Indecency

Although the incidence of voyeurism and indecent exposure is relatively low compared to other sexual offenses, both crimes raise fundamental questions about the proper scope of the criminal law in a liberal society. The two offenses mark out, and mutually reinforce, the borders of the ever-changing and culturally variable understanding of what is public and what is private. In voyeurism, the offender violates the victim's right to exclude others from her private domain. In indecent exposure, the offender violates the victim's right not to be included in the private domain of others. The interests and rights at stake in the two offenses are in a sense complementary. But they also reflect significant asymmetries. The wrongs of voyeurism seem relatively clear and uncontested, and this is true even across otherwise wide cultural divides. The law of public indecency, by contrast, will prove to be messier, more sensitive to cultural variations, and more attuned to the specific circumstances in which such exposure occurs. We will see this, for example, when we consider cases in which a person exposes himself in contexts as varied as Mardi Gras parades, political protests, performance art, nude beaches, and fraternity pranks. We will also consider the ways in which the emergence of new technologies and new social practices have simultaneously lowered the threshold of what society regards as private, while increasing the potential for resulting harm to victims.

This paper aims to discuss the Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act, 1986, which safeguards women against indecent and obscene publications. Although the definition of decency varies from person to person, it has a common intent to disrupt public morality and so the paper tries to define indecency in a more precise manner. It discusses how this law functions along with other laws like IPC, CRPC, IT Act and the Constitution of India, authorizing the government to act against the wrong-doer in the most suitable way. The Indian Constitution grants equality and right to live with dignity to its citizens and empowers the states to make laws for positive discrimination for the betterment of women. This paper thus focuses to draw attention towards the loopholes in the act and suggest ways for a better implementation of the law.

This article explores the various ethical and legal limitations faced by researchers studying extreme or ‘ shock’ pornographies, beginning with generic and disciplinary contexts, and focusing specifically upon the assumption that textual analysis unproblematically justifies certain pornographies, while legal contexts utilize a prohibitive gaze. Are our academic freedoms of speech endangered by legislations that restrict our access to non-mainstream images, forcing them further into taboo locales? If so, is the ideological normalization of sexuality inextricable from our research methodologies? Simultaneously, can we justify researchers being allowed access to materials that are not deemed suitable for general consumption, which may further bolster normalized hierarchies of class-privilege and cultural capital?

This essay examines the legacy of gay playwright and activist Robert Chesley through an in-depth look at his most controversial play, "Jerker, or The Helping Hand" (1986), uncovering a unique strand of safe-sex advocacy that emphasized sound—and the voice specifically—to manifest queer desire. Phone sex, or dial-a-porn, as it was first called, rose to popularity in the 1980s amid the AIDS crisis. Chesley's depiction of it onstage reimagined the pornographic address, unleashing it from the visual primacy of video porn of the time to foreground elegiac, pedagogic, and ethical dimensions. The broadcast of "Jerker" on radio station KPFK-FM, however, spurred a legal redefinition of indecency in 1987 and further imperiled safe-sex advocacy that refused to skirt eroticism. In an era when “Silence = Death,” Chesley's Jerker revealed the complexities of the mediated voice as a tool for survival, remembrance, and unbounded pleasure.

Over the last ten years, Family Guy has made its mark by pushing the envelope as an equal opportunity offender. For the writers, no subject is too sacred. This study examines how the key demographic for the cartoon (viewers age 18-24), a group that has grown up immersed in political correctness, read the value, meaning and intent of the show. The study uses Q methodology to extract several readings of the show. Four factors emerged from the study. The first factor reads the show as an intelligent critique on society that demystifies stereotypes by bringing its absurdities to light. The second represents a view of the show as low-brow humor aiming to make the viewer uncomfortable, but not as a product of bigotry. The third reads the show as a guilty pleasure, dismissing it as a silly cartoon, while understanding why people are often offended by it. The final factor reflects a perspective that reads the show as perpetuating the wrong message about minorities by turning sensitive issues into a joke. The article further discusses the characteristics of each perspective and the implications for audience studies and the acceptance of offensive speech.

With the recent developments surrounding R v DLW and the legal interpretation of ‘bestiality’ before the Supreme Court of Canada, animal law organizations such as Animal Justice insist that Canadians must recognize their obligation to protect the most vulnerable beings in their care, and not subject them to abuse. We argue that there were many avenues of interpretation open to the Supreme Court in adjudicating and addressing the legal definition of bestiality. The majority of the Supreme Court ultimately adopted a conservative approach to statutory interpretation. A strict legal construction and focus on original intent of Parliament foreclosed development of the law towards legal recognition of animal sentience and the concomitant implications for animal rights in Canadian law. In this paper we consider various routes by which a more progressive interpretation of bestiality could have been constructed by the Supreme Court of Canada. When the Supreme Court of Canada concluded that bestiality could only be interpreted as a penetrative offence, it avoided the chance for incremental legal change that could have contributed to the ways Canadians, laypersons, and legal professionals recognized animal consciousness. Animal protection and legal animal welfare apparati in Canada still remain relatively adrift, and less developed than in countries like New Zealand.

