Advertising, Striptease, and the Lure of a Shop Window Mannequin. Reconstructing the Eroticized City Landscape of 1950s Vienna
In the 1950s, Austrian society was engaged with rebuilding the country and finding a new identity after the horrors of the war and Austria’s engagement in war crimes and the holocaust. Especially among conservative groups, the idea of sexual modesty, youth protection, and the cleansing of the public...
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| I publikationen: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/rhc, |
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| Huvudupphovsman: | |
| Materialtyp: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Språk: | Anglais |
| Publicerad: |
Revue d'histoire culturelle
2023
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| Länkar: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Sammanfattning: | In the 1950s, Austrian society was engaged with rebuilding the country and finding a new identity after the horrors of the war and Austria’s engagement in war crimes and the holocaust. Especially among conservative groups, the idea of sexual modesty, youth protection, and the cleansing of the public sphere from sexualized imagery gained ground as prerequisite for the moral reconstruction of Austrian society. One outcome of conservatives’ fight for decency was the establishment of an anti-pornography law in 1950 and a longstanding struggle to fight “obscene” media via criminal prosecution in the ensuing years. However, the 1950s also saw a quick economic recuperation and the sexualization of both the media and the world of consumer goods, resulting in the increased visibility of sexual imagery in the public sphere that ranged from advertisements to consumer goods to motion pictures. Conservatives’ demands of keeping sexual imagery out of the public sphere thus clashed together with the logic of consumer capitalism whose “sex sells” aesthetic increasingly occupied public spaces. Based on criminal case files against pornography from the 1950s, the paper analyzes how sexual imagery in 1950s Vienna looked like, in which contexts it did arise, how and by whom it was policed and legally prosecuted, and how effective these measures were. |
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