Abstract

This study represents an inquiry into the historical conception of "pornography" that developed in the 19th century in response to the invention of photography. The project focusses on the historical coincidence of the invention of photography, the accompanying realist debates surrounding the nude, and the etymological transformation of the word "pornography." In contrast to recent literary histories of pornography, the dissertation insists that its modern conception and history, coincident with art in the age of its "technological reproducibility," is primarily image-oriented. The study demonstrates that contemporary objections to pornography are indissociable from the 19th century dispute between photography and painting, which concerned the former's perceived disruption of established paradigms of art and realism. By locating both controversies within the Western philosophic and aesthetic tradition that associates the materiality of the image with femininity and the feminine, the dissertation questions the "self-evidentiary" nature of pornography as distinct not only from erotica but from other representational genres as well, and draws a number of conclusions concerning the relation of pornography to modernity. ;A cross-disciplinary study in sexuality and representation, the study concerns a broader cultural revolution in the 19th-century of which pornography and obscenity are a profoundly underestimated manifestation. In order to demonstrate the mutual implication of photography and pornography, the dissertation reconfigures the reigning admixture of psychoanalysis with Foucauldian panopticism in feminist theories of the gaze. While my interpretation is indebted to this line of thought, it differs radically in its insistence upon the femininity of the metaphors of Western iconoclasm; the project describes and examines the relation of subjectivity to the work of art wherein the sensuous materiality of the image, likened to the flesh of the female body, is a motivating concern of debates over medium and mediation. Once pornography is situated as a re-invention within the terms of a particular historical and social moment, the questions photography raises for the nature of art in the 19th century begin to resonate with traditional concerns regarding the immoderate materiality of the image, as manifested in debates regarding the appropriate "medium" of art