Vancouver’s 1980s Feminist Debates: Pornography and Censorship in the Archives Gendered Violence: Responses and Remediation

Abstract

ABOUT OUR EDUCATIONAL GUIDES SERIES One of the central goals of Archive/Counter-Archive is to increase public engagement with our partner organizations and their collections through an “activation” of archival materials that foregrounds the pressing need to rethink what archives can/might do in the 21st century. In order to achieve this goal, we have developed a series of Educational Guides designed to accompany film and video from A/CA’s Case Studies and facilitate their integration into K-12 and postsecondary classrooms. About the Guide This educational guide activates one of three archival collections held at VIVO Media Arts Centre’s Crista Dahl Media Library that focus on the subject of gendered violence as it was discussed, debated, and exhibited in and around Vancouver in the 1980s. Although united by a common theme, these collections span a variety of topics: feminist porn wars and resistance to censorship, activist video responses to the Pinochet dictatorship, and the 1989 In Visible Colours film and media festival which aimed to foreground discussions of settler colonialism, decolonization, Indigeneity, and solidarity. Taken together, these three collections generate intersectional and multigenerational dialogue about gendered violence; as such, the films and videos in this archive are modes of creative resistance against several forms of subordination and oppression. In partnership with VIVO, the Archive/Counter-Archive project has developed three separate educational guides that engage with each collection as part of its Gendered Violence: Responses and Remediation Case Study. These guides are available digitally and for free at counterarchive.ca This specific guide centres on the feminist debates regarding issues of pornography and censorship that took place in Vancouver in the 1980s. Indeed, in the 1980s, many Vancouver feminists opposed to porn drew on the language of gender violence to make their case, arguing that all sexually explicit images of women were harmful. Working against this position and the creep of censorship into smaller moving image formats in the province, queer and feminist artists defended sexual expression and created alternative visual languages for sex. In particular, this guide expands on the 2022 mail-art project developed by Vancouver-based artists Hazel Meyer and Cait McKinney in collaboration with VIVO and Archive/Counter-Archive entitled The images, such as they are, do have an effect on us. The guide features images and videos documenting Meyer and McKinney’s mail art project, an essay by Ana Valine on the feminist debates regarding sexual representation and censorship in the 1980s, and contextualizing images and videos. The curated material is listed in the suggested order of viewing and a list of discussion questions is included to encourage conversation. We recommend previewing the works before you screen them for your students and reading the contextualizing information provided in this guide. Please note that some videos contain graphic imagery."