Theory into Practice? Pornography and the Public/Private Dichotomy

'The feminist total critique of the liberal opposition of private and public still awaits its philosopher'.1 So concluded Carole Pateman in an important article written a decade ago. During the intervening years, there has been an explosion of feminist literature reflecting upon issues raised by public/private dichotomies in social and political thought, much of it concerned with legal analysis or questions of legal policy and reform. Yet, notwithstanding this theoretical development, questions around public/private dichotomies have lost little of their power to bewilder, as each confidently asserted critique raises further questions of theory and strategy. Indeed, it sometimes seems that the more we criticize the public/private dichotomy, the more we get trapped within its conceptual framework. In this paper, I want to return to this well-worked terrain with two purposes in mind. First, I want to distinguish several different concerns which have informed feminist preoccupation with the public/private dichotomy. Drawing on feminist political and social theory, I shall explore how each of the different concerns I identify feeds into questions of legal policy. Secondly, I shall turn my attention to one concrete area, namely pornography, in which feminist activism including that directed to law reform has been informed by the public/private critique. Pornography is an issue which, perhaps above all others, has been controversial within feminist thought, and in which issues of theory and strategy connect particularly closely. I hope to shed some light on why the pornography debate has been such a problematic one for contemporary feminism by looking at it again in the light of a more differentiated appreciation of the public/private critique. In particular, I shall try to identify the negative consequences which unjustified inferences from the public/ private critique have had on feminist politics around pornography.