Langton (1993, pp. 320) explores, through two examples, ways in which illocutionary
silencing can occur. Both examples start with the woman uttering “no” in a sexual
context to indicate that she wants to refuse sex. In the first example, the hearer (male)
recognises the utterance “no” as a refusal of sex yet g oes ahead and has sex with the
woman anyway (rape). In this case, the women’s refusal is frustrated, as despite her
refusal being recognised by the man she is ignored, and the illocutionary force of her
utterance is not successful. This is known as “perlocutionary frustration.” In the
second example the illocutionary act performed by the woman to refuse sex, the
utterance of “no”, is not taken seriously by the hearer. For whatever reason (Langton
(1993) argues this reason is pornography) despite the man hearing the words “no” he
thinks the woman means yes. Austin (1976, pp.16) describes this as a misfire. From
the perspective of the hearer, they do not recognise “no” as a refusal of sex, thus the
argument could be made that the woman did not refuse (I will dispute this later). In
this example, the women’s refusal has been more than frustrated, it has been
disabled. The key difference here is that in the latter the silencing is a result of the man
making the women’s speech act unspeakable, as opposed to simply frustrating the
woman’s perlocutionary goals, which is what is happening in the first example
(Langton, 1993, pp.319).
1.3 How Langton (1933) classifies pornography as speech.
To understand Langton’s (1993) claim, that pornography leads to the illocutionary
disablement of women it must be understood how and why pornography is classed as
a speech act. Only when a reliable account of how pornography can be classed as
speech is rea ched can we then accept Langton’s (19933, pp. 315) suggestion of
silencing, as her notion of illocutionary disablement is based on the ability for
pornography to count as speech.
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