Thesis Excerpt

Breaking Points: Women, Sexuality, Pornography, and the Vicissitudes of Feminist Group-Making Projects, 1970-1986

by Quin Aaron Shakra

The act of definition—especially self-definition—is thus paramount to the work of social movements. To transform social relations, it becomes necessary to define them in a way that accurately reflects the positions and desires of the ground for which the transformation is to occur. The act of definition, then, requires the creation of a group itself — in other words, the creation of a new and meaningful identity.¹ –Catriona Sandilands

On October 20 1979, more than 5,000 feminists, college students, and activists marched through New York City's Times Square district, protesting 42nd Street's lascivious sex shops, peep shows and X-rated movie theatres, all named through the umbrella term "pornography." Protesters held signs reading, "Porn hurts women" and "Pornography is a feminist issue." They chanted phrases such as "Clean it up, shut it down, make New York a safer town" and "Two, four, six, eight, pornography is womanhate."Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, and Susan Brownmiller, all prominent feminists who had been active from early on in the women's movement, fronted the march, holding a banner that succinctly summarized their anti-porn stance: "Women Against Pornography. Stop Violence Against Women." The three were also founding members of the New York City-based group Women Against Pornography (WAP), which was involved in organizing the protest. ² WAP had made the Times Square area its ground zero of organizing, leading weekly tours of the area and strategically locating its office on nearby Ninth Avenue.

The protest featured many tropes common to popular activism of the late 1960s and early 1970s, including the size of the rally, its visibility, and ostensibly unified agenda. On the ground, feminists explained their oppositions to porn as women. For instance, one protestor claimed, "Pornography merchants have lied about all of us, libeled and defamed all of us and given us cause to fight them together." The categorical invocation of "us" and "all," by the protestor implied that women shared similar viewpoints concerning the role that predominately male-created, sexually explicit representation played in women's overall oppression in society. This assumption was a central feature of anti-pornography intellectual discourse from the mid-1970s and onward. These writings consistently claimed that all women, regardless of social location, were oppressed by the existence of pornography.

The protestor's utterance of "us" and "all," referring to "all women" are examplesof what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls a "performative discourse." For Bourdieu, an especially potent moment of social struggle is the "public act of naming" that occurs during demonstrations — for example, "Pornography merchants have… given us cause to fight them together" — for this is when "the practical group — virtual, ignored, denied, or repressed – makes itself visible and manifest, for other groups and for itself, and attests to its existence as a group that is known and recognized." ³ Those involved in social struggle seek to impose, "a new vision and a new division on the social world" that establishes "meaning and a consensus about meaning, and in particular about the identity and the unity of the group." ⁴ The Times Square protest was precisely this form of groupmaking project: "women" constituting themselves as a group entity with shared interests against "pornography," the genre.

Bourdieu reminds us that the "effectiveness of… performative discourse… is directly proportional to the authority of the person doing the asserting." ⁵ Earlier in the year, WAP had begun to receive significant notice in the mainstream media, notably the New York Times and Time magazine. The latter publication had covered burgeoning antipornography activism earlier in the summer, describing the Times Square area as partand- parcel to women's "all-out war against pornography." ⁶ The October 1979 protest marked the group's largest and most highly visible anti-pornography organizing to date.

Steinem, Abzug and Brownmiller's literal fronting of the march with a banner was not only indicative of the ideological sway they held over the group of protestors, it is also a reminder that groups are created by the individuals who impose the "common principles of vision and division" upon them, principles that ultimately provide "a unique vision of [the group's] identity and an identical vision of its unity." ⁷ The banner's abridged message became the unaltered anti-pornography feminist orthodoxy over the next decade.

However, cracks in the veneer of feminist unity were also evident during the event. For instance, the Times quoted a female anti-pornography protestor who said, "There are a lot of feminist issues I would not agree with — I am against abortion, for example — but this anti-pornography move I fully support." Another group of protestors representing an organization called the Morality Action Committee attempted to join the march, bearing signs that read, "protect our children." While the group denied affiliation with anti-homosexual crusader Anita Bryant (with whom the phrase had been associated), anti-pornography feminism's ideological overlap with other conservative antipornography campaigns made such confrontations inevitable. For example, another protestor showed up at the protest holding up an anti-abortion, anti-homosexual poster. ⁸

