Critical Inquiry
Spring 1995
Volume 21, Number 3
Excerpt from "Pornography: The Theory" by Frances Ferguson:
"What does Catharine MacKinnon mean by pornography? What account of
pornography is she putting forward when, in "Francis Biddle's Sister:
Pornography, Civil Rights and Speech," she writes that pornography is
"a practice of sex discrimination" that "combines a mode of portrayal
that has a legal history-- the sexually explicit-- with an active term
that is central to the inequality of the sexes-- subordination"("FBS."
pp.176)? What do she and Andrea Dworkin mean to accomplish, and what
do they accomplish, by talking about what pornography does rather than
about what pornography is? In the essays MacKinnon wrote on
pornography in the 1980s, she spoke of "pornography as a practice of
sex discrimination" and of "what it does behaviorally" ("FBS." pp.176,
177). In her most recent book, Only Words, she speaks
continually of pornography in terms that treat it as an action-- or a
variety of actions-- rather than as an object-- or a collection of
objects. This is a formulation or verbal habit sufficiently
interesting to require some examination. We could portray it as simply
a matter of rhetorical escalation, a histrionics designed largely for
demagogic effect. Or we could render it fatuous by paraphrasing it as
a statement that all speech is behavior, thus making pornography look
like a subset of language in general, merely one example among the
myriad examples of the operations of prose. The aim of this essay is
to set aside those two dismissive accounts of MacKinnon's position, to
examine some of the arguments of some of her opponents, and to isolate
what I take to be the most interesting aspect of the Dworkin-MacKinnon
position, namely, its attempt to suggest a connection between
pornography and action that continually demands a revision of the ways
in which the law acknowledges, and, indeed, formulates action..."
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