Whitney Strub
Episode description
Professor Whitney Strub joins us to talk about his books: Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right (2010), Obscenity Rules: Roth v. United States and the Long Struggle over Sexual Expression (2013), and this co-edited anthology with Carolyn Bronstein titled, Porno Chic and the Sex Wars: American Sexual Representation in the 1970s (2016). We talk about his historical approach to porn studies, New-Right censorship strategies of the post-war era, the important obscenity trials that have formed the obscenity laws that we’re familiar with today, and we talk about how is new edited collection is fighting against our commonly held assumptions of the “Golden Age” of porn in the 1970s. And after the interview, we take you on an audio tour of New Jersey’s last porn theater, the Little Theater. Which opened in Newark in 1929, and has been showing pornography since the 1970s. You don’t want to miss it!
Here’s a link to Whitney’s personal website: https://strublog.wordpress.com/
A link to the 1965 short film Perversion for Profit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om4kMTw-R6o
Link to more info about Perversion for Profit: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/perversion-for-profit/9780231148863
Link to more info about Obscenity Rules: https://www.amazon.com/Obscenity-Rules-Struggle-Expression-Landmark/dp/0700619372
Link to the court’s oral argument of Roth v. U.S. on April 22, 1957: https://apps.oyez.org/player/#/warren6/oral_argument_audio/13231
Link to more info about Porno Chic and the Sex Wars: http://www.umass.edu/umpress/title/porno-chic-and-sex-wars
I want a president on the NYC High Line: http://art.thehighline.org/project/zoe-leonard/
Here’s a link to an article that Whitney wrote about the Little Theater: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nnkwyg/the-little-theater-newark-porn
Here’s a link to a porn theater in L.A. that I mention during our audio tour: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam-los-angeles-last-adult-theaters-20170706-htmlstory.html
More information about the Queer Newark Oral History project can be found at: http://queer.newark.rutgers.edu