Couldn’t help but note this parallel from my reading for the day. First, from Edward Ross Dickinson’s Sex, Freedom, and Power in Imperial Germany, a description of late nineteenth and early twentieth century movement against “immorality” (meaning, in this time, everything from pulp cowboy novels to bars and cafés to erotica):
Ironically, of course, the agenda of the morality movement was not to cover up immorality again but rather to eradicate it, precisely by making it visible (40).
And then today, reading E. Tammy Kim’s article published today in The New Yorker, regarding the fight over book banning in rural Montana:
Cuthbertson called “Gender Queer” pornographic and inappropriate for children. She brought giant blowups of the illustrated panels, ironically putting this content in full view.
Ironic both cases may be, but also illustrative of a common strategy amongst those most devoted to supposedly eradicating so-called immorality from public view. Precisely because no one can agree on what constitutes immorality, evidence of it has to be constantly displayed, pointed to, examined, and denigrated in order to create some kind of common understanding of what is being othered as inappropriate. Fortunately, it’s precisely those practices that often serve other uses of the material. I haven’t read Gender Queer, but all the controversy around it has undoubtedly helped young queer people find it for themselves.