4. completely.” (Austin, 1976, pp.15)
5. If the situation is reliant on the thoughts and feelings of the person/
persons involved whether that be the speaker or the listener, they must
genuinely have those thoughts and feelings.
6. The individual with those thoughts and feelings must conduct themselves
in a manner that is appropriate for someone who holds those thoughts and
feelings.
It is important to set out such conditions as without them it would lead to
individuals making absurd claims. Take for example the utterance “I bet you £100
green will win” without the “appropriate circumstances” (Austin, 1975, pp.13) i.e.,
that there is a green, within the context of some sort of race, the speech act cannot be
said to be happy. If there was not a set of felicity conditions to be satisfied, an
individual could make the claim that Green has won and thus is owed £100, whenever
brown bread is scanned at ASDA (an arbitrary claim).
1.2 How pornography silences and subordinates
Rae Langton (1993, pp.302) uses Austin’s (1976) Speech Act Theory in her article
‘ Speech Acts And Unspeakable Acts’ to make the claim that pornography is speech
that harms women through subordination. Pornography is defined “as the graphic
sexually explicit subordination of women in pictures or words” (Langton 1993, pp.
294). Langton’s (1993) text is split into two sec tions. In the first section, Langton
(1993, pp.302, 314) justifies her claim that pornography subordinates, and in the
second how this subordination leads to the silencing of women. Langton (1993) draws
upon the works of MacKinnon (as cited in Langton, 1993) and Easterbrook (as cited in
Langton, 1993) to aid in the justification of her claims. Before explaining how
Langton (1993) reaches each claim, the nature of silencing, what it is, and how it is
linked to pornography must be explored. Langton (1993, pp.315) draws upon Austin
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