Taking Back Times Square: Feminist Repertoires and the Transformation of Urban Space in Late Second Wave Feminism

The history of feminism's sex wars has mostly focused on questions of sexual censorship, free speech, and the alleged support that antipornography feminists offered conservative policy-makers during the backlash of the 1980s. These are all important questions. But what has been overlooked is the contest over physical and cultural space, as well as the conversation about democratizing public space, that Women Against Pornography initiated when they marched on Times Square in 1979. By imagining heteropatriarchy as a regime, and antipornography feminist strategies as repertoires, this article explores new ways of imagining the possibilities and the limitations of a movement which rejected the terms of a sexual revolution that it viewed as having unleashed cultural and actual violence against women.