Pornography and objectification: re-reading “the picture that divided Britain”

This paper examines the significance of the terms objectification and pornography in three key approaches to analysing pornographic texts; an anti-pornography feminist approach, an historical approach focused on pornography and regulation, and an approach which details pornography’s aesthetic transgressiveness. It suggests that while all three approaches continue to be productive for the analysis of sexual representations, their usefulness is limited by a tendency towards essentialism. A discussion of the public controversy around an advert for Opium perfume in 2000 is used to argue that an attentiveness to the context of particular images, and to the variety of reactions they provoke, provides a useful way of developing the analysis of sexual representations and their contemporary significance.