Indecent Detroit
eBook - ePub

Indecent Detroit

Race, Sex, and Censorship in the Motor City

  1. 322 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Indecent Detroit

Race, Sex, and Censorship in the Motor City

About this book

While Detroit has been a major focus in urban history, little has been written on censorship in the very city thatā€”due to shifting legalities, the urban crisis, and racial tensionsā€”profoundly shaped media suppression in the United States.

By examining censorship in film and literature, Indecent Detroit recounts the evolution of media control from the end of WWII through the 1970s, when the US saw a major change in the legal mechanisms used to censor media due to court rulings that curtailed censorship laws. Ben Strassfeld reveals how Detroit altered its censorial tactics and rhetoric from an obscenity-based system of censorship centered in the Detroit Police Department to a regulatory model based in zoning law that was then expanded nationwide. This shift was connected to broader social and political trends, including the sexual revolution, that led the public to increasingly turn against censorship.

A must-read for film and media scholars, Indecent Detroit highlights how one Midwest city's ordinance was imitated across the country after it was upheld by the US Supreme Court, making this more than a local curiosity but also an influential model for the cultural, political, and moral control of urban space through media regulation.

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Yes, you can access Indecent Detroit by Ben Strassfeld in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Scienze sociali & Storia nordamericana. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. Acknowledgments
  7. Introduction
  8. 1. ā€œBurn the House to Roast the Pigā€: Literary Censorship and Juvenile Delinquency
  9. 2. ā€œWeā€™re Not Really Censorsā€: The (Il-)Legality of Detroit Police Movie Censorship
  10. 3. ā€œThe Blight of Indecencyā€: Anti-Porn Politics and the Urban Crisis in Detroit
  11. 4. Topless Detroit: Regulating Industry and Exotic Dance
  12. 5. Erogenous Zoning: The Creation and Dispersal of the ā€œDetroit Modelā€
  13. Epilogue: The Election of Coleman Young and the Politics of Pornography and Race
  14. Bibliography
  15. Index
  16. About the Author