Just Announced
Explore the world of film, censorship, politics, and the work of Kenneth Anger with visiting scholar Dr. Whitney Strub.
Note: This talk will take place in the Wells Screening Room (Wells 048), located in the Moving Image Archive of the Wells Library. As with all IU Cinema events, this talk is open to all.
Join us for a fascinating talk by visiting scholar Dr. Whitney Strub. Obscene Anger: Kenneth Anger and the Legacies of Censorship will examine the heteronormative targeting of Kenneth Anger's queer underground classics Fireworks (1947) and Scorpio Rising (1963) as obscene during the Cold War era and consider this both in its contemporaneous historical context and its reverberations through the years, including our current moment of resurgent censorship.
Dr. Whitney Strub is an associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Newark. He is the author of Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right (2011) and Obscenity Rules: Roth v. United States and the Long Struggle over Sexual Expression (2013), and co-editor of Porno Chic and the Sex Wars: American Sexual Representation in the 1970s (2016) and ReFocus: The Films of Roberta Findlay (2023). His newest book is the edited collection Queer Newark: Stories of Resistance, Love, and Community, published in February 2024 by Rutgers University Press. Whit’s work has appeared in such venues as Washington Post, Jacobin, Salon, Vice, and Temple of Schlock, as well as scholarly journals including Journal of the History of Sexuality, Radical History Review, and American Quarterly. He lives in Newark, New Jersey, where he co-directs the Queer Newark Oral History Project. Whit blogs at https://strublog.wordpress.com/ and can be found on Twitter @whitstrub.
