”Hur i helvete kan ni komma och kalla oss porrblad?”: Pornografiska inslag och abjekt kroppslighet i undergroundtidskriften PUSS

Sammanfattning

The satirical underground magazine PUSS, published in twenty four regular numbers in the Swedish language between 1968 and 1973, used provocative images and texts to get its critique and commentary across. This included pornographically coded images depicting nude bodies and genitalia, which in the third issue came in the form of manipulated photographs of nude or semi-nude political leaders. These images, especially the one depicting party leader Sven Wedén (FP) holding his penis up with pliers, garnered a lot of attention from newspapers at the time, leading to the magazine to be labeled by many as pornographic. This study aims to examine this porn label by looking both at the reactions in the press and in PUSS itself, as well as the visual-verbal rhetoric of the magazine itself, on the basis of the following question: a) How can PUSS's third issue's pornographic label be understood through the reactions in daily newspapers and PUSS? b) How are bodies and physicality portrayed in the magazine? c) What functions do the pornographic and abject elements in the magazine serve? This is done through reception history in the first part of the analysis, using a theoretical framework from Wolfgang Kemp and Stuart Hall, followed by a semiotic breakdown and comparison of two images from PUSS number 3 based on Roland Barthes Rhetoric of the Image. In the last part of the analysis, the discussion is widened to address the visual-verbal rhetoric of the magazine as a whole, based on three aspects: Criticism and ridicule, sex and gender, and pornography in the public sphere.