Community, Censorship, and Feminism in 1980s Vancouver 

Curatorial Essay by Ana Valine

In the 1980s, Vancouver was a hotbed of debate over pornography and censorship which resulted in fierce splits among feminist organizers in the city throughout the decade. As such, Vancouver became “an outpost of the larger feminist sex wars” (Guerrero 2023, n.p.). As early as 1975, Vancouver feminist activist Gene Errington warned that the rising division of opinion on pornography was “our latest battleground,” as feminists found themselves “in opposition to each other” (39:45).

Some opposed pornography across the board, while others opposed the censorship of sexual expression; both positions held at their centre the visual representations of women in the media and their effects. Each side organized conferences and screenings, wrote position papers, protested, and kept making their work through it all.

The “anti-porn” position was embraced by feminists who opposed the ubiquity of pornography in Canadian society. White, heterosexual pornography seemed to be everywhere: on magazine racks, porn movie houses, record covers, and music: “Pornography has become an integral part of our lives and most of us haven’t even realized it” (Falconer 2:14). To anti-porn activists, “all sexually explicit media was harmful and a form of gendered violence” (Guerrero 2023, n.p.). As such, pornography was offensive, violent, and damaging to women, and, consequently, most material of a sexual nature had to be banned. A Respectable Lie (1980) and Gene Errington (1975), which were made by the Women in Focus Society (WIF), a feminist media collective that was staunchly anti-pornography and against most forms of sexual representation until the mid-1980s, reflect this stance. In 1982, members of the guerrilla group The Squamish Five calling themselves the “Wimmin’s Fire Brigade” went as far as firebombing multiple porn shops in the city.
 

On the other hand, the anti-censorship position argued that “women were subordinated in many categories of representation, from pornography to commercial advertisements for cleaning supplies” (Sirove 2014, 146). What was needed, then, were alternate methods of artistic sexual expression that represented a feminist perspective. Among those who advocated against censorship were artists and media workers whose explorations of the question of identity in video production were prolific in Vancouver in the 1980s and 1990s and who were directly affected by the censorship of sexual representations.

Although these two sides were opposed in theory, in a relatively small city such as Vancouver, it is important to note that the camps were also porous and dynamic, connected to each other through various affiliations and concerns such as labour, Indigenous rights, migration, and anti-racism. These feminist debates were further complicated by Vancouver’s political context, where censorship laws affected virtually everyone, even those who profited from pornography and the exploitation of sex.

Karen Knights (VIVO Archivist) was an anti-censorship activist during this period. She explains:

“In 1985, in the wake of funding cuts to publishers of political criticism and social history, the Socreds [the Social Credit Party, a populist, right-wing political party that dominated B.C. government for 34 years] established The Periodical Review Board, described as a ‘self-regulating’ industry body upholding ‘community standards’, a term adopted nation-wide to justify restrictions on imagery and publications about sexuality” (Knights 2020).

The following year, the BC government introduced video classification and censorship legislation, “Bill 30” or the new B.C Motion Picture Act (MPA), which stated that all video works required prior screening and classification. These new laws thus impacted independent media producers by imposing fees on them for classification and restricting the imagery they could show. At the federal level, the Canadian government was amending its Criminal Code to define obscenity, and publications were being seized at the border by Canada Customs due to their perceived violation of “community standards.” As Knights (2020) further states, these new anti- pornography legislations “[made] virtually all producers and distributors of sexual imagery vulnerable.” The most egregious use of such legislation was against queer and feminist materials. In many instances, the laws prevented non- heteronormative audiences from accessing films and videos that represented their perspectives. Indeed, while straight, white women were working toward “equal and fair representation” in sexual imagery, people of colour and queer people were trying to define and express their desires, all while working within, and in defiance of, local laws–and often in tension with the straight feminist morality.

The passage of these laws led to widespread resistance. In the winter of 1985, a group of Vancouver feminist artists and cultural workers organized The Heat Is On: Women On Art On Sex Conference, which brought together a national group of feminist, anti- censorship advocates that “looked to expand and consolidate into an organization that would reach beyond the art community and that could propose a credible alternative program to the slash and burn strategy of state censorship” (Knights 2020). This was followed by several other activist and artistic events that gathered momentum and members. In 1986, the Coalition for the Right To View—a coalition initiated by Vancouver’s arts community and that included media workers, educators, librarians, trade unions, and LGBTQ2+ organizations and businesses, among others—was formed with a mandate to “oppose the suppression of images” at the provincial and federal level. The organization’s statement of purpose read:

“The aim of the coalition is to combat government censorship including but not limited to: 
Proposed videotape legislation [classification and censorship]
Censorship by the Periodical Review Board
Censorship and banning of work and image by Canada Customs
Anti-obscenity section of the Criminal Code of Canada”

Concerned that the “government would choose to ban, rather than educate, ” the group proposed that instead of censorship, education and resources were needed to support gender equality and the protection of victims of violence and sexual abuse. They also advocated for “the development of sexual images which [would] …be an alternative to existing porn and advertising images” (Knights 2020).

