Literature in the legal humanities has begun to turn toward performance as a new site of analysis: as source, representation, and intervention. From Law and Performance (2018) to Law as Performance (2022), this belated comparison has garnered increasing traction. But methods from dance and performance studies, those wayward disciplines where corporeality supersedes the literary, still make only passing appearances. The repercussions, however, exceed the methodological toward the most material. This chapter underscores the consequences for this absence by centring the lone figure, “Naked Athena,” as a femme body in protest whose choreographic aesthetic of whiteness allowed particular flexibility under the law. Through her balletic performance of resistance, themes of discipline, elegance, and decorum swirl against the indecent, vulgar, and obscene labels afforded other protesters in the same scene. Motivated by this framing, I focus us toward identification of the publicly exposed body as righteously revealed or promiscuously pornographic, an aesthetic distinction theorized within art history as the difference between nakedness and nudity yet left ambiguous in legal terms.

In many European countries, sodomy statutes institutionalized the scrutiny of homosexual acts. Magistrates’ reliance on forensic experts to explain sexual deviance in terms of criminal responsibility stimulated the emergence of a medical concept of homosexuality. Belgian courts, however, displayed no such ‘will to know’ about the nature of ‘perversion.’ A comparison of German and Belgian legal logics pertaining to indecency demonstrates how the former was preoccupied with a perpetrator’s motives, while the latter deliberately ignored them. German courts often had recourse to medical expertise to understand what drove (homo)sexual offenders, whereas the Belgian judiciary preferred to omit these hard-to-prove intricacies by stubbornly sticking to the facts of the matter. Belgian trials pertaining to homosexual acts of public indecency were therefore mostly bereft of any special interest in the psychological significance of the acts in question. Unlike elsewhere, they did not stimulate forensic physicians to account for such ‘unnatural acts’ in terms of a medico-psychiatric ‘condition.’

Two differing ideas characterized the city of Toronto throughout the twentieth century. The first, Toronto the Good, represented the aspirations of religious leaders, reformers, politicians, and police officers to create a city modelled after Christian morality. Sexuality was meant to be expressed in the confines of the private, monogamous, heteronormative family home. Sex was for procreation, not pleasure. Contrary to Toronto the Good was a second idea, Toronto the Gay, a 1950s tabloid reference to the variety of spaces available for sexual exploration and desire. Sex work, queer sex, interracial marriage, divorce, birth control, and abortion endured despite intense enforcement of sexual morality. This chapter explores the tensions between the idealism of Toronto the Good and the sexual opportunities of Toronto the Gay.

Chapter 8 explores the rise and fall of the FCC’s policy against broadcast indecency by following the exploits of anti-indecency crusader Brent Bozell, founder of the Parents Television Council (PTC).It traces the beginnings of the FCC’s policy in the early days of radio, and how it was transformed as courts began to develop First Amendment doctrine. It explains the birth of the FCC’s current indecency policy with its action against George Carlin’s “seven dirty words,” and how it was driven by political demands to get tough on broadcasters. This reached a crescendo because of the efforts of Bozell’s PTC and similar groups, who bombarded the FCC with spam email campaigns. Politicians responded by imposing skyrocketing fines based on an increasingly incoherent and confusing policy. The widespread chilling effect on broadcasters led courts to rein in the FCC’s authority in this area. Bozell and his fellow crusaders managed only to discredit themselves, to diminish the influence of their organizations, and to undermine FCC authority over broadcast content.