Year: 1994
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This thesis examines whether the Canadian state's interest in maintaining the long-term legitimacy of cunent social relations has prompted a co-optive response to Canadian feminists, critique of pornography.Specifically, I question whether a feminist inte¡est in promoting insurgent social change -by altering the nature of the state's approach to pomographyhas been co-opted by the Supreme Court decision in R. v. Butler (lggL).I argue -from a socialist feminist perspectivethat pornography is an institution of an imperial-capitalist and hetero-patriarchal society.Through pornography sexual subjectivity is constituted.As constitutive in and of socio-sexual subjectivity, pomographic practices reproduce gendered power relations.Owing to the fact that the state has done little by way of conuolling por.nography,I argue that the state implicitly supports the ideology of pornography.From this perspective, I interrogate the possibility of lawas a mechanism of state powerto transform gender relations.I conclude that agents of the state responsible for judicial praxis fail to comprehend the complexity of pornography from a sociolbgical point of view.Owing to this failure, the law tends to persist in legitimizing, thereby nonnalizing, hegemonic socio-sexual subjectivity and practice.
Source: Mspace (University of Manitoba)
Author: Johnson, Kirsten K.
Language: English
Subfield: Gender Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7071613359