3/10 - REQUIRED READINGS: Pornography: Free Speech or Exploitation?

Judith Butler, “Burning Acts, Injurious Speech,” in Excitable Speech, 43-69

1. The Power of Words and Performativity

  • Butler explores how language itself can act and shape reality, not just describe it.

  • Draws from J.L. Austin’s theory of speech acts, which distinguishes:

    • Illocutionary acts (words that perform an action, e.g., “I now pronounce you husband and wife”).

    • Perlocutionary acts (words that produce effects, e.g., a threat that causes fear).

  • Words are not just neutral expressions but can wound, injure, and exert power in ways that go beyond their literal meaning.

2. The Role of Language in Moral Accountability

  • Butler critiques the way moral and legal systems assign blame by linking speech to accountability.

  • Draws from Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals to argue that societies create subjects to assign responsibility for harm.

  • The legal system often reduces ongoing social harm to a single act of speech or action, ignoring the larger structures that create injury.

3. Hate Speech, Injury, and Legal Boundaries

  • Explores the difficulty of defining and prosecuting hate speech—should words be treated as actions?

  • Butler challenges the idea that only governments can cause harm, arguing that citizens and institutions also wield speech as a tool of power.

  • Discusses the U.S. Supreme Court case R.A.V. v. St. Paul (1992), where a white teenager burned a cross in front of a Black family’s house.

    • The Court ruled that this act was protected speech rather than a prosecutable crime.

    • Butler critiques this, arguing that historical context matters—burning a cross has a history of racial violence that makes it more than just an expression of opinion.

4. The Limits of Legal Solutions for Speech Harm

  • While hate speech laws aim to prevent harm, Butler warns against relying too much on legal punishment.

  • Courts often reverse the roles of victim and perpetrator, protecting free speech while ignoring the historical and social structures that make speech harmful.

  • Example: The legal system may protect racist speech as “free expression” while criminalizing protest speech as a “threat.”

5. Key Takeaways

✅ Words do more than communicate; they shape reality and social power.
✅ Legal systems often fail to recognize how speech works over time, focusing only on individual cases.
✅ Hate speech is not just offensive but can actively cause harm, reinforcing historical and systemic oppression.
✅ Relying on law alone to address hate speech risks reinforcing the same structures that produce harm.