Book Review

In The Politics of Sex, Barbara Sullivan deftly comments on the highly charged and polemical debate about the regulation of sex in the latter part of the twentieth century in Australia. By focusing her attention on the textual production of the conversations around pornography and prostitution, Sullivan is able to comment on the aspect of her topic that interests her most: the notion of how "talk" produces meanings about sex. This Foucauldian approach does not however render Sullivan impotent to contribute to the political debate(s) about sex-work and representations of sex within textual productions designated as "pornography." The real strength of her approach is that this discussion is historicized, located in time and place, and examines the broader impact of the "sexual culture" produced by and through "talk" about sex. Her interest in the specificity of sexual practices in places and in time and the relationship of these to the production of themes within pornography, as well as concerns about pornography, allows Sullivan a sophisticated entry point to the scholarship.	1
For the purposes of this review I have decided to focus on how well Sullivan's approach achieves an analysis of legal discourse: how does she deal with questions pertinent to the framework of scholarship within "law and history"? Given that in recent years this scholarship has become influenced by trends outside "law" per se, with more scholars coming to questions of law from feminist, postmodernist, and poststructuralist perspectives, Sullivan's work has already achieved its own place and importance. What she does with "law," though, needs to be investigated.	2
The postwar period in Australia is significant for the history of sex/uality. Sullivan, dealing with all states and territories in Australia, looks at the legal zones around "sex," at its regulation and criminality, and at decriminalization. The first part of the book deals with the formation of the sex industries in Australia, suggesting that a new "moral economy" was ushered in after the war. Sullivan suggests that prior to 1945—from the mid- to late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century—there was an apparent consensus about what constituted "danger": prostitution and obscenity. Sullivan draws on convict historiography, together with theoretical approaches to histories of sexuality, to describe this period. Her exploration of a number of nineteenth-century acts including Contagious Diseases legislation is economical and useful. The postwar period was, unlike this period dealt with more briefly by Sullivan, not a period of consensus about sex and the laws around it. Rising fears about male homosexuality, for instance, gender roles, and the arguably resexualised postwar woman contributed to an increasingly more complex set of social understandings of sex.	3
The central chapters in the book deal with the tensions between the so-called "Sexual Revolution," conservative Australia and the limits of this "revolution," and the "Libertarian" moments of the 1970s. The new sexual culture of the late 1950s impacted peoples' lives and gender relations and also law and public policy. Australian trends toward legislation that limited people's access to print media about sex are placed within an international context. For instance, British and American efforts to determine the bounds of "obscenity" were echoed in Australia, with bans on the magazine Playboy until 1967. The responsibility for the determining of these boundaries fell to the states, which led to regional differences in Australia where legislation around materials deemed pornographic is concerned. Sullivan's detailed explorations of the acts and their implications is highly interesting. The case of Oz magazine, much publicized and clearly symbolic of the tussle between "libertarian" and "conservative" viewpoints, opened up a new sense of what might be acceptable within law. From 1967 a new category of restricted publications was defined in the law in amendments to the Obscene and Indecent Publications Act.	4
While the debates around publications that were possibly obscene led to a relaxing of legal codes, even while the legal classifications around obscenity became more complex, the question of prostitution as explored here indicates that new social concerns about "sex" were emerging. Describing the Wolfenden Report, published in Britain, Sullivan draws on Jeffrey Weeks to explain that there was an important shift in the regulation of society in the late 1950s and 1960s. Prostitution was being decriminalized and morality was being redefined. By the early 1970s, it was the question of the sex industry, and how to regulate it, that had become central to the debate about sex in the political arena in Australia.	5
The final section of the book deals with the period from the mid 1970s to the contemporary era and, as such, brings into play some of the most interesting aspects of legal and political culture, and how these collide with sexual culture, in this history. Sex, it could be assumed from the postwar era, was not going to "go away," and in fact, as historians have shown, its importance to social history cannot be ignored. Feminist arguments about the effects of certain types of pornographic material found their way into debates in this latter period. Thus the deployment of feminist discourse (as Sullivan shows) becomes "wide" and part of the "mainstream." New concerns, especially regarding pornography that depicts children, became part of debates too, so that some of the libertarian ideals of the earlier age were looking increasingly questionable. And yet others were reclaiming sex: same-sex relationships were increasingly depicted in erotic material for same-sex audiences, and prostitutes have redefined themselves as sex-workers.	6
In The Politics of Sex, Barbara Sullivan provides a detailed historical account of laws around sex in Australia. The implications of these are also explored so that Sullivan can, as I suggested at the outset of this review, get to the core of that which interests her the most. What Sullivan manages to show is that the less visible "discursive shifts in law-makers' understandings of prostitution and pornography" have contributed to a changing sexual culture in Australia. Her work within a feminist culture, too, has helped her shape her conclusion: that ideals of "mutuality" and a changing sexual contract have influenced some shifts in sexual culture as much as they have been about the definition of "normality" and morality. There is no one stable meaning for prostitution, for instance. Sullivan has made a very useful contribution to scholarship and manages at the same time to hold a conversation with those in the "political arena."	7
Cathy Coleborne University of Waikato

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.