The feminists' Times Square struggle was also enmeshed in a politics of real estate being pushed forth by the New York City government. WAP's office was leased free of charge from the 42nd Street Redevelopment Corporation, a nonprofit that received funds from the Ford Foundation and sought urban renewal in the district. A New York Times article revealed that the office had previously been, "a soul food restaurant and gathering place for transvestites and prostitutes." The piece also quoted Carl Weisbrod, a lawyer for the city's Midtown Enforcement Project: "our means and ends may not be exactly the same… [but] obviously, the issue of pornography is a matter of concern to both the city and the feminists…[and] the city needed all the help it could get on this score." ⁹ Despite this, feminists' role in "cleaning up" the area may have been more symbolic than actual; a newspaper article published a month after the October protest revealed a long-term decline in sex-related businesses over a five-year period, well before WAP had arrived there. ¹⁰

Group-Making Projects and Categories for Doing

This thesis interprets anti-pornography feminism and the ensuing conflicts over sexuality and pornography as the central elements of feminist group-making projects during the 1970s and 1980s. Feminists of the era projected specific ideologies onto the "woman" category because they understood it was the key to broad scale social and political change. Yet as feminists took up this category for their group-making projects, they reached radically contradictory conclusions that culminated in significant antipathy between the sex radical and anti-pornography feminist camps. I argue this fundamentally impacted the feminist movement's notion of the female activist subject. I illustrate this argument with a wide range of source material, including newspaper articles, conference proceedings, feminist grassroots periodicals, academic journals, and visual imagery of the era, adopting an interdisciplinary analytical approach to interpret new meanings in these cultural texts.

The work of sociologist Rogers Brubaker is attendant to how scholars in both the social sciences and humanities use the term "group." He demonstrates how both scholars and activists construe groups as "discrete, sharply differentiated, internally homogenous… unitary collective actors with common purposes… substantial entities to which interests and agency can be attributed" — a set of assumptions Brubaker calls "groupism." ¹¹ This critique gestures toward new directions for scholarship that accounts "for the ways in which — and conditions under which —this practice of reification and powerful crystallization of group feeling, can work." ¹² By focusing on the "relational, processural, dynamic, eventful… variable and contingent" of group-making activities, historians and sociologists can avoid ossifying what is in flux.

Brubaker understands group-making as a "social, cultural, and political project, aimed at transforming categories into groups." Feminism's core category has long been women as subjects and political agents, yet because there will always be more women than feminists (and more than women are feminists), this category has been unable to represent the needs and interests of all those it purports to. Brubaker suggests we can demonstrate this asymmetry between groups and categories by focusing on "how people—and organizations—do things with categories," especially the ones (such as women and sex) that have been so historically conditioned on levels of both structure and agency. ¹³

Fractures in feminism appear when the "woman" category is exposed as partial rather than universally representational, and this is precisely what occurred during the sex and pornography debates. The asymmetry between feminists' reliance upon categories and the diverse interests of actual women revealed deeply contradictory activist agendas. Their highly polarized views about meaning and moral significance of sex and but he acknowledges that "groupism extends well beyond" this domain "to include accounts of putative groups based on gender, sexuality, age, class, abledness, religion, minority status, and any kind of ‘culture,' as well as putative groups based on combinations of these categorical attributes pornography remained cloaked in considerably generic and interchangeable terms such as feminism, women and men.

Chapter Map

This thesis is divided into three chapters. The first chapter is a historiographical review of the feminist sex and pornography debates from the 1970s to 1980s. While sustained historical scholarship on the subject has until recently been quite limited, both the current and previous investigations have replicated highly contentious terms of debate, such as "cultural feminism," that emerged from the era itself. While highly divergent viewpoints about the definition and political significance of pornography and sexual practice undoubtedly polarized feminists and prompted their various group-making projects, I argue that these groups each understood the "woman" category as centrally significant to feminism, which informed their ideological battles with one another. This insight is absent from an otherwise well researched, argued, and admirably written set of texts by Alice Echols, Jane Gerhard, Carolyn Bronstein and Whitney Strub.

The second chapter focuses on the cultural and political climate of the United States during the early 1970s and its influence upon concerted feminist group-making projects around pornography. For anti-pornography feminists, a new argument about pornography drew from feminist writings, including political lesbianism, which understood that women were oppressed as women irrespective of other social considerations. Political scientist Judith Grant's insights about the "core concepts" of feminism, such as "experience" and "personal politics," help reveal how this "woman" was ultimately grounded in highly subjective notions of oppression explained through the concept of experience. Anti-pornography feminists discursively grafted these readings onto new understandings of "violence" that they discovered in a wide range of sexually explicit imagery they called "pornography." Specific authors that created this discourse were Susan Brownmiller, Gloria Steinem, Diana Russell, Robin Morgan, and Andrea Dworkin. These authors also used the politics of sexual fantasy and sexual practice and a distinction between pornography and erotica to create an overarching "woman" category against "pornography" as such.

