Reading
The reading assignment is Langton (1993).
There is a lot written on this topic in the wake of Langton’s paper. Bauer (2015) is one example. Section 4.1 of West (2022) offers an overview. Eaton (2017) leans further into aesthetics rather than philosophy of language, offering an account of feminist pornography that is grounded in views about the power and authority of pornography that are similar to those found in Langton. (Those of you who recently attended the Illinois Philosophical Association may have met Eaton!)
Slides and Handout
References
Bauer, Nancy. 2015. “How to Do Things with Pornography.” In How to Do Things with Pornography. Harvard University Press.
Eaton, A. W. 2017. “Feminist Pornography.” In Beyond Speech: Pornography and Analytic Feminist Philosophy, edited by Mari Mikkola. Oxford University Press. https://philpapers.org/go.pl?id=EATFP&proxyId=&u=https%3A%2F%2Fphilpapers.org%2Farchive%2FEATFP.pdf.
Langton, Rae. 1993. “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 22 (4): 293–330. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265469.
West, Caroline. 2022. “Pornography and Censorship.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2022, edited by Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2022/entries/pornography-censorship/.