[Nick]names of tricksters, who often appear in both oral culture and in literature in the guise of servants or fools, are infused with what Bakhtin  called the grotesque debasement of language to the bodily lower stratum. In this paper I shall exemplify the use of carnivalesque debasement in naming conventions of trickster figures, from antiquity to the present, with primary emphasis on the medieval and renaissance periods. Ludic onomastics is part of language play, one of the most beloved forms of human activity, and oral-carnivalesque culture is full of onomastically-challenged servant figures, who both have trick names and live by their tricks. It belongs to the very essence of trickster-servant and fool figures that they should have grotesque names connoting their basic characteristics, related to their use of practical jokes and verbal games, such as obscene double entendres, to subvert official order. Nicknames, inseparable from ritual insults, function as a verbal game with a kind of magic power, with the obscene language functioning as a substitute for action, that is, with verbal insults replacing acts of aggression, and with salacious expression defusing the impulse to copulate.

This research paper looks at the judicial decisions in Canada including R v Butler, R v Labaye, and R v Sharpe to trace the court's evolving attitudes on obscenity. Specifically, this paper discusses visual arts in relation to censorship, obscenity, and pornography. The purpose of this paper is to show that the obscenity law restricts artistic freedom by requiring an unsubstantiated risk of harm. Consequently, this paper takes an anti-censorship feminist approach arguing there is profound educational value to be had in allowing artists to depict morally taboo subject matter. With this in mind, this paper offers a policy recommendation to eliminate the law of obscenity and indecency.

Keywords: Labaye, Butler, Sharpe, Langer, artistic merit, obscenity, indecency, pornography, anti-pornography, censorship anti-censorship, freedom of expression, Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, risk of harm, artistic expression.

This paper contains an addendum on the Bedford 2013 decision in which the Supreme Court of Canada struck down Canada's prostitution laws. The addendum rightly predicts Parliament's answers to the Court decision and places this in the context of socio-legal conceptions of harm.

"This paper traces the logics underpinning obscenity and indecency law in Canada from R. v. Hicklin (1868) to the present day in R. v. Labaye (2005) to discuss the emergence of a precautionary principle in the law governing sexually explicit materials and conduct. The most recent Supreme Court decision on obscenity and indecency law (R. v. Labaye 2005) is interesting for its appropriation of a security inspired logic of pre-emption (or precautionary governance) into the heart of obscenity and indecency law. The replacement of the community standards of tolerance test for the undue exploitation of harm with a new, so called objective test for risk of harm, obviates the need for empirical evidence of harm to justify the exercise of state power. Today, risk of harm becomes a stronger element within the rubric of obscenity and indecency criminalization on the basis of a judge’s perception of the imagined negative effects of sexual conduct and materials on constitutional values such as liberty and equality.

Key Words: Labaye, harm, risk, obscenity, indecency, governmentality, precautionary
principle, security politics, liberty, equality."

My aim is to recuperate elements of bodily performance, particularly the acting out of copulation through the eroticization of stock semantic fields and obscene gestures in medieval fabliau-tales, which I aim to illustrate through the thirteenth-century German Ritter mit den Nüzzen and related tales in other languages, as well as with visual analogues. The tale’s central transparent sexual metaphor in the form a ‘perverted proverb’ about cracking and eating nuts from a lady’s lap belongs to pan-european tradition, with analogous such as, for example, in the Spanish Ay mujer, y ay mujer!! Vamos a apañar bellotas/ or  Más es el ruido que las nueces, which I have studied in the Libro de Buen Amor. In this tale the obscene relexicalization serves to mime the wife’s sexual and, more importantly, verbal deception of her husband, who is too stupid to interpret the signs of his own dishonor. The cumulative effect of the linguistic and mimetic play in the Ritter mit den Nüzzen is to convert it into an extended obscene pun, where it is precisely that deferral, that leering verbal pseudo-fig leaf, that increases the comic climax for the audience.

