Office: Corliss-Brackett 216
Phone: 401-863-3217
Email: rikiheck@brown.edu
Website: http://rkheck.frege.org/
Office Hours: W 12-1, F1-2
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Instructor: Richard Kimberly Heck Office: Corliss-Brackett 216 Phone: 401-863-3217 Email: rikiheck@brown.edu Website: http://rkheck.frege.org/ Office Hours: W 12-1, F1-2 |
Pornography as we know it today was born in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and feminists have been concerned about its influence ever since. Indeed, in the late 1970s, pornography become the central concern of many feminists, so much so that, even today, the term 'feminist pornography' strikes some people as self-contradictory. The usual charge was that pornography causes sexual violence: "Pornography is the theory, and rape is the practice", as Robin Morgan famously put it. The causal connection was always hard to prove, however, and in the 1980s the argument shifted. Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon argued that pornography did not just cause women's sexual and social subordination but somehow constituted it: In some robust sense, pornography was supposed to make it the case that sexual violence is legitimate.
But feminists have never been of one mind about this issue. Early opponents included the Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce (FACT) and 'sex-positive' feminists such as Gayle Rubin, Lynne Segal, and Ellen Willis. These critics articulated powerful (and sometimes angry) rebuttals of the claims of MacKinnon, et al, even while emphasizing that they too regard (much) pornography as distasteful and, in some ways, socially harmful. Given the social and political context, however, their emphasis was, understandably, always on denying that pornography 'caused rape' or 'licensed women's subordination'—and so on denying that pornography was an appropriate target for (any form of) censorship. As a result, these feminists never clearly articulated their own account of pornography's harmfulness. Something similar is true today. Only rarely do 'anti-censorship' feminists address the question what social harm pornography might do, and how, and what we might do in response.
That is my own present research goal: to develop an account of why (certain kinds of) pornography are not just distasteful or even offensive, but are productive or supportive of socio-sexual norms that are contrary to women's equality.1 I doubt that we will quite get to the point where I can articulate such a view, but I hope that we will get close enough to see what such a view might be like.
We'll start by considering the attempt by Jennifer Hornsby and Rae Langton, in the early 1990s, to develop Dworkin and MacKinnon's arguments by drawing upon work in the philosophy of language. We'll consider some of the criticisms offered in response and (hopefully) learn some lessons we can apply later.
One of the great ironies about the philosophical literature on this topic is that, as much as it has to say about Pornography the Abstraction, it has very little to say about actual pornography. As a result, the literature tends to feature some very broad claims about the nature of pornography that have little basis in reality. On the rare occasions when specific claims are made about specific films or pictorials, they tend to be at best exaggerated and at worst pre-determined by an ideology that refuses to grant pornography any complexity at all. Outside philosophy, however, there has been a great deal of careful analysis of pornographic media. A major inflection point was Linda Williams's groundbreaking study of pornography as film, Hard Core, which was first published in 1989. We'll read that book and some later contributions from queer theory and sexuality studies, all by way of encouraging and practicing a more nuanced 'reading' of pornography.
All of this will help to motivate a somewhat different approach to the question what is objectionable about much 'mainstream' pornography. It's a common refrain that sexually explicit media doesn't have to be misogynistic. One way to address the question what exactly is wrong with much pornography would therefore be to ask what 'better' pornography might be like. In fact, however, such pornography actually exists—or, at least, there are people out there who are at least trying to create pornography that is 'better'.
Such pornography dates to the early 1980s, when several women (most notably, Candida Royale) began creating pornography that, they hoped, would reflect something of women's sexual experience and embody a more feminist perspective on sex and gender. Such pornography came to be known as feminist pornography.2 In the last few decades, the internet has solved the distribution problem that independent pornographers had previously faced,3 and there has been an explosion of such work recently. Philosophers have started to pay attention to it—though, as we'll see, often with their ideological blinders still firmly in place. We'll watch some of this work ourselves and then read some of the commentaries on it—both as a different way of exploring normative questions about pornography and also to practice reading pornography critically.
1 Pornography can also be racist, homophobic, trans-misogynistic, ableist, and objectionable in any number of other ways. We may consider some of these issues, as well.
2 Queer pornography is born around the same time, with the founding of the lesbian erotic magazine On Our Backs in 1984 and the birth of an associated video production company, Fatale Video, in 1985. (Gay male porn is older, but, as we'll see when we read Richard Dyer, it did not necessarily merit the label 'queer' until later.)
3 Royale remarks in many of her retrospectives that she found it difficult to find distributors who would handle her films—not because they found them objectionable, but because they thought they wouldn't sell. Women, she was told, don't watch pornography.