ABSTRACT
The defence of ‘alternative’ sexually explicit imagery has become an urgent task for feminists. These images, which range from the low budget lesbian ‘zines to feminist-oriented safer sex material, are playing an important role in interrupting sexist discourse, heterosexism and AIDS demonisations. Feminists are, of course, divided on the question of censorship; for the most part, anticensorship feminists have to defend these alternative discourses from attacks by both the state and other feminists. Although the anticensorship feminists’ political work is extremely valuable, they often reproduce traditional arguments about representation. Viewed in terms of this traditional framework, the defence of alternative images often becomes self-contradictory.
