DePaul Prof Lisa Sigel’s Book Details History of ‘Handmade Porn’

LOS ANGELES—The 1970s and early 1980s may have been the “Golden Age” of porn, but Americans have been creating pornography at least since the country began, usually just for their own entertainment. Now, a new book by a DePaul University history professor chronicles the history of “handmade” porn going back to 1830, with such objects uncovered by the author as an erotic piece of scrimshaw.  Author Lisa Sigel (pictured above), a professor of history at DePaul University in Chicago, has written several books about sex and porn from an academic perspective, including, Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England, 1815-1914, and International Exposure: Perspectives on Modern European Pornography, 1800–2000. Her new work, to be published by the University of Chicago Press imprint Reaktion Books in December, is The People’s Porn: A History of Handmade Pornography in America. According to the book’s promotional material, Sigel traces “handmade” porn in America from “the delicately obscene anonymous scrimshaw carvings of the early nineteenth century to the primitively obscene imaginings of the prolific Henry Darger in the twentieth century, to the contemporary obscene repurposing of the anatomy of Barbie Dolls.” But the professor makes a distinction between “homemade porn,” which refers largely to amateur or private sex tapes, and “handmade,” which are largely arts-and-crafts creations featuring sexually explicit imagery. In an interview with Chicago Magazine, Sigel said that while people often don’t tell the whole truth when asked about their preferences in porn, the objects they create give direct insight into “how people conceptualize sex at the moment.” She also writes in the book that studying antique pornographic objects reveals that the sexual fascinations and predilections of earlier Americans, “were just as dirty, problematic, odd, real, and authentic” as those of people living today.  But she also recognizes that what Americans define as “pornography” has changed over the decades, and is contingent on the values of the society in which it is created. Her book, Sigel writes, “tries to capture a sense of that contingency. It shows how some objects became art while others did not and explores how shifting definitions leave behind an impoverished vision of what pornography can mean.” She also includes a chapter on porn created by prison inmates, finding that “in many ways, prison pornography echoed the wider range of handmade and homemade objects. In terms of themes and subjects, prison pornography reflected the larger world of sexual desires.” But of all the historical porn she uncovered, she says that her favorite was a set of hand-carved coffins, with a figurine of a corpse inside.  “When you open the lid, the corpse’s penis pops up,” she told Chicago. “Every time I think I understand what this field looks like, somebody says, ‘Oh, have you seen X?’” Photo via DePaul University