Lisa Z. Sigel

The People’s Porn offers the first history of American handmade and homemade pornography, providing the backstory to the explosion of amateur pornography on the web. In doing so, it provides a much-needed counterweight to ahistorical and ideological arguments that dominate most discussions of pornography. Whalers and craftsmen, prisoners and activists, African Americans and feminists—all made their own pornography. By pulling together a diversity of objects made by a wide variety of people, The People’s Porn tells a new story about American sexual history.

NOTCHES: What drew you to this topic, and what questions do you still have?

Lisa Z. Sigel: I was drawn to the topic by the sources. They are fascinating. A catalog described these objects as “inventive, whimsical, improvised, homespun, lampooning, crass, ludic, and touching in more or less equal measure.” (“Private Eyes,” Kinsey Institute, 2010, 5.) Whenever I look at these objects in an archive, people around me are intrigued and walk over to see them. Whenever I give a talk, people get incredibly excited. People want to talk about them. To look at a fifty-year old, soap carving allows people to see the world in a way that they were not expecting. The deeply human aspect of these objects is what drew me in and that’s what draws in others. People recognize the obscenity in the sources but also the humanity. Often, they’re moved in ways they were not expecting.

Having worked on the topic for a decade, I still have so many questions that remain unanswered. As much as I learn, there’s always more to know. There’s more to know about prison culture, about logging camps, about death culture, about folk practices, about SPIRK (a student told me that is Captain Kirk/Spock erotica. Who knew?) My project tries to document the diversity of sex culture. As much as I have done, there’s so much more to discover and explain. I see this book as just a start. I hope that others continue to detail the diversity of objects, desires, and communities.

NOTCHES: This book engages with histories of sex and sexuality, but what other themes does it speak to? 

Sigel: Most scholars who engage with pornography do so as attendant to something else. In the process of studying the French Revolution, for example, they discover revolutionary pornographic texts or they might use pornography as a source in the study of queer history. They use pornography as one source among many others to tell them about an important moment, event, or group. That approach has been extremely productive and has resulted in some important books.

In contrast, my book prioritizes the study of the pornography itself. In doing so, it focuses on handmade and homemade pornography and follows the sources to the changing context. Whalers made erotic scrimshaw, so the book engaged seafaring. Loggers and country people made figurines and carvings so the book had to examine the rural context. There is a whole sub-genre of coffin figures so I had to think about death culture. Prisoners made handmade books so the book engages with the carceral state. I followed the sources to all of these contexts.

In order to understand the materials and the way they changed over time, I had to develop fields in folkloric studies, outsider art, art brut, self-made art, and so on. Following the sources encouraged me to think about consumerism and mass culture. In the process, the book engaged with concerns about authenticity and the relation of folk and outsider culture to mass production. I ended up at places I never expected to be.

NOTCHES: Did the book shift significantly from the time you first conceptualized it?  

Sigel: My book grew over thirty years. While still a graduate student, I came across a hand-lined, hand-written, hand-drawn pamphlet entitled “A Pretty Girls’ Companion and Guide to Loves Sweetest Delights.” The document was shorn of any identifying information that scholars tend to use to make sense of an object like date or location. Yet it had a very vivid sense of sexuality and a clear narrator.

Fast forward a few decades and I started teaching courses on historical methods. One of my main recommendations to students is to find a rich vein of sources and see what they say, rather than starting with a pre-set hypothesis and then going on a search and destroy mission to prove it. After remembering that pamphlet, I decided to see how rich that vein really was. I returned to the archives to see how many handmade pamphlets existed. I started with handmade pamphlets but then branched off into other book arts and from book arts into illustrations and drawings and from there into carvings and so on. The number and type of sources ballooned. As I expanded the type of sources, I began finding new collections. I also began talking to collectors who showed me how much more I had to learn. I started researching different genres of art production and different types of handmade objects.

As I began to come across more handmade artifacts, I began to see them as a form of testimony to people’s desires. Once I started thinking about these materials as a form of testimony– though occasionally inchoate and often lacking in provenance–I could see how I could work with them. I could hear them countering claims about industrial sexuality that are often put on pornography as an emergent genre. At a time when consumer culture didn’t meet people’s needs, these testimonials provide a clear sense of their desires. At a moment when there was little pornography for queers, women, people of color, or prisoners, people created their own.

Once I mapped the sources, I began to develop a chronology and periodization and thus began to develop a sense of what changed over time. By the time that I sat down to write, I had been tacitly thinking about the sources for years. It started as a simple article and grew in all directions until it burst its clothes like The Incredible Hulk.

NOTCHES: Whose stories or what topics were left out of your book and why? What would you include had you been able to?

Sigel: There are all kinds of objects that did not make it into the book from erotic whirligigs to jewelry that used Morse code to spell out obscenities. Every time I give a talk, someone brings up something I have not seen before, an artist doing fabulous work, a new genre of pornography, an object. I hope that someone who reads this interview starts an online gallery. It would be a great way for people to create an archive.

