Updating this chart from my Free Speech & Censorship course, used when we read Catharine MacKinnon’s Only Words (Harvard, 1993), an influential egalitrian-postmodern feminist case for the censorship of pornography. By then we have already read Plato’s pre-modern case for censorship from Book 10 of Republic and John Stuart Mill’s modern case for free speech in Chapter 2 of On Liberty. The chart contrasts the liberal and egalitarian-postmodern positions on several sub-issues.
Related: My primer on MacKinnon’s Only Words, in the Philosophers, Explained series.
This is great. Lays it out with wonderful lucidity.
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On what basis do you call ‘Only Words’ postmodernist? Do you consider J.L. Austin to be a postmodernist? Typically people associate McKinnon with the second wave radical feminism, distinct from postmodern feminism?
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The guiding assumption throughout OW is that language constructs our social realities and thereby our identities. That plus the leveling egalitarianism pitted against liberalism.
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