I want to endorse Doug's cogent remarks about the Canadian censorship case, especially his thoughtful ammendments this morning. All of us in the United States should watch this case with great interest, since it is a practical demonstration of what happens when the Dworkin-MacKinnon position on pornography is encoded into law. Born of an unholy alliance between the feminist left and the religious right, the law has immediately been applied to suppressing works by feminist artists and gay/lesbian writers, as many of its critics have long suggested. The incident suggests to me the problem of using legal restraint as a strategy within what is essentially an ideological debate. A more constructive strategy, in my opinion, is represented by feminist interventions within the pornography genre, either the critical interventions represented by Linda WIlliam's HARDCORE or the production interventions represented by Fatale, Femme, and the other feminist porn collectives. We need to change the conventions of the genre from within by producing new works with an alternative formal and political structure. Going after porn with such a diffused attack that it results in the confiscation of Duras works is obviously not a good strategy, not to mention an outrage against free speech. The situation at the University of Iowa strikes me as more difficult. On the one hand, it is probably a good idea to inform students of what they are going to watch. As it happens, I would not refuse to watch Nazi propaganda; I have seen TRIUMPH OF THE WILL many times and learn something each time. But, I would like to be adequately prepared for what is going to be taught. On the other hand, it seems bad policy to codify what types of films require such introductions by instructors. In this case, the Iowa policy, as I understand it, seems blatantly homophobic, since it requires forwarning of gay content, and does not, for example, speak to the kinds of controversial materials you suggest. Should I be forewarned for example if the film contains religious opinions which I may find disagreeable or if it takes a conservative political stance? Who decides which films are potentially offensive and by what standards? It seems to me that these judgements are best made by the classroom teacher in response to the particulars of their class, rather than by a general policy statement by the Iowa Board of Regents. By the same token, do we really want students, either collectively or individually, deciding what films can be shown in the class or even what films they watch in the class? Could a student decide categorically that he did not want to see any films by women directors or minority directors? Or is this standard only applied to films with a homoerotic content? Having made that decision, how should the student expect the instructor to respond? Should we wave the requirement? Should we expect the student to face the consequences of their choice? Should we construct an alternative assignment? Should students in a classroom at a college level be protected from material that they might disagree with or is the purpose of an education to make us confront difficult materials and form our own informed judgements? Should the university endorse the validity of opinions about aesthetic works which are formed by people who refuse to watch them? Nobody is saying, I think, that being offensive makes these works art, but there are plenty of legitimate reasons to study a work of popular culture besides the fact that we regard it to have artistic merits! We might well want to talk about the controversy itself and to color the students' response by applogizing for the film's content or otherwise authorizing closed-minded and automatically hostile responses does not make pedagogical sense. So, I see the Iowa case as ultimately complex but we should err on the side of intellectual freedom. --Henry Jenkins