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Dissertation Information for Whitney Vincent Strub

NAME:
- Whitney Vincent Strub

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (2006)

ADVISORS:
- Ruth H. Bloch

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Janice L. Reiff
- Kathleen McHugh

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Perversion for profit: The politics of obscenity and pornography in the postwar United States

Abstract: After having receded from public concern since the end of the Victorian era, pornography received a resurgence of national attention in the years after World War II. This dissertation traces the history of those rekindled concerns, seeing pornography as both a reflector of national sexual politics and as a causal agent in the emergence of the New Right, the most important political movement of the past half-century. As the Cold War took shape, domestic sexual politics concentrated on the channeling of sexual energy into "all-American" heterosexual nuclear families, and pornography, as a challenge to this circuit, became the target of newfound public outrage. The charge was led by the liberals who held power at the time, but the postwar liberal consensus failed to successfully balance its free-speech framework and the exception it allowed for obscenity laws. Conservatives, spearheaded by groups like Charles Keating's Citizens for Decent Literature in the 1960s, took advantage of this tension in liberal thought. As the New Right developed in the late 1960s it exploited the pornography issue for partisan gain, discovering the political capital of moralism that would later emerge more fully in debates over abortion, feminism, and gay rights. The dissertation tracks the obscenity/pornography debates through the brief "porno chic" moment of the 1970s and into the political awakening of evangelical Christians. It concludes that ambivalence toward sexual expression has hampered liberal participants of the debates, while entrepreneurial moralism has greatly benefited the modern conservative movement.

MPACT Scores for Whitney Vincent Strub

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C = 0
A+C = 0
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TA = 0
calculated 2008-08-09 08:36:23

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Students under Whitney Vincent Strub

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None