ABSTRACT
Obscenity law regulates two types of bodies: those engaged in sexual pursuits within various kinds of texts, and the more figurative body-politic. Doctrine emerged piecemeal among the states, emanating out of English common law and moving toward statutory law from the 1820s to the 1860s. Legally, obscenity generally remained linked to blasphemy as a libel against society, as when John Ruggles was convicted of the latter charge in New York in 1811 for declaring, “Jesus Christ was a bastard, and his mother must be a whore.” Sexual liberalism would require a few decades to work its way through the legal system, and in the meantime, obscenity law remained a tool of sexual regulation. Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin flatly rejected obscenity law, preferring to locate pornography in the legal orbit of civil rights protections, as a harm toward women, or “a form of discrimination on the basis of sex.”.
