This thesis explores the relationship between pornography, eroticism, and censorship, focusing on the reception of sexually explicit representations in literature and film by the public and governing bodies in their sociopolitical, cultural, and legal contexts. My comparative analysis of Marquis de Sade’s Justine (1797), its intertextual dialogist, Pauline Réage’s Story of O (1954), and their respective twentieth-century screen adaptations, by Jess Franco and Just Jaeckin, attempts to demonstrate changes in attitudes toward what once was considered to be top-shelf cultural production over time. Drawing on the intersection of cultural, feminist, film, sexuality, and pornography studies, my work examines how, and to what extent, Sade, Réage, Franco, and Jaeckin had their fair share of trouble with censorship laws, and the ways they challenge and subvert the accepted sexual norms and, by extension, then current state body politics by propagating the ideas of sexual freedom, freedom of choice, and sexual equality
