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The second chapter explores what was possible in the wake of mid-century rulings by the Warren Court that expanded Constitutional protections for transgressive literary works. This chapter contrasts Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, which were published just a few years apart and which both address the ramifications of World War II. The Bluest Eye is frequently challenged when it appears on high-school reading lists, while Pynchon's novel is hardly ever taught, rendering it comparatively uncontroversial, though close analysis reveals serious concerns about its content that parallel the ones most frequently cited in challenges to The Bluest Eye. What makes Morrison's novel more prone to controversy is that it is has a prominent place in classrooms for multiple reasons the chapter examines, and this helps to show the impact of schools as a locus of obscenity challenges after the trials of the 1950s and '60s, while also demonstrating that the benefits and burdens of obscenity controversies are distributed unequally.
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The introduction to Obscene Gestures describes the book's scope and defines its terms, while also providing a densely researched historical overview of obscenity debates and jurisprudence. Drawing on sources as diverse as Supreme Court decisions, night-club comedy, Congressional records, and cultural theory, the introduction describes the many contradictory vectors of twentieth-century moralist controversies. In some respects, attempts at censorship often transparently seek to stifle dissent. On the other hand, obscenity debates have historically tended to lead to market success and fast-track canonization. However, this reception pattern is more advantageous to white, male, writers from a heteronormative position, who benefit from cultural scripts that allow their imputed transgressions to be understood as marks of genius. Writers of color, women, and LGTQ+ folk instead often have comparable transgressive representations interpreted by mainstream audiences as confirmation of damaging stereotypes in a pattern highlighting the tendency to read non-majoritarian works ethnographically and reductively.
The fourth chapter brings the project to the close of the twentieth century, beginning with Robert Mapplethorpe's final exhibition The Perfect Moment and concluding with Tony Kushner's play Angels in America. Both works were protested for their celebration of non-heteronormative desire and identity, and both provoked discussions about sexual morality in the context of the AIDS epidemic, crystallizing major nuances in obscenity discourses. Because same-sex desire had historically been assumed to fulfill the legal criterion that something be offensive in order to merit suppression, these frank texts challenge this presumption while engaging in deliberate acts of LGBTQ+ visibility. The regional challenges that resulted when the works toured also highlight the importance of local politics in determining the fate of transgressive sexual representations, as they were celebrated in some locales and picketed or prosecuted in others. Because Supreme Court rulings on obscenity include provisions that works can be banned if they violate community standards, obscenity prosecutions often do take on such local characteristics, demonstrating the complex legacy of obscenity cases.
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