Blue Politics: Pornography and the Law in the Age of Feminism by Dany Lacombe (review)

310 LETTERS IN CANADA 1995 During in-class discussion, when a white woman presumes to defend a police officer in an incident involving the shooting of a young black man, Barmerji remarks: 'My body feels hot and tense, I want to shout at her, just plain scream - "you fucking racist icliot," "you killer" - but I cannot. The theatre of teaching, its script, does not permit me to do that. If I have to say it, I have to say it pedagogically; exact a teaching moment out of it. I must build up a body of opinions and explanations here, which will challenge and crush her racism.' Bannerji's fight, however, is not only against 'patriarchal, imperialist racism' but also against J the racism ofwhite women and their femillist ,movement/ bourgeois white feminism being synonymous with 'racist gender essentialism.' That there is a 'dissociation' between her public self and her private self is no doubt appreciated by her students and colleagues alike. ' Dramatizing the link between the personal and the political, the dialogue between Jennifer Dale Tiller, a white feminist, and Geraldine MoribaMeadows , a black feminist, focuses on their differing responses to a speech by the charismatic bell hooks and to the interpersonal and interracial dynamics of the reception that followed the speech, while the final essay, by Tim McCaskell, looks at anti-racist education and practice in the public school system and has the salutary effect of broadening the debate, for, as he points out, 'the notion of freedom of speech has seldom been extended to include young people or children.' All in all, this is a volume that mainly preaches to the already converted. Ifit does not succeed in fulfilling its title's promise to take its readers beyond political correctness, it does succeed in showing the way towards a more inclusive university and in furnishing a Canadian perspective on a debate that is unlikely to disappear very soon. (GREIG HENDERSON) Dany Lacombe. Blue Politics: Pornography and the Law in the Age ofFeminism University of Toronto Press 1994. 229· $18.95 Simon Fraser University criminolOgist Dany Lacombe subtitled her Blue Politics 'pornography an~ the law in the age of feminism' with good reason. The 19805were an J age' in respectto the pornography issue: the decade saw feminism enter the pornographyI censorship contest, come off a political winner, and then depart. Or, at least a specialized group offeminists stayed the race to the finish line and saw key elements of their position cemented into Canadian juridical opinion in 1992, when the Supreme Court of Canada delivered the Butler Decision. After this, a new political cycle was begun. Women's liberation had, against considerable odds, firmly established itself asa respectable political influence in the 1970s, while still retaining something of its earlier style of 'movement politics.' The influence of both HUMANITIES 311 features would prove important to the pornography controversies. Antipornographyactivists quite suddenlyarose withinthe women'smovem~nt , late in the decade, around 1979. Defining their position very rapidly, they soon replenished the failing energies of decades-long'decency crusades,' tmited with the religiOUS and rightist groups, albeit uneasily, and the antipornography crusade assumed a new agenda and gained new momentum. The alliance was never solid, but, until near the end, the parties stuck together. Blue Politics tells much of this story with enviable clarity and energy. Following lucid and pointed accounts of the ideological positions assumed by the two very different groups pressing for government actions against pornography, Blue Politics proceeds to narrate the main moments of the debate within the Canadian political process. Although Lacombe starts her book with a methodological section derived from Michel Foucault, the body of her study is quite conventional. In Foucaldian fashion, she does take sceptical notice of the controlling role the behavioural sciences would come to playas the recognized form of acceptable knowledge in the debate. Also Foucaldian is her lamenting that the opinions of'sex workers' and'sex radicals' were consistently marginalized. In fact, her early reliance on Foucault's critiques looks forward to the central debates in the 19905 (when his History of Sexuality looms large in arguments developed by 'queer theory'), butLacombe'5 substantive narrative is retrospectiveand dissolves promises of radical...