Policing the "grotesque": the regulation of pornography in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Adult pornography has gained increased prominence in the public domain. Pornographic iconography has extended into the mainstream as new technologies have contributed to its growing distribution and consumption. These social changes point to the need to examine this field of study and consider the altered place of pornography in society and the consequent socio-legal reactions to it. This dissertation examines this sexualization of culture through qualitative legal research, focusing on obscenity law in Canada. Utilizing feminist critical discourse analysis, legal provisions and cases (n=218) between 1959 and 2009 were examined. Governmentality provides a lens through which to look at the regulation of adult pornography and comprehend the impact of neo-liberal politics on society and sexual citizenship. Using the work of such scholars as Michel Foucault and Nikolas Rose, this research contemplates the notions of ‘technologies of the self’ and ‘governing at a distance’ in relation to the production and consumption of adult pornography and the ways in which it is controlled. This research shows that adult pornography has been enabled to flourish as a commodity in a neo-liberal age which is preoccupied with the self, the individual and a ‘biopolitical’ conception of power. This development is shown through a discussion of discourses around sex and obscenity that came to light out of an analysis of the Canadian legal system. Paying attention to the judicial discourse, what becomes clear is that a harm-based approach emerges in the 1980s and starts a trend within the legal realm to adopt neo-liberal language and concepts such as, individual responsibility and ‘freedom’. This shift towards a free-market mentality constructs a framework in which individuals are encouraged to self-regulate and police their own pornographic behaviour and consumption. Simultaneously, the neo-liberal mindset quickly perceives and defines risk in sexual content using this harm-based approach. The reduction in legal cases pertaining to adult pornography can be explained through this lens and changes in legal governance can be seen as playing a central role in a greater move towards neo-liberalism in Canada.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".