Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts

Abstract Courts declared that pornography is speech. MacKinnon declared pornography is a kind of act. Put these together and pornography is a kind of speech act. An Austinian perspective makes sense of two controversial feminist claims: pornography subordinates women, and silences women. These claims can be understood in a causal way, as describing pornography's perlocutionary effects; or in a constitutive way, as describing pornography's illocutionary force. The latter is crucial to feminist argument. Pornography can subordinate women if it is an illocutionary act that ranks women as inferior, legitimates discrimination, and deprives women of powers. It can silence women if it creates illocutionary disablement, undermining women's capacity to perform certain illocutionary speech acts, for example those of sexual refusal.