Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification By Rae Langton (original) (raw)
Related papers
On Pornography: MacKinnon, Speech Acts, and “False” Construction
Hypatia, 2005
Although others have focused on Catharine MacKinnon's claim that pornography subordinates and silences women, 1 here focus on her claim that pornography constructs women's nature and that this construction is, in some sense, false. Since it is unclear how pornography, as speech, can construct facts and how constructed facts can nevertheless be false, MacKinnon's claim requires elucidation. Appealing to speech act theory, 1 introduce an analysis of the erroneous verdictiwe and use it to make sense of MacKinnon's constructionist claims. 1 also show that the erroneous verdictive is of more general interest.
IX-Pornography, Speech Acts and Context
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Hardback), 2006
Catharine MacKinnon has claimed that pornography is the subordination of women. Rae Langton has defended the plausibility and coherence of this claim by drawing on speech act theory. I argue that considering the role of context in speech acts poses serious problems for Langton's defence of MacKinnon. Langton's account can be altered in order to accommodate the role of context. Once this is done, however, her defence of MacKinnon no longer looks so plausible. Finally, I argue that the speech act approach (adapted to account for context) offers an appealing way to make sense of disagreements over pornography; but also that this will probably not be so appealing to most proponents of the speech acts approach.
Las Torres de Lucca. Revista internacional de filosofia politica, 2021
Through her silencing thesis, Langton has contributed to the study of epistemic injustice by highlighting a possible cause of such a phenomenon: She asserts that the pornographic representation of (straight) sexual relationships affects the felicity conditions of speech uttered by women, so this speech is not understood as an illocution by men. This fact arguably undermines women's credibility, since their testimony is not even registered in men's testimonial sensibility. However, this thesis entails problematic consequences from at least two standpoints. From a theoretical perspective, it enacts a circularity when it comes to the empirical individuation of the subordinative effects of pornography. I will point out that this problem arises from Langton's substantive conception of power, i.e. from her notion of authority as an attribute which can be ascribed to preexisting subjects. From a political perspective, such conception of power allows Langton to performatively rank women as credible when testifying sexual violence, but it also leads her to silencing alternative political strategies, e.g. the ones proposed by Butler. Hence, I propose to consider this form of silencing as a specific kind of epistemic injustice, one that neutralises the performative value of political discourses.
A liberal anti-porn feminism? (forthcoming in Social Theory and Practice)
Social Theory and Practice
In the 1980s and 1990s, a series of attempts were made to put into U.S. law a civil rights ordinance that would make it possible to sue the makers and distributors of pornography for doing so (under certain conditions). One defence of such legislation has come to be called "the free speech argument against pornography." Philosophers Rae Langton, Jennifer Hornsby and Caroline West have supposed that this defence of the legislation can function as a liberal defence of the legislation: in particular, a defence of the legislation based on the value of women's liberty. This would be somewhat unexpected given MacKinnon's own antipathy toward liberalism. In this paper, I argue that the free speech argument against pornography cannot be used as a liberal defence of the ordinances. The legislation is, to some extent, self-defeating insofar as it understood in terms acceptable to a fairly standard kind of liberal. This becomes apparent when we consider the value pornography can have for women, which we can see if we consider what female makers, distributors and consumers of pornography have to say about why they make, distribute and consume it.
An Object of Discourse for Studies of Pornography
Questions de communication, 2014
This English translation has not been published in printed form/Cette traduction anglaise n'a pas été publiée sous forme imprimée. Pornography has been the subject of much recent discussion, particularly in France. It has become an everyday theme in media discourse as the numerous articles, special files and columns in the printed and online press demonstrate, as does the multiplication of "sex" features under various names in nearly all the French daily and weekly papers, on numerous radio stations and television channels 1. Pornography has also become a research subject and is now an integral part of humanities and social science studies in France 2 , although it is new and somewhat controversial for some. A recent object for sciences of discourse and communication Pornography is rarely studied from a standpoint involving language, discourse and, more broadly, representations. This is the subject of this thematic issue devoted to the discourse of pornography in all senses of the term whether written, oral, techno-discursive, verboiconic, photographical or even, as we shall see, unconscious. At first glance, pornography may seem to escape language and communications specialists given that everyone appears to agree that it is above all a matter of sexual organs, images, fluids or positions-bodies in a word. What is more, it would take a wise person to draw up exact borders between pornography, eroticism and sexuality-all fields An Object of Discourse for Studies of Pornography Questions de communication, 26 | 2014