Blue Politics: Pornography and the Law in the Age of Feminism

Rebecca Murdock is a lawyer in Toronto.

Blue Politics is a lucid text that provides a twofold perspective on
pornography and the law. Chapters 1 to 6 contain a competent legal
history of attempts to criminalize pornography—failed efforts that
culminated in the Supreme Court of Canada’s 1992 Butler decision.
Chapter 7 addresses the difficult question of law reform as a means of
social change.

While the author’s historical survey provides the backbone to Blue
Politics, the final chapter, which takes on the question of law reform
as a means of addressing violence against women and children, is really
her most provocative area of inquiry. She argues against the notion that
law reform is inherently compromised as an agent of social change
because it fundamentally represents and protects the interests of the
status quo. In her view, the administrative systems that make up the law
and an individual’s or group’s capacity for resistance/change are
“mutually constitutive.” As evidence, Lacombe points to the “new
collective identities” and the “multiplicity of knowledges
concerning pornography, sexuality, society, and self” that are
produced by the pornography debate. Political re-organization and
expression is a mode of resistance that produces new power and knowledge
necessary to the development of a radical plural democracy.

Certainly political organizing is critical as a means of social change;
however, organizing around law reform issues (i.e., abortion,
pornography, or universal suffrage) has not historically been as
effective in improving the conditions of women’s lives as riots,
boycotts, demonstrations, sit-ins, and labor strikes. Readers may find
Lacombe’s optimistic approach to legal reform as a harbinger of social
change to be an overstatement of a power that is largely symbolic. The
Butler decision may have made it illegal to portray women in sexually
explicit degrading poses, but the material still exists as contraband.
Sanctioning obscene material may be important not because it eradicates
violence against women, but because of the Court’s power to influence
public opinion.

Politics aside, readers will find the text useful as a concise and
capable airing of the controversial issues surrounding censorship and
pornography.