ABSTRACT
Sold from approximately the 1930s to the 1960s, Tijuana Bibles were eight-page wallet-sized pornographic comic books. Inspired by the nascent comic book industry and sold behind store counters, in saloon back rooms, and in other masculine coded spaces, Tijuana Bibles fulfilled a growing demand for affordable and discreet erotica in an era of rapidly changing gender relations. This chapter engages with a series of extant Tijuana Bibles demonstrating their role as a cultural force that worked to create and reinforce normative gendered and racialized notions of masculinity and sexual violence. Such influence stemmed not only from the written and visual text of the bibles, but also from their homosocial circulatory patterns. However, such a subject also calls for an interrogation of the limitations and possibilities of such ephemeral and untraceable sources, speaking to some of the crucial archival questions at the heart of modern sexuality studies.
