This is a past event
Speaker: Aidan McGlynn (Edinburgh)
Pornography and Objectification Reconsidered
A familiar feminist criticism of so-called “mainstream” pornography is that it objectifies women, but it’s not clear how we should interpret this claim. This makes it hard to know whether we should endorse the criticism, or what kind of response it calls for. In this talk, I’ll develop a new account of this concern as it applies to pornographic films in particular, appealing to both Martha Nussbaum’s influential analysis of objectification and to empirical work on the content of recent pornographic films. Developing my account offers an opportunity to further explore and extend the notion of epistemic objectification, which has received some attention recently in the literature on epistemic injustice. It also will demonstrate some benefits of theorising about pornography using resources from the philosophy of film, rather than speech act theory (as has become standard in philosophical discussions of pornography, following Rae Langton and Jennifer Hornsby’s agenda-setting work). I’ll close with some reflections on how pornographic films might be stripped of some of their power to objectify, in light of the account that I propose.
- Venue
- 50-52 College Bounds, CB202