Canadian laws pertaining to pornography and bawdy houses were first developed during the Victorian era, when ”non-normative” sexualities were understood as a corruption of conservative morals and harmful to society as a whole. Tracing the socio-legal history of contemporary obscenity and indecency laws, Kramar and Jochelson contend that the law continues to function to protect society from harm. Today, rather than seeing harm to conservative values, the court sees harm to liberal political values. While reforms have been made, especially in light of feminist and queer challenges, Kramar and Jochelson use Foucault’s governmentality framework to show that the liberal harm strategy for governing obscenity and indecency continues to disguise power.

Although the incidence of voyeurism and indecent exposure is relatively low compared to other sexual offenses, both crimes raise fundamental questions about the proper scope of the criminal law in a liberal society. The two offenses mark out, and mutually reinforce, the borders of the ever-changing and culturally variable understanding of what is public and what is private. In voyeurism, the offender violates the victim's right to exclude others from her private domain. In indecent exposure, the offender violates the victim's right not to be included in the private domain of others. The interests and rights at stake in the two offenses are in a sense complementary. But they also reflect significant asymmetries. The wrongs of voyeurism seem relatively clear and uncontested, and this is true even across otherwise wide cultural divides. The law of public indecency, by contrast, will prove to be messier, more sensitive to cultural variations, and more attuned to the specific cir...

gi na 16 6 The absurd names of servant figures that I shall be discussing, as well as the frequently cruel and illogical tricks in which they specialize will become clearer if they are studied in the context of the grotesque and anti-social activities of the universal folkloric figure of the trickster, which is their subliterary archetype. According to Jung the trickster, an archetypal psychic structure of extreme antiquity embodies an absolutely undifferentiated consciousness, corresponding to a psyche that has hardly left the animal stage. In his clearest manifestations he is a faithful copy of an absolutely undifferentiated human consciousness, corresponding to a psyche that ahs hardly left the animal level ’ (Jung 200). He is also seen as poised at the crossroads of the secular and the spiritual. He has some of the features of a pagan deity, of an animal, a human being, a hero, and a buffoon, he serves both good and evil, and functions as denier and affirmer, destroyer and creat...

This paper briefly explores the feminist responses to several Supreme Court obscenity and indecency rulings in the Canadian context. The authors argue that the feminist academic debates, have, to some extent, been absorbed into the legal debate, and lost some of their foundational impetuses. The authors thus argue for a rethinking of the critical arguments in the context of obscenity law in Canada, and suggest that methodological approaches that are descriptive in tone might provide an interesting counterpoint to the activist debates. The authors suggest that the governmentality methodology might be one such appropriate descriptive vehicle for analyses.

"This paper takes a bottom-up approach to empirically investigate how people construct the meaning of obscenity, and offers an experientialist, cognitive linguistic account to explain why the term appears to defy definition and makes a problematic legal concept. To study the contextual dependence of the term, we
examined the extent to which various item characteristics (such as genre, context, and the race or celebrity status of the people portrayed) and individual variables (such as gender, religion, sexual orientation and previous personal and cultural
experiences) influence our perception of seemingly obscene materials. We report correlations that have not been previously shown. The data support the thesis that the meaning of obscenity emerges in a cognitive-affective response that arises
during a dynamic process of interpretation, and thus allows for extralegal factors to influence judgment. The results challenge the assumption that obscenity is a symbolic representation of objectively existing reality and argue that community standard
of obscenity is a legal fiction."

This paper briefly explores the feminist responses to several Su- preme Court obscenity and indecency rulings in the Canadian context. The authors argue that the feminist academic debates, have, to some extent, been absorbed into the legal debate, and lost some of their foundational impetuses. The authors thus argue for a rethinking of the critical arguments in the context of obscenity law in Canada, and suggest that methodological approaches that are descriptive in tone might provide an inter- esting counterpoint to the activist debates. The authors suggest that the governmentality methodology might be one such ap- propriate descriptive vehicle for analyses.

"In the Fall of 2012, I conducted a course pairing stand-up comedy and rhetoric. The course posed ontological questions (What makes us laugh? What is laughter?) and epistemological questions (Are stand-up comedians rhetors? What is the nature and purpose of their rhetoric?). We examined performances by the most notable comedians of the last fifty years, exploring language, race, gender, and class. The course culminated with an evening of stand-up: Each student prepared a “set” and performed it in a public forum.

This paper explores stand-up comedy as a site for pedagogical and community engagement. Gregg and Seigworth note, “because affect emerges out of muddy, unmediated relatedness… it makes easy compartmentalisms give way to thresholds and tensions, blends and blurs.” By engaging students in stand-up, this paper suggests, we can meaningfully engage these affective moments (collective laughter and identification) and convert the comedy club into a site for deliberative democracy.
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