This project develops a computational approach to the study of sexual visual culture from the 1960s to the present. It is grounded in the premise that the sexual revolution was not only a transformation of norms, behaviors, and identities, but also a visual and media revolution. As sexual images circulated through magazines, films, advertisements, posters, public-health materials, activist media, and digital archives, they had crucial role in defining which forms of sexuality became visible, legitimate, desirable, educational, obscene, marginal, or absent. The project positions sexual visibility as the central focus of its analysis. Rather than treating images as passive reflections of social change, it examines how visual media actively shaped sexual meanings, moral boundaries, and hierarchies of gender, sexuality, class, and race. Thus, the study connects the history of the “long sexual revolution” with contemporary questions about digitized archives, computational methods, and critical sexualities studies.
Methodologically, the project will compile a corpus of approximately 10,000 items from around 30 online archives of sexual visual culture. These include mainstream and underground magazines, feminist and queer archives, public-health campaigns, political posters, erotic photography, zines, and other visual materials. The appendix lists sources such as Kinsey Institute Digital, Digital Trans Archive, and QZAP. The research will develop a staged computational workflow for sorting, interpreting, and tracing these materials. A pilot sample will refine thematic categories and test image-analysis tools. A hand-labeled reference set will support validation and calibration. The full corpus will then be categorized computationally, while selected cases will undergo close visual and multimodal analysis. The project will also trace the republication and reuse of selected images across platforms, periods, and contexts to examine how sexual meanings change through circulation.
The project’s contribution is threefold: it advances critical sexualities studies by making large-scale visual archives analytically accessible; it develops a reproducible computational-humanistic workflow for studying sensitive visual materials; and it offers a new framework for understanding sexual visibility as an active force in shaping norms, identities, and cultural meanings across the long sexual revolution.