Bound And Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America is a 1996 book by Laura Kipnis

Laura Kipnis

Laura Kipnis is a professor of media studies at Northwestern University. She is also a cultural and media critic who focuses especially on gender issues, sexual politics, popular culture, and pornography...

. It attempts to approach pornography

Pornography

Pornography or porn is the explicit portrayal of sexual subject matter for the purposes of sexual arousal and erotic satisfaction.Pornography may use any of a variety of media, ranging from books, magazines, postcards, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, film, video,...

 in a new way, focusing not on whether pornography is a serious social ill, but rather on its nature and what its function and meaning might be in the lives of its audience as well as the lives of those who seek to ban or suppress it.

The book is divided into five sections, each of which can stand more or less independently as individual essays:

1. "Fantasy In America: The United States v. Daniel Thomas DePew" presents an account of the first computer bulletin board entrapment case, in which Daniel DePew is convicted of conspiring to make a snuff film
   Snuff film
   A snuff film is a motion picture genre that depicts the actual death or murder of a person or people, without the aid of special effects, for the express purpose of distribution and entertainment or financial exploitation. For-profit snuff films are generally regarded as an urban legend, whose...
   
    and sentenced to thirty-three years in prison even though there was little evidence that his "plans" were anything other than kinky sexual fantasy.
2. "Clothes Make The Man" is a look at transvestite pornography, specifically the self-portrait personal advertistements, comparing them to the more "respectable" work of photographer Cindy Sherman
   Cindy Sherman
   Cindy Sherman is an American photographer and film director, best known for her conceptual portraits. Sherman currently lives and works in New York City. In 1995, she was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. She is represented by Sprüth Magers Berlin London in and Metro Pictures gallery in...
   
   .
3. "Life In The Fat Lane" is about fat fetish pornography and contemporary American culture's anxiety and hypocrisy about fat and desire. She argues that pornography featuring obese subjects is a revolt against the cultural esthetic of thinness.
4. "Disgust And Desire: Hustler Magazine" discusses Larry Flynt
   Larry Flynt
   Larry Claxton Flynt, Jr. is an American publisher and the president of Larry Flynt Publications . In 2003, Arena magazine listed him as the number one on the "50 Powerful People in Porn" list....
   
   's use of pornography as a political, class-conscious act. It also examines feminists' disgust with Hustler
   Hustler
   Hustler is a monthly pornographic magazine aimed at men and published in the United States. It was first published in 1974 by Larry Flynt. It was a step forward from the Hustler Newsletter which was cheap advertising for his strip club businesses at the time. The magazine grew from a shaky start to...
   
   and similar magazines because they are class-based.
5. "How To Look At Pornography," the book's conclusion, discusses (among other things) the marriage of anti-pornography writer Catharine MacKinnon
   Catharine MacKinnon
   Catharine Alice MacKinnon is an American feminist, scholar, lawyer, teacher and activist.- Biography :MacKinnon was born in Minnesota. Her mother is Elizabeth Valentine Davis; her father, George E. MacKinnon was a lawyer, congressman , and judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit...
   
    and anti-psychoanalytic writer Jeffrey Masson.

Kipnis rejects the more militant anti-pornography

Anti-pornography movement

The term anti-pornography movement is used to describe those who argue that pornography has a variety of harmful effects, such as encouragement of human trafficking, desensitization, pedophilia, dehumanization, sexual exploitation, sexual dysfunction, and inability to maintain healthy sexual...

 views expressed by feminists such as Andrea Dworkin

Andrea Dworkin

Andrea Rita Dworkin was an American radical feminist and writer best known for her criticism of pornography, which she argued was linked to rape and other forms of violence against women....

 and dismisses the conservative movement to exempt pornography from First Amendment

First Amendment to the United States Constitution

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. The amendment prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering...

 protection. She sets out her view that pornography is a legitimate cultural expression which exposes class prejudices and sexual hypocrisy while it deliberately seeks to transcend taboos. The book involves themes including Freudian analysis

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...

, consumer capitalism

Consumer capitalism

Consumer capitalism is a theoretical economic and political condition in which consumer demand is manipulated, in a deliberate and coordinated way, on a very large scale, through mass-marketing techniques, to the advantage of sellers....

, and societal taboos

Taboo

A taboo is a strong social prohibition relating to any area of human activity or social custom that is sacred and or forbidden based on moral judgment, religious beliefs and or scientific consensus. Breaking the taboo is usually considered objectionable or abhorrent by society...

.