Introduction

In his concurring opinion for the case Jacobellis v. Ohio, concerning the banning of the 1958 film Les amants (The Lovers), Justice Potter Stewart infamously stated that when it came to ferreting out obscene material, "I know it when I see it." Though his opinion supported the exhibition of the controversial film, free speech activists often cite his statement in their concern with the spurious censorship of controversial texts. Indeed, in the eyes of anticensorship crusaders the censor's role has always been associated with and almost defined by a sense of unerring credulity and inconsistency.

Perhaps ironically, it is this difficulty of definition and categorization that marks the study of censorship and regulation today. Rather than ruminate on the task of defining objectionable content, this issue of the Velvet Light Trap chooses to turn the question back on the field and to ask what we think we know and what we think we see when it comes to censorship. In conceiving this issue the editors favored an incredibly diffuse notion of censorship and regulation. Our purpose was not so much to elicit content that would satisfy the topic provided, unlike many past issues of VLT, but rather to define the topic in the process of putting together this issue. The simple fact is that when it comes to censorship today, both "seeing" and "knowing" have become increasingly complicated affairs.

In our call for papers we said, "The time has come for media studies to ask what 'censorship' means in the current political and economic landscape of media production, to reinterrogate past instances of manifest censorship, to consider the productive qualities of censorship, and to uncover instances of 'structural censorship' which upends the system itself." We think this issue delivers on all of those considerations and more. This issue is additionally diverse in its global focus, its assortment of media texts, and its multiple methodologies. Each selection is complete in its analysis and yet expansive in its potential to refocus the field on the relevance and timeliness of critical inquiry into censorship and regulation.

Author Theresa Cronin, in "Media Effects and the Subjectification of Film Regulation," examines the reception context of the indie horror film Wolf Creek (2005) in order to argue for a "subjectification" of regulatory discourse. Employing a Foucaultian framework, she proposes that debates over controversial content in films have shifted from a focus on the objectionable text to judgments against objectionable subject-spectator responses. Her sources range from the high-profile revulsion of Roger Ebert to anonymous on-line user comments, revealing a common expectation of "the normal response," which is horror, disgust, and complete rejection of the film. The simultaneous presumption is that those who enjoy the film must compensate with introspection and/or guilt. Thus, the regulation of media could happen, in some instances, within the soul of the subject-spectator.

Taking us from a consideration of personal to more overtly political hegemony, Nandana Bose's paper, "The Hindu Right and the Politics of Censorship: Three Case Studies of Policing Hindi Cinema," provides an intimate look at the phenomenon of moral panic, arguing that the right-wing interests of the Indian state in the 1990s coalesced with a wave of unprecedented censorship. Bose employs three case studies—the films Khalnayak (1993), Bombay (1995), and War and Peace (2002)—to illuminate the way in which censorship invokes the hot buttons of sex, religion, and national security, all of which orbit around the overriding anxiety to maintain cultural integrity in an increasingly globalized environment. Indeed, these case studies exemplify how censorship can invoke—or construct—an ostensibly national agenda.

In "Exemplary Consumer-Citizens and Protective State Stewards: How Reformers Shaped Censorship Outcomes Regarding The Untouchables" we have an instance of the surprising products of censorship practices. Laura Cook Kenna examines the censorship campaign against the 1960s television program The Untouchables, particularly the lobbying efforts of the Italian American antidefamation movement. The efforts of the Italian American community to resist the association of their ethnic identity with televisual depictions of the Mafia (a struggle that was recently renewed in the context of protests against the HBO series The Sopranos) led to the construction of...