By examining the highly contested legal debate about the regulation of pornography through an epistemic lens, this book analyzes competing claims about the proper role of speech in our society, pornography's harm, the relationship between speech and equality, and whether law should regulate and, if so, upon what grounds. In maintaining that inegalitarian pornography generates discursive effects, the book contends that law cannot simply adopt a libertarian approach to free speech. While inegalitarian pornography may not be determinative of gender inequality, it does contribute, reinforce, reflect and help maintain such unfairness. As a result, we can place reasonable gender-based regulations on inegalitarian pornography while upholding our most treasured commitments to dissident speech just as other liberal democracies with strong free speech traditions have done.
Lynn Mills Eckert is associate professor of political science at Marist College.
Part I - Sociology of Knowledge - "We Already Regulate Pornography for Gender-Based Reasons without Acknowledging It" Chapter 1 - Regulating Pornography: Comparing the Zoning Approach and Nude Dancing Cases to Hudnut Chapter 2 - Language Games and the Zoning and Nude Dancing Cases Part II - The Legal Landscape that Acts to Exclude Knowledge Claims about Pornography Chapter 3 - Categories and Epistemic Gatekeeping in Free Speech Jurisprudence Chapter 4 - A Critique of the Content-Neutrality Principle Chapter 5 - Proving Pornography's Harms - Where Speech Act Theory, Causality, and the Performative Fall Short Chapter 6 - Discursive Effects: A Different Framework to Understand the Harm from Speech Part III - Liberal Law and a New Theory of Harm Chapter 7 - Discursive Effects and Liberal Law Chapter 8 - Reconsidering the tension between Liberty and Equality
An original and deeply insightful analysis of indirect strategies employed by American law to regulate pornography and the sex industry. Building on a wide range of feminist and critical race scholarship, Eckert's book displays the historically and culturally biased systems of knowledge production that shape what counts as harms, and offers a new theory of discursive harm. By rejecting simplistic accounts of objectivity, evidence, and neutrality, Eckert challenges us to deepen the liberal and egalitarian aspirations that underlie our constitution. A terrific book! -- Stephen Macedo, Princeton University
