The Geography of Pornography: Neighborhood Feminism and the Battle against "Dirty Bookstores" in Minneapolis

"It just doesn't look right to have a bunch of women standing in here," declared the clerk in a South Minneapolis adult bookstore.¹ The women, a half dozen or so who lived in the Central neighborhood immediately adjacent to the store, had come on this particular summer evening in 1979 in order to "browse" the clientele who browsed the store's sexually explicit magazines and quarter movies. The store's male patrons were embarrassed. The staff reacted angrily and called the store's owners. The women had intruded upon a traditionally male urban space, and they had done so intentionally and boldly, to make the point that they felt this particular business and its patrons encroached upon their territory, the neighborhood.

Beginning in the mid-1970s and continuing for more than a decade, the residents of three neighborhoods abutting the Lake Street commercial corridor of South Minneapolis did battle with the owners and patrons of local adult businesses. What began as sporadic protests grew into concerted and multi-year campaigns on the part of existing neighborhood associations and newly forming radical feminist organizations against public pornography. The activists who came together to oppose these bookstores and theaters organized, picketed, politicked, lobbied, testified, and allied their way toward a vision of a commercial strip that they hoped would serve the needs of the surrounding community, dissuade crime, and make the area safe. These ultimately successful efforts to close adult businesses intertwined neighborhood and municipal politics, economic revitalization, and women's rights to create a productive neighborhood feminism during the 1970s and early 1980s that has generally been overlooked in the literature of both urban renewal and grassroots feminism. While neighborhood feminism did decline in the mid-1980s, its demise ultimately fed both a national movement against pornography and grassroots economic revitalization in South Minneapolis.

Where this story is better known is in the literature of women's studies, for it was in Minneapolis that feminists Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin first found a forum for their argument that pornography violates women's civil rights. Their work broke new theoretical ground in the opposition to pornography, but the stage for their work was set by local activists who also have a compelling story to tell. The history of how South Minneapolis residents sought to remove the adult businesses in their midst reveals a surprisingly strong relationship between neighborhood activism and secondwave feminism, a relationship that demonstrates the ways in which gender was constitutive of local politics. In these neighborhoods lived residents who laid the groundwork for challenging the sale of pornography. They then asked those famous feminists for assistance—not to reconceptualize the nature of pornography's harms toward women, but rather to create legal means to help residents rid their street corners of adult bookstores and theaters. The local activists sought to reclaim their neighborhood's commercial strip for "legitimate" businesses that would better serve the needs of the local community, and in radical feminism they found one tool that could be deployed in that fight.

Neighborhood organizing—efforts to solve local problems and build community through grassroots organizing and local politics—flourished in the 1970s and 1980s in Minneapolis and across the nation. Not easily categorized as liberal, progressive, or leftist, argues Harry Boyte, this "citizens movement" was "cooperative group action by ordinary citizens motivated by both civic idealism and by specific grievances."² Scholar Robert Fisher declares this type of community-based activism the "hallmark of the era," and other scholars, mostly in the fields of political science and sociology, have pointed to the important role such organizing has had on community efficacy and public policy.³ Writer and community organizer Makani Themba, for example, concludes that "efforts that engage community residents and give them a sense of their own power enhance a community's ability to solve problems and strengthen individual members' sense of community."⁴

The feminist movement, however, has generally been held apart from these trends, which hides the importance of local strategic alliances in feminist campaigns for systemic change. As historian Anne Enke...