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.
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?
The guiding assumption throughout OW is that language constructs our social realities and thereby our identities. That plus the leveling egalitarianism pitted against liberalism.