Governing Pleasures by Lisa Z. Sigel

How did concepts of sex and gender, race and class, home and empire develop in Victorian society? Lisa Z. Sigel charts the evolution of these ideas through the medium of pornography. Governing Pleasures details its production, distribution, and consumption in Great Britain between Waterloo and World War One. Rather than viewing pornography as a static phenomenon, Sigel examines how this medium changed over time to explore key questions: How did British society define pornography? Who had access to it? What did people make of its ideas? And how did these messages affect sexual and social dynamics? The author asserts that pornography offered people a way to make sense of sexuality and its relationship to the world during the transition of British society from an era of radical politics to one of consumer pleasures. Sigel vividly illustrates her arguments with literary and visual materials drawn from public and private collections.