Feminist fundamentalism - women against images - controversy over art censorship - Column

Art in America, Sept, 1993 by Carole S. Vance

Also comic were the earnest avowals of both law students and antiporn feminists that their actions did not constitute censorship. Here, too, they adopted the rhetorical technique of fundamentalist groups in the NEA controversy, who intuited that an explicit defense, and therefore acknowledgment, of censorship is a liability in public debate. The statements of future lawyers were especially dismaying, is they seemed to reflect the speakers, shallow legal training and hypertrophic credulousness. Bryan Wells, a law student and one of the exhibition's organizers, said, "We really didn't think of it as a censorship issue, but as a safety issue.... It wasn't our place to assess that threat. It was our position to trust our speakers."[16] The dean of the law school, Lee Bollinger, also engaged in some creative reasoning over the course of the controversy, though his imaginative explanations perhaps make more sense when seen in light of the ACLU's threatened lawsuit. Against concerns about artists, freedom of speech, Bollinger raised issues of student rights - "that includes the right to be unreasonable as well as the right to be reasonable."[17] Bollinger argued that students, too, were entitled to free expression: "Student organizations can invite or disinvite people to speak at conferences, and it's within their legal and constitutional rights."[18] This spurious analogy between planning conferences and removing art from a gallery is unconvincing, since it would propose a rather Orwellian definition of "free expression" - the right to eliminate any speech or art one doesn't like.[19]

The parallels between the antipornography feminist and fundamentalist attacks on art extend beyond tactics and rhetoric. Both share a powerful desire to reshape cultural attitudes toward sexual imagery as part of a larger program of political, social and legal reform. It is no accident that this incident occurred at the University of Michigan Law School, where Catharine MacKinnon has been elaborating legal theory about the harm of pornography and training enthusiastic students in innovative ways to erode First Amendment protections for sexual images and speech. Though interpretations differ about the degree of MacKinnon's involvement in this episode (she claims that she did not see the videotapes and only conveyed to the exhibition organizers various speakers, objections to the tapes), she has publicly supported the students, actions: "It is one thing to talk about trafficking women, and it is another thing to traffic women. There is nothing in the First Amendment to require that this school, or students in it, be forced to traffic women. If these materials are pornography - and I haven't seen them, so I can't say - it is not a question of their offensiveness, but of safety and equality for women. Showing pornography sets women up for harassment and rape."[20]

These parallels should come as no surprise. Like fundamentalists, antipornography feminists have long embraced a two-step strategy that melds cultural and legal activism. Both employ cultural campaigns to enlarge the popularly understood definition of pornography (the pejorative category for bad, harmful or immoral material) to include virtually all sexual imagery. In addition, because current law prohibits only sexual material which is obscene, both are crafting innovative legal strategies to expand the definition of obscenity and, hence, the scope of obscenity law. In their efforts to disable their political opponents, both groups are skilled in deploying demagogic charges of "pornography, and mobilizing sex panics in order to eliminate expression, images and perspectives that counter their own agenda.