Troubling the Definition of Pornography: Little Sisters, a New Defining Moment in Feminists' Engagement with the Law?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores feminism's relationship to the legal regulation of pornography. Of particular interest to the author is how the defining moment of the Butler decision has been opened up to contestation and complication by Little Sisters Book and Art Emporium et. al. v. Minister of Justice et al., a recent Supreme Court of Canada decision regarding Canada Customs violations of the free expression and equality rights of a Vancouver-based gay and lesbian bookstore. The focus of the article is on the role that the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) played in both Butler and Little Sisters. The author contends that while much has changed for the better since Butler, problematic legal strategies continue to be reproduced by LEAF. While LEAF has to some extent nuanced its arguments with regard to pornography's relationship to harm, the author argues that neither LEAF's Butler nor its Little Sisters facta work to destabilize the relationship of sex, gender, and sexual orientation identity and their complicated relationship with pornography. Le présent article analyse la relation entre le féminisme et les dispositions juridiques réglementant la pornographie. L'auteure s'intéresse particulièrement au point tournant survenu lorsque l'arrêt Butler aété contesté et complexifié par l'arrêt Little Sisters Book and Art Emporium et. al. c. Ministre de la Justice et al.,décision rendue par la Cour suprême du Canada. Ce dernier arrêt porte sur des atteintes par Douanes Canada à la liberté d'expression et au droit à l'égalité d'une librairie s'adressant particulièrement à une clientèle gaie et lesbienne, librairie situéeà Vancouver. L'article s'attarde au rôle joué par le Fonds d'action et d'éducation juridiques pour les femmes (le « FAEJ ») dans les deux causes Butler et Little Sisters. L'auteure affirme que le FAEJ continue à adopter des stratégies juridiques problématiques, bien qu'il y ait eu des améliorations sensibles depuis l'affaire Butler. Le FAEJ a nuancé, dans une certaine mesure, ses arguments touchant la relation entre la pornographie et le préjudice, mais l'auteure soutient néanmoins que les mémoires du FAEJ dans
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.065 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".