Feminist and LGBTQ+ Studies

Abstract

Throughout the 1960s and 70’s, the United States witnessed an unprecedented eruption of visual sexual culture, accompanied by feminist protest, legal debate and cultural backlash. While 
magazines like Hustler and Penthouse drew public ire for their overt explicitness, Playboy‘s imagery quickly became cloaked in the aesthetics of prestige and bourgeois taste. This presentation explores how Playboy’s visual discourse operated not through obvious obscenity or outright objectification, but through a more insidious sexist choreography. 

I interrogate Playboy’s imagery not as mere representation but as a disciplinary space that trains the embodied viewers’ perception as a site of hegemonic power. Drawing on Ann Cahill’s 
work (2011), I identify three interlinked mechanisms naturalize Playboy’s misogynistic fantasy as reality: 1. Derivatization of women’s identities, where women are depicted not as objects but as 
curated personae, rendering personhood erotically legible to readers; 2. Kayfabe of the “Playmate of the month” sections - a staged, self-aware spectacle that upholds masculine entitlement while 
masking its violence as civility; 3. The motif of the “Rabbit Hunt”, inviting readers to find the hidden logo on Playboy’s covers. This ritual cultivates a skilled vision – a learned visual literacy that trains 
the viewers to detect signs of willingness and erotic potential in any and all feminine appearances. 

Far from harmless indulgence, Playboy’s aestheticization of personhood underpins logic of sexual violence and victim blaming (Hill, 2016). To examine such phenomena, we must move beyond 
representation analysis towards an interdisciplinary understanding of how visual culture conditions embodied viewers and sustaines real-life harm under the guise of sophistication.

Biography

Anna Kleiman is a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, at the University of Amsterdam. She holds a BA (cum laude) in Art History and Theater Studies, and an MA (cum 
laude) in Art History and Gender Studies from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Published in several books and journals, Kleiman is an interdisciplinary researcher of scandal, visual culture, 
femininities and sexuality. Her work investigates how public outrage, aesthetic norms and social decency normalize misogyny and sexual violence, as well as how they are contested through 
feminist and activist resistance.