The Bawdy Politic in Stuart England, 1660-1714: Political Pornography and Prostitution (review)

It's always disappointing to open a book on sex or pornography and find it has no pictures. But Melissa Mowry's primary interest in The Bawdy Politic is in text and the cultural work accomplished when people read and wrote political pornography during the Stuart period. Mowry stakes out an ambitious project for herself, investigating how the pornographic body came to be politicized. In the service of her argument, Mowry distinguishes between Renaissance pornography that she asserts was primarily anticlerical, and Stuart-age pornography that she finds almost exclusively antidemocratical. In the interest of her argument, Mowry marshals an impressive array of evidence, deploying legal and pornographic discourse, both printed and manuscript materials.

According to Mowry, the development of political pornography occurred in three main stages: the first immediately follows the Restoration and attempts to resolve threats to the body politic manifested by the regicide. In discussing the first phase, Mowry examines fears of the monstrous, many-headed democratic body that threatened the monarchy and the ways pornographic discourses about multiple partners fueled those fears. She also examines the Bawdy House riots, connecting broadsides and legal discourse about the riots to trace the case built against prostitutes as the instigators of the riots. Mowry examines the second phase in chapters 3 and 4. Here she takes up the long-term consequences of the civil war, positing at once that civil war radicals frequent prostitutes, creating bastards, and at the same time their legitimate daughters must turn to whoring as their fathers have lost everything in the Restoration. As part of the latter argument, Mowry explores the creation of a sexual identity particular to prostitutes. In the third phase Whigs reappropriate the figure of the prostitute and divest the female figure of political import. The final chapter is arguably Mowry's best; here she argues that the "Glorious Revolution" is largely a conservative culmination rather than a true revolution. It marks the Whigs' turn away from populism, and Mowry finds this signified in pornography that attacks the viciousness of the poor and the degradation of personal relationships.

It is in her attention to the whore as political agent that Mowry's work proves most useful. Many early studies of Restoration political literature argue that women represent England or property or some other concept. Mowry's study of Restoration whores in broadsides and penny-pamphlets opens up new territory for examining the female figure as political agent.

In order to make her case though, Mowry redefines pornography in a way that ultimately proves problematic. As Annabel Patterson in Pastoral and Ideology defines pastoral by its function rather than by its generic conventions, Mowry attempts to define pornography by its political function, ultimately asserting that pornography is writing about prostitution that has a political edge. It seems that texts which accuse politicians of having sex with prostitutes might then be considered pornographic, and in Mowry's book even news stories about sexual transgression fall under the broad rubric "pornography": Mowry might have done better to talk about sex writing (akin to sex work) than pornography — but then, that's not as sexy.

Like much recent work in cultural studies, Mowry's book wants to explore questions about "the conjunction of cultural representation and cultural practice"; however, Mowry's argument rests on a quite small sample of material. By her own count there are seventy texts that fit her definition of pornography and she cites only a small percentage of these: how much cultural practice can occur from such miniscule representation? Furthermore, this text also seems to follow a troublesome trend in cultural studies that assumes a transparent relationship between text and context. In her third chapter, for instance, Mowry uses both mass culture and legal texts to support her argument, but she has access only to nine mass culture sources...