Feminist theories on porn: did pornography 'kill' feminism?

Résumé

This article begins from the problem that much of the feminist literature on the question of pornography—a phenomenon that traverses women’s sexuality deeply and particularly, both symbolically and materially—has, over time, been confined to the dichotomous “pro-sex” and anti-pornography perspectives crystallized in the U.S. sex wars of the 1970s and 1980s and in their legal-theoretical developments. These perspectives are insufficient to encompass the phenomenon’s complexity and multidimensionality. The effort to map the theoretical positions on pornography established throughout the history of feminist epistemologies—and the main theoretical tensions that continue to structure the debate—is justified by the intrinsic need for these perspectives to remain in constant movement and renewal in the face of social, political, and economic changes that affect the experience of being a woman, in a broad sense, and, above all, women’s experience of sexuality. The study conducts a qualitative, exploratory narrative literature review of a corpus of eleven works by eleven authors—including Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, Carole Pateman, Gayle Rubin, Nadine Strossen, Wendy McElroy, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, and Amia Srinivasan—selected according to explicit inclusion and classification criteria. Its central hypothesis is that moving beyond the pro-sex/anti-pornography dichotomy and placing feminist disagreements in dialogue, rather than setting them against one another, makes a more precise and consistent interpretation of the phenomenon possible. The findings show that feminist currents, understood in their greater plurality—even though they often continue to diverge over porn—can critically integrate the material conditions of production and circulation, grammars of desire, and intersectional effects.