

By: Kathleen Lubey

Narrated by: Kathleen Godwin

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 listeners to connect sex with its social outcomes. Lubey offers a surprising take on a deeply misunderstood cultural form: pornography transforms sexual description into feminist commentary, revealing the genre's deep knowledge of how social inequities are perpetuated as well as its plans for how to rectify them.

The book is published by Stanford University Press. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.

©2022 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University (P)2024 Redwood Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"A masterful rethinking of the history of pornography." (Whitney Strub, author of Perversion for Profit)

"Kathleen Lubey's dazzling study makes available an astounding new history of pornographic narrative..." (Grace Lavery, author of Please Miss)

"With analysis that is nothing short of astonishing, Lubey offers a dramatic, eloquent cultural history of pornography..." ((Frances Ferguson, University of Chicago)