I tried to tell the story of how handmade pornography changed over time but I couldn’t just list all of the objects that I found. Some were impossible to describe or contextualize. Some were held in private collections that I was not allowed to identify or photograph. I couldn’t get permissions for some objects. I have looked at thousands and thousands of these objects but I couldn’t reproduce them.

One thing that is not mentioned is the way copyright interferes with scholarship. One cannot reproduce an object without permissions and those permissions are easy to deny. Even if one can get permissions, they can be expensive. Further, pricing is based upon on color, size, placement, and so on. Some of Darger’s images are 10 feet wide. Reproducing them in a little 5 inch square doesn’t do them justice. If I could have, I would have included dozens of double-sided Darger illustrations. I also would have included double the number of illustrations. My book has 99 images. I would have loved to include more. It often came down to a question of money. Granting agencies don’t want to bankroll books on the history of pornography so there just wasn’t money to pay for illustrations. I begged people for free illustrations. I asked a photographer friend to work for free.  He did a beautiful job but I wish I could have paid him. I also paid for some illustrations out of pocket. The limits on illustration affect scholarship in hidden but important ways.

NOTCHES: How did you become interested in the history of sexuality?

Sigel: I became interested in the history of sexuality decades ago when it was just emerging as a field. At that point, most people documented the regulation of sexuality. They looked at things like legislation against obscenity and control of prostitution. It was an important foundation to the field and raised fascinating questions but I wanted to explore sexuality as a set of ideas. I saw in pornography a set of documents that would let me historicize people’s conceptual worlds. I planned on writing a single book but now, years later there are still interesting leads that are worth exploring.

Recently, one of my students asked me why I did such a niche topic. The question surprised me. What could be more central to the human experience than the history of sexuality? Sexuality is one of the central ways we define ourselves but it is still under-examined. Something rich, messy, deeply human, and important but not written about? Sign me up!

NOTCHES: How do you see your book being most effectively used in the classroom? What would you assign it with?

Sigel: I would assign it with D’Emilio and Freedman’s Intimate Matters for a “History of Sexuality” course. Our “History of Sexuality” sequence is a survey that breaks at the Civil War. My book would fit with the post-Civil War world in that case.

It could also be used in an historical methods course to think about how to work with material culture. In my department, we’re always looking for books that are fairly short and self-conscious about methods. If they are cheap, that’s a bonus. I kept all those parameters in mind when I was writing and thinking about publishers.

Most chapters can be used as stand-alones. Each one contributes to the larger story about how handmade and homemade pornography changes over time but each one also works as a stand-alone organized by chronology. That means you could take Chapter 1 and use it in a course on nineteenth century American culture. You could take Chapter 2 that deals with Henry Darger and put it in course that deals with the early twentieth century, mass culture, hoarding, or the impact of consumer culture. Likewise the chapter on prison porn could go into a course on the prison state in the post-war world. Chapter 4 could be used for a postwar course. They can all be used as a fun one-off in a lager American history course.

I’ve given talks to students and they really respond to the sorts of materials I use. They are interested in how historians conceptualize the sorts of mass culture they deal with every day. The objects in the book—whether outsider art or reworked ephemera—looks like and feels like a lot of objects in their lives. It meets people where they live.

NOTCHES: Why does this history matter today?

Sigel: This book ends with questions about consumerism and the search for authenticity. Authenticity has become a tag phrase that means that something is real and unmediated by the market. And strangely enough, because it has become so important, it is now a market in and of itself. You can charge more for the authentic.

When you think about pornography, there’s a huge gap between authentic sexual expression and those mediated by the market. People understand that pornography is a performance but they want an authentic expression of sexual desire and sexual behavior. Think about the enormous popularity of sexing photos or other amateur sequences. The divide between the authentic and the pornographic has created its own marketplace. People pay for the real so that’s what the marketplace produces and has for some time. There have been guides to producing amateur porn just like there’s been crackle paint that ages so it looks antique. The search for the authentic has devoured all sorts of forms from folk art, to outsider art, to amateur pornography.

I was just speaking with a colleague who was asking what the big deal with consumerism is. I think that my book illustrates how there isn’t a place outside of consumerism anymore. It’s all for sale. Even our head space about what we think of bodies or sex has been gobbled up by consumerism. This book documents how that happened.

NOTCHES: Your book is published, what next?

Sigel: First, I wrote a novel during the pandemic when I couldn’t hit the archives. If anybody wants to publish a fast-paced pandemic novel with intertwining storylines about politics, the supernatural, and a bunch of middle-aged academic women, it’s revised and ready to go.

Then I want to document a group called the London Life League or L3. They were a corseting and cross dressing group devoted to London Life magazine which was a British fetish magazine published between the wars. In the magazine, people used the correspondence column to discreetly map out desires, communities, and identities. Apparently, the magazine lived on in people’s minds well after the physical publication ended. During the 1980s people created a network devoted to its memory. I would like to document the group while its members are still vital. If you were a member, call me!

Dr. Lisa Z. Sigel is a Professor of History at DePaul University. She works on the histories of sexuality, pornography, and censorship. Her previous books include Governing Pleasures, International Exposure, and Making Modern Love. She serves on the editorial boards of Porn Studies, Journal of Social History, and Book History.



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