Pulp Sadomasochism and Sensational Narratives of Sexual Violence in the Postwar United States.

In juxtaposing convoluted explanations for the causes and impacts of sadomasochism on normative American characters and extended representations of explicit sex, the pulps held a mirror up to the cultural drive to create narratives about sadomasochism. 6 I alternate between using the terms "sadomasochism" and "eroticized violence and pain" throughout this article to underscore both the circulation of sadomasochism as a term and the pornographic unsettling of it. 7 American Psychiatric Association, "American Psychiatric Association Correspondence Concerning Seminars", ca. 1954, 7, Sex & Sexuality Archive, https://www.sexandsexuality.amdigital.co.uk/. 17 Paula Rabinowitz, I American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street i (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 37. 18 Quoted in Miriam G. Reumann, I American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and National Identity in the Kinsey Reports i (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 33. 19 Reumann, 33. 20 Earl Kemp, "Earl Kemp", Efanzines.com, published January 2002-February 2012, https://efanzines.com/EK/index.html. I explore how the double layering of sadomasochism worked in each of these three arenas, building off each other to enable a consideration of how idealized bodies, sexual moralism, and iterations of American character were always constructed in relation to raced, classed, and national others.[5] Sexuality, "Sadomasochism", and National Identityinthe Postwar United States In 1950s correspondence between the APA and Dr. Alfred Kinsey, the organization outlined categories of sexual behavior that indicated sexual disorder. [Extracted from the article]