The Force of Fantasy: Feminism, Mapplethorpe, and Discursive Excess. differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 2:2 (1990) pp. 105-25
Federal funds prohibited from being used to:
-promote, disseminate or produce obscene OR INDECENT materials, including but not limited to depictions of sadomasochism, homoeroticism, the exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sex acts
– or that denigrates, debases or reviles a person, group or class of citizens on the basis of race, creed, sex, handicap, age or national origin representation and action
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- fantasy constitutes a PSYCHIC ACTION, fantasy doesn’t directly transmute into ACTION
- For Butler fantasy is the very scene that SUSPENDS action Dworkin establishes a direct causal relationship between: Fantasy-Representation-Action huh?
- Pictures injure, you see a picture you will get hurt by looking at it. wounded passive, injured stance of viewer, passive recipients of this visual assault.
- There is no INTERPRETIVE leeway between the representation and its meanings, and its effects. Butler’s view:
- pornography is a textualized fantasy of dissimulated and unstable identifications “A question to raise here would be, is it even possible to do the kind of reading that Dworkin does, that involves a retelling and repetition of the pornographic scene without making use of precisely the variable identifications that the pornographic fantasy itself occasions? From what source does Dworkin’s reading draw its own strength and mastery if not through an identification and redeployment of the very representation of aggression that she abhors? In other words, does the identificatory process that her own reading requires effectively refute the theory of identification that she explicitly holds? (194 JB Reader)