Thursday, April 5, 2007


In On Pornography: Literature, Sexuality, and Obscenity Law (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993), Ian Hunter, David Saunders, and Dugald Williamson argue, after Foucault, that pornography is not produced by the repression of true, real, or healthy sexuality. Rather it is a sexual practice produced within the context of what they call "a perpetually shifting and multiple pornographic field." The divide between aesthetics and pornography is the effect of a complex set of overlapping disciplinary apparatuses: the law, the police, literary standards, and so forth (the "pornographic field")—whose form and content necessarily changes over time. Although the unspeakable pleasure or subversive power associated with pornography paradoxically extends the tentacles of regulatory power, the boundary between the aesthetic and the pornographic also marks what Abigail Solomon-Godeau refers to as "the failure of a discursive cordon sanitaire" the attempt at segregating the licit from the illicit that constantly fails.

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