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<p>The proliferation of digital platforms, communication technologies, and visual production tools has prompted successive legislative revisions aimed at ensuring ‘online safety for minors’ or eradicating ‘gender-based violence’. Drawing on the Portuguese legislative dossier on the <i>attempted</i> criminalisation of the dissemination of images of a ‘pornographic or sexual nature’, this article examines the assumptions underpinning its normative enunciation and framework. The intricacies of this criminal classification are analysed alongside doctrinal perspectives and case law to explore the representational tensions between visual representation, <i>pornographic imagination</i>, and legal reasoning. Ultimately, the aim is twofold: first, to re-situate the legal construction of truth from the boundary between private and public—and the gradations within each of these spheres—employed both to delimit transgression and to uphold the idea of unity that characterises—and challenges—the legal order. Second, by turning to visual jurisprudence, it addresses sexual phantasmography within legal discourse, arguing that, in naming the pornographic, the legal apparatus generates the very spectres it purports to regulate.</p>

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Law and the Pornographic Imagination: on the Criminalisation of Sexual Image Dissemination

  • 期刊论文

  • 出版模式：

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  • 发表日期：

    2026年6月19日

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  • Ana Oliveira

摘要

The proliferation of digital platforms, communication technologies, and visual production tools has prompted successive legislative revisions aimed at ensuring ‘online safety for minors’ or eradicating ‘gender-based violence’. Drawing on the Portuguese legislative dossier on the attempted criminalisation of the dissemination of images of a ‘pornographic or sexual nature’, this article examines the assumptions underpinning its normative enunciation and framework. The intricacies of this criminal classification are analysed alongside doctrinal perspectives and case law to explore the representational tensions between visual representation, pornographic imagination, and legal reasoning. Ultimately, the aim is twofold: first, to re-situate the legal construction of truth from the boundary between private and public—and the gradations within each of these spheres—employed both to delimit transgression and to uphold the idea of unity that characterises—and challenges—the legal order. Second, by turning to visual jurisprudence, it addresses sexual phantasmography within legal discourse, arguing that, in naming the pornographic, the legal apparatus generates the very spectres it purports to regulate.