Lavender, Menaced: Lesbianism, Obscenity Law, and the Feminist Antipornography Movement

This article examines the means by which obscenity law, as an instrument of heteronormativity, operated against depictions of lesbianism in the post-World War II United States. As persistent obscenity charges served to reify the conflation of lesbianism and obscenity, bolstering an already operative antigay framework, judicial rulings repeatedly ratified this equation, holding depictions of lesbianism to arbitrary and anomalous legal standards that insured its continued stigmatization. After an analysis of case law and the legal targeting of lesbian imagery, the article goes on to argue that this hitherto unexamined story provides a crucial backdrop for understanding lesbian responses to the feminist antipornography movement that emerged in the 1970s, as lesbians often proved resistant to a movement whose discourse frequently resonated with earlier legal language utilized in the suppression of lesbian imagery.