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How to Screw Things with Words

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Lorna Finlayson
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Abstract

Since its influential rendering by Rae Langton in her 1993 paper, “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts,” the “silencing argument” against pornography has become the subject of a lively debate that continues to this day. My intention in this paper is not to join in the existing debate, but to give a critical overview of it. In its current form, I suggest, it is going nowhere (and has been en route for too long already). Yet the silencing argument, I believe, nevertheless contains an indispensable insight—and more radical potential than is usually acknowledged either by its defenders or its opponents. I argue that in order to preserve this insight and unleash its potential, we should begin by adopting the following motto: MacKinnon, not Austin!

Type
Open Issue Content
Information
Hypatia , Volume 29 , Issue 4 , Fall 2014 , pp. 774 - 789
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 by Hypatia, Inc.

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Footnotes

My thanks to Koshka Duff, Raymond Geuss, Katharine Jenkins, and Basim Musallam, as well as to two anonymous referees for Hypatia, for useful comments and discussion.

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