In 1987, Visual Evidence, an exhibition and workshop series about sexual representation, was organized by the Vancouver Artists’ League and the CRTV as a direct challenge to the B.C. Motion Pictures Act. In what they considered to be “an act of civil disobedience,” Visual Evidence screened explicit videos that had not been submitted to the Film Classification Office and there were no age restrictions on attendees. As Karen Knights recalls:

“One of the most rewarding results of Visual Evidence was the forging of an alliance between the arts community and those in sex education and treatment of victims of sexual abuse and violence - people who traditionally took a pro-censorship position. Many participants commented that they found John Goss’ Wild Life [a video confiscated and deemed by Canadian border officials to be ‘child pornography’  because it showed two 16-year-old Latinos kissing] communicated more about youth sexuality and the dangers of legislation than any lecture on the subject.” (Knights 2020).

Canadian video artist John Greyson, in partnership with Blush Productions (a woman-run pornography production house), held an accessible workshop on and screening of gay and lesbian porn which contained information crucial to the sexual health and well-being of community members. Other community activations included a public forum on Pornography, Hate Literature, and Censorship at Simon Fraser University, and Art and the Canadian Context at The Western Front – which organized a screening of See Evil (1985) by feminist video artist Lisa Steele, a video about the battle between Ontario’s arts community and the censor board, as the province of Ontario was dealing with their own censorship challenges.

This is but a brief introduction to the context in which feminists existed, thought of, and made art about issues of pornography, censorship, community, and identity in Vancouver. This history is heavily documented in VIVO’s archives—although this is a history which is as rich as it is fragmented. As Emily Guerrero (2023) writes of archives:

“A paradox of the archive, especially felt by those who have sorted and discarded files, is that there is never ‘one’ ‘true’ story— and as often as not, there is a chasm right where you are looking for these histories. And, the scraps and gossip found within them are so often precious fragments, requiring and deserving of care to knit back together” (n.p.).

The two dossiers created by Hazel Meyer and Cait McKinney draw on this complex history and its complicated archives. “Porn” and “Censorship” represent the position of each camp in relation to sexual expression and pornography, “using the archives at VIVO as a site of activation” (Guerrero 2023). The title itself, “The images, such as they are, do have an effect on us” comes from writer Himani Bannerji’s address at The Heat is On! Conference held in Vancouver in 1985.

Hazel Meyer (2022) describes:

"The images, such as they are, do have an effect on us, as an “[e]dition of 100, distributed via Canada Post, 9.5 x 12”, paper, copies, photos, clips, staples, envelopes, postage.” The dossiers were mailed in separate envelopes to select persons. The invitation came with a content warning: “The mailings include archival records related to porn, kink, and gender violence and you are agreeing to receive this material in the mail.”

Recipients got either a “Porn” folder or a “Censorship” folder in the mail. The project, therefore, was based on the physicality of the archival files. As McKinney and Meyer note in their artist statement: This “mail art project… enlivened records related to porn, feminism, and censorship” (McKinney and Meyer). In her article “Gossipy Scraps, Gossip(ing) Archives” (2023), Emily Guerrero describes the dossiers in detail:

“Bearing stamps from the ’80s, but recently postmarked and featuring a red stamp declaring ‘Archive!’, the envelope spilled out a thick file folder labelled Censorship. Its initial title, Porn, peeked out underneath the label, covered but not erased. The file, full of clippings, photos, and notes, was a temporary portal from my messy kitchen to ’80s feminist Vancouver, created and sent to me via archival crate digging, a bit of time travel, and a hefty dose of gossip” (n.p).

Not only do the artists mobilize archival ephemera, which, as scholar and curator Genevieve Flavelle (2021) notes, has “arisen as a key source for challenging and expanding the definition of an archive” (44), but Meyer and McKinney also introduce fictional archival elements to their project. “Some of the records are real, others we imagined based on scraps, remnants, and gossip,” reads the curatorial statement. These speculative records fill in the blanks and embellish the actual archival documents included in the two dossiers in order to play “with questions of polarization and memory” (McKinney and Meyer 2024).

The artists additionally created two video walk-throughs of the physical dossiers: one shot with a smartphone; the other with camcorder originating from the time the original documents were produced. Both recordings were, however, made in 2022. There are ‘tells’ within each file that point to contemporary touches, such as a Google map with 1982 firebombing locations highlighted. As such, Meyer and McKinney’s art project draws attention to the archives’ physical and temporal state and works to both displace and replace the archives in time.

Guerrero (2023) deems Meyers and McKinney’s project essential for thinking about our present and future:

“Paging through both folders from The images, such as they are, do have an effect on us, the differing tactics unspooling in front of me showed two deeply diverging conceptualizations of control and violence. This schism runs straight through to today—the political deal that anti-porn feminists Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin made when they pushed to get anti-obscenity laws enacted in Canada is the earlier version of current TERF/“gender- critical” feminists’ alliance with right-wing attacks on the bodily autonomy of trans people. Meanwhile, the fight against censorship led by queers and sex workers has continued as the terrain of struggle has moved from physical media to the internet” (n.p.).

Placed within the context of contemporary issues, these archives are indeed important reminders that conversations around censorship, feminism, and equality are still alive and needed.
 

 - Essay by Ana Valine