Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Censorship has generally been of interest to social theorists when considered as a matter of state control over “free speech” and/or mass-mediated content. This governmental censorship has tended to focus on notions of protecting “vulnerable” (young/lower-class/female) audiences from representations of sex, violence, and criminality which, it is assumed, may deprave, corrupt, or desensitize them ( Dewe Mathews 1994 ). Media-sociological work on censorship (e.g., Barker & Petley 2001) argues that it has worked to support the ideological power of hegemonic blocs, tending to repress expression which does not fall into normative cultural categories, as well as especially restricting popular rather than “literary” culture. “Educated,” middle-class audiences for elite culture are not as likely to be represented as “vulnerable” as audiences for popular film and television. In the US, the cinema Production Code of 1930 infamously detailed exactly what could not be shown in classical Hollywood film: sexual relations between heterosexual characters were elided; morally bad characters were depicted as never triumphing thanks to their crimes; and homosexual relationships could not be shown nor even strongly implied ( Jacobs 1991 ; Berenstein 1996 ). As well as restricting popular culture through codes of conduct for producers or industry self-regulation, censorship can also be said to ... log in or subscribe to read full text