New Assistant Professor of French Studies Hannah Frydman has published the article, “Freedom’s Sex Problem: Classified Advertising, Law, and the Politics of Reading in Third Republic France,” in French Historical Studies (volume 44, number 4).
The article traces the history of legal responses to so-called immorality (e.g. abortion, sex work, non-normative sex) in the classified pages of the Parisian press. In particular, she shows how decades of judicial uncertainty about whether obscenity law permitted the symptomatic reading of coded ads — or if only surface reading was allowed — protected the freedom of the press, a freedom endangered by attempts to make mass media inhospitable to sexual advertising.
The article is available on the Duke University Press site.