Beyond Explicit by Hester Helen

Beyond Explicit by Hester Helen

Author:Hester, Helen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2014-03-20T16:00:00+00:00


The Role of Violence in Understandings of the Pornographic

As I suggested in my brief discussion of Not a Love Story and Mercy, and in Chapter 1’s analysis of the resemblance of Dworkin’s polemical tableaux to works of pornographic flash fiction, many anti-pornography feminist tracts touch on sexual acts in ways that verge on the explicit. Their vulnerability to being labeled as pornographic is perhaps, therefore, not particularly surprising. However, as we have seen, many of the texts that Wood discusses do not even come close to sexual explicitness, and at times omit corporeal forms altogether. That Wood is able to position these texts as pornographic is in some ways a triumph of the ideas of anti-pornography feminism, and much of his discussion of British abolitionist propaganda as pornography is made possible by the theoretical maneuverings of Dworkin, MacKinnon, and their ilk. After all, despite the sporadic explicitness of their own writing, many of these thinkers work to diminish the importance of sexuality in any conceptualization of the pornographic, positioning violence, rather than sex, at the center of this contested cultural category. Dworkin, for example, claims that the “spread of pornography that uses live women, real women, is the spread of the whorehouse, the concentration camp for women, the house of sexual slaughter” (“Pornography and Male Supremacy” 234),12 while Steinham argues that, unlike the “mutually pleasurable, sexual expression” of erotica (53), pornography is really concerned with “violence, dominance, and conquest” (53). Longino, meanwhile, makes the anti-pornography feminist decentering of sex within pornography very clear: “What is wrong with pornography, then, is its degrading and dehumanizing portrayal of women (and not its sexual content)” (87).

The high profile of this facet of the women’s movement has resulted in the particular reconceptualization of pornography that it enacts gaining something of a toehold in the contemporary imagination. Although common-sensical understandings of adult entertainment may prioritize sexual contents and affects, the word “pornography” also now brings with it a realm of associations with violence and violation.13 Indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary entry for “pornography” not only states that it is the “explicit description or exhibition of sexual subjects or activity in literature, painting, films, etc., in a manner intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic feelings,” but also makes reference to the word’s extended use in the “pornography of violence”; for the OED, “pornography” is now linked to “the explicit description or depiction of violence in a manner intended to stimulate or excite.” From this, we can clearly see that pornography is widely understood as being in some way associated with ideas of violence.

This linkage is not entirely the result of the sex wars, perhaps. After all, as Carolyn Dean remarks, “social commentators and analysts began to postulate a significant link between the wartime proliferation of pornography and the unprecedented violence of modern combat” in the immediate wake of World War I (61), and it was at this point, she suggests, that “pornography and violence became continuous with descriptions of assaults on the integrity of the



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