Carol Powers

The focus on the content of pornography has dominated traditional discourse surrounding pornography. However, pornography must be understood as a representational practice in order to adequately explain how pornography functions as an instrument of repression. ;Thus, my dissertation seeks to answer the question, "What is wrong with pornography?" by making use of psychoanalytic concepts drawn from Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. I identify some of the principal features of iconographic representation. The central iconographic feature to be found in pornography is the patriarchal distortion of the glorification of the penis. ;What is perhaps the core theme in pornography is that women have no desires of their own and are entirely subject to the sexual desires of men. They are represented as requiring discipline, enjoying bondage, and prone to bisexuality. I use Lacan's concepts of perversion and fetishism in order to identify pornography as that perverse fantasy of women. ;I conclude with Luce Irigaray's effort to provide a vision of intimacy which preserves and protects the desires, and hence the identity, of both women and men.