A Comparison of Social Constructionist and Ethnomethodological Descriptions of How a Judge Distinguished Between the Erotic and the Obscene

Abstract

In 1985, a member of the Canadian judiciary handed down a written judgment in which he distinguished between erotica and obscene matter. The judgment attracted the scorn of some normative sociologists, who complained of the insufficiency of the social psychological research on which it was based. Their reaction prompts a review of the judgment in the light of social constructionism and of ethnomethodology; this, in turn, prompts a comparison of social constructionist and ethnomethodological methodologies, in which the legal judgment serves merely as a test case. It is argued that normative sociology and social constructionism, both being of an essentially ironic cast, occlude the judge's sense-making procedures, the very phenomena they purport to describe. Ethnomethodology, on the other hand, being nonironic, promises to capture those procedures.