Breathing New Life into Old Fears: Extreme Pornography and the Wider Politics of Snuff

In this chapter, I focus on a prosecution brought under the extreme pornography provisions of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2009. I examine elements of the legislation, the argumentation, and the research used to justify its provisions—the claims of the growth and the widespread availability of pornography glorying in sexual violence and assertions of its possible effects. Alongside that discussion, I explore some of the images prosecuted in R v W and how the trial illustrates a “crisis over the meanings of pornography” wherein “the identification of ‘extreme’ pornography has given voice to a range of anxieties about media spectacularization of the body” which have their antecedents in older concerns about the commercial possibilities of the snuff movie.