Merciless Doctrines: Child Pornography, Censorship, and Late Capitalism

This article argues for a feminist analysis of the disavowed biopolitics of child pornography and, in turn, of the occluded pedophilic libidinal economies of late capitalism. Moving beyond a dominant critical paradigm that reads child pornography censorship legislation as a contemporary moral panic, I argue that the consolations provided by such critiques function to mask the cruel regulation of the body within child pornography. I also explore an internal cultural contradiction between the claims that child pornography censorship legislation is policing the virtual through intensified technologies of control and discipline and the actual practices of such technologies.