Smut and Sandwiches

In Smut and Sandwiches, Russell Sheaffer reconstructs the history of “stag films,” spanning from the term’s roots in the late nineteenth century to the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography’s 1970 Report, which used the term to refer to early hardcore film. While histories of pornography equate the phrase with sexually explicit films, Sheaffer draws from an archive of advertisements, newspaper reports, institutional records, and public spaces to show that the early stag films were comprised of a variety of genres deemed to be popular with men, including boxing pictures, slapstick comedies, films that displayed women’s bodies through dancing or modeling, and both softcore and hardcore representations of sex. Sheaffer highlights how the 1920s vice reform movements played a crucial role in shaping the codification of the term itself as well as the environments in which stag films would be viewed and remembered, ironically making screenings more noteworthy than they would have been otherwise. Smut and Sandwiches intervenes in the established history of transgressive film to understand the methods and consequences of mobilizing and modifying language in service of moral and political aims.