7 - Sexing Visual Culture

Summary

Chapter 7, “Sexing Visual Culture,” critically addresses the history of representations of sex and sexuality in visual culture, from erotic woodblock prints to film to contemporary popular art. The nation-builders of the late nineteenth century considered erotic prints – along with a number of customs, festivals, and rituals that centered on the celebration of fertility, potency, and nudity – as injurious to public morals and thus unfit for the modern civilized nation Japan aspired to become. Later debates regarding “pornography” occasionally pitched both the freedom of sexual expression and “sexual liberation” against aggressive reproductive policies, middle-class morality, and persisting patriarchal conventions. Today, the political and social weight of sexual expression and its social implications continue to be debated. Where some critics see the emergence of the powerful, sexed, ever-transforming, and transformative female in new manga, anime, and popular art, others conceive of such as merely new iterations of the old exploitation of female sexuality designed to fuel and satisfy primarily heteronormative male desire.