The third chapter explores how public disputes over the nature of feminism occurred when sex radicals entered the sexuality and pornography debates. I begin with a discussion of how lesbian feminists took up controversial perspectives on sadomasochism (SM), using the late 1970s San Francisco-based collective Samois as an early example. Samois offered an alternative discourse about the relationship between sexual practice and consent that was anathema to anti-pornography writers who had adopted both an implicit and explicit anti-SM stance by the mid-1970s. This became an early fault line by which debates about pornography, sex, and feminism were polarized. A loose affiliation of feminist radicalism that eventually encompassed the writings of Pat Califia, Lisa Duggan, Ellen Willis, Gayle Rubin, Carole S. Vance and others critiqued antipornography feminists for promulgating a feminist sexual morality rooted in essentialist conceptions of women's desires that was fully compatible with the overarching conservative political climate. As they attacked these and other central assumptions of anti-pornography feminism, they did so in the name of feminism itself.

However, anti-pornography viewpoints nonetheless informed the more widely circulated and representational versions of feminism, particularly those featured in the mainstream media. New legislative strategies undertaken in the mid-1980s by antipornography feminists such as Catherine A. MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin and widely covered in the media galvanized a new faction of feminists to form around issues of censorship and the state. I discuss how anti-porn feminists who frequently claimed to be fighting male pornographers were also increasingly fighting those within their own ranks.

I conclude the thesis with a brief examination of the feminist pornography debates from a contemporary standpoint. Sexual politics and pornography have arguably transformed the nature and possibility of large scale feminist organizing, however a broader intellectual critique of Western feminism also emerged parallel to the sex and pornography debates and contributed to exposing the various power differentials and viewpoints laden in the Western feminist subject.

Throughout this thesis, I argue that the most enduring terms of feminism — "woman," "women," and "feminism" itself — were taken up by all sides in the sex and pornography debates and used by both feminists and conservatives for their own groupmaking projects. These terms informed the most significant internecine conflicts of this time period and by the mid-1980s, these conflicts had broken apart the feminist movement — or at least feminists' potential to organize around issues of sex and sexuality without first considering the radically diverse interests they held under the "woman" category.

1  Catriona Sandilands, The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 37.

2  Barbara Basler, "5,000 Join Feminist Group's Rally In Times Sq. Against Pornography," New York Times , October 21, 1979: 41.

3  Ibid., 224; emphasis in original.

4  Pierre Bourdieu, "Identity and Representation: Elements for a Critical Reflection on the Idea of Region," in Language and Symbolic Power , trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991), 221-224.

5  Ibid., 223.

6  Georgia Dullea, "In Feminists' Antipornography Drive, 42nd Street Is the Target," New York Times , July 6, 1979: A12; "Sexes: Women's War on Porn," Time Magazine , August 27, 1989, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,920580,00.html (accessed April 19, 2011).

7  Bourdieu, 224.

8  Basler, 41.

9  Dullea, A12.

10  Carter B. Horsley, "The 'Porn Thorn' in Midtown's Side Gets Less Painful," New York Times, November 18, 1979, R1. For more about Times Square during the "golden age" of pornography, see Josh Alan Friedman, Tales of Times Square, Expanded Edition (Portland, Oregon: Feral House, 1993).

11  Rogers Brubaker, "Ethnicity without groups," Archives européennes de sociologie  43, no. 2(2002), 164-165. Brubaker's critique of groups is specific to the study of ethnicity, nationalism, and race, " (164n).

12  Ibid., 167.

13  Ibid., 169. Virginia Yans remarks that historians have "scarcely" noticed the intrinsically historical dimension of Brubaker's argument. She asserts that Brubaker's work allows historians, "to ask different kinds of questions, historical questions, concerning why groups sometimes do mobilize… [w]e will understand how they are, and under what historical circumstances, they are constructed, why they form in some contexts and not in others." Virginia Yans, "On ‘Groupness'," Journal of American Ethnic History, Summer 2006: 123.