Digital Project

My digital project is available to view at Omeka.net/eighteenthcenturypornography.  I have created a directory of images from the long eighteenth century that would have circulated in print culture in multiple formats.  Though James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson illustrated contemporary images of sex, most of the pornography available at print shops came from older works that were continually reprinted.  Aretino's Postures and Aristotle's Masterpeace were two prominent works from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that enjoyed enormous popularity in the eighteenth century.  The directory is searchable by category.  To focus on some of the anti-clerical pornography that attacked the morals of the Catholic Church, type in "religious."  Since I will be researching the Gaze and its significance, I have made this directory searchable by the keywords "voyerism" and "Gaze."  This will allow me to examine different aspects of the "multiplicity of gazes" that the reader takes part in when viewing these images.  The cultural norms and class and gender clues hidden away in obscene prints is fascinating.  When attacking the Church, architectural luxury mingles with sexual depravity to show the overindulgent Catholics in the worst possible light.  The homosexual scene of French officers comments on the Army as well as homosexual activity, and the bourgeois women, secreted away in luxury, who entertain dalliances in their parlors, says much about the anxieties of the private domestic sphere.  I hope you enjoy!