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California State University, Dominguez Hills
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Created: October 16, 2003
Latest Update: October 16, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Censorship and Answerability

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, October 2003.
"Fair use" encouraged.

This week Issue IV, October 2003, of Naked was on well not exactly the stands, but the Naked Lady. A black one we heard, but according to the club members in charge there's also a white Naked Lady tempting our studens with mud flap art to take politics seriously, on the premise that young people could care less about politics.

This issue begins our project for CENSORED, our own newsletter, that will utlimately serve as the catalog for our exhibit in December on how answerability and visual sociology can bring illocutionary understanding to material that is offensive to many, and that others are using in the stated goal of getting our attention (corporate media's advertising principle for reference).

Here's a variation of NAKED'S logo:

What's wrong with this picture?

CENSORED proposes to use a variation of the mud flap icon from our CENSORED COLORING BOOK as the cover to our catalog for December's exhibition.

I promised many of you that I would put up a rough outline of my reasons for finding the NAKED icon offensive. I note them here so that each of you can explore them and we can use them for discussions and articles for the CENSORED catalog:

• The mud flaps we fought about in the seventies as offensive to women. The flaps turned into an icon when interstate truckers used them for mudflaps. They were a lot like the naked picture calendars that used to adorn garage walls and lockers where women were unlikely to go. They seem to have represented ideal woman as sexual object to the men who plastered them everywhere. For many women they were associated with truckstops, fast sex, prostitution, the dehumanization of women. They offended many of us.

  I recognize that much about trucking has changed in recent years, but the connotations of that icon remain offensive with the context the icon appears here, as a come on to attract young people to read the newsletter called NAKED, which does present some thought provoking political and social ideas. I endorse their right to speak and write. I just think they should deal with the harm they are causing by these offenses up front and with answerability. Remember the Other doesn't need your permission to answer his/her utterance unless he/she has some power over you. So we are free to answer. If NAKED refuses to respond, then NAKED is acting in a monologic nonanswerable context which is inconsistent with their stated editorial position of free speech. The answer to free speech is more speech, not silence, especially not silence through pulling rank or power.

  I want to emphasize that the more I asked for those who had offended me by using such blatant sexual come ons to get young people to look at a political newsletter (which is dishonest in and of itself, but that's another essay) the more they hid behind censorship. The N word would have gotten my attention also. Why did you pick gender offense over race offense? Why did you pick what was offensive to at least a large part of our community? And why do Wayne Martin, their faculty advisor, and Kendra Harris, their president, insist upon answering every statment of offense with "We have a policy of No Censorship." We also have a policy on no censorship, for we practice answerability. But what does censorship have to do with your offending us with sexual icons and epithets? You may have the right to free political speech, but that isn't even arguable. Do you claim to have NO responsibility to even have an illocutionary discussion with those you offend? If you are a political newsletter about free speech to express the truth you claim is not told, doesn't that make our validity claims truth you will not discuss?

• Other concerns with the icon:

  Like it or no it still represents an ideal held up before young women, and you are appealing to a young audience, That image as an ideal flies in the face of our entire country's concern with obesity, Barbie dolls, bulimia, and anorexia. You may insist upon monologic nonanswerability in the name of being free to do what you want. So we will respond with what we hope are healing messages for those to whom you hold up this model and all the inequalities and hurt it engenders.

  I also want to clarify that my being offended does not in any way relate to censorship. Cnesorship involves a legal right to prevent publication of material that is offensive to the community at large. That's a legal issue, and we do our best to protect free speech because we always find that we can't agree on what obscenity is. We are a nation of many and wonderful differences. I am not speaking of NAKWRD in a legal context, but in the context of offending potential readers and of false consciousness as to who those readers are and what they are interested in. That cannot be answered by CENSORSHIP unless one chooses to take a monologic nonanswerable stance, which we consider unethical through its complicity with the corporate liberal focus on anything that will win and/or increase the bottom line. Naked hurt many of us. Naked should respond to us, try to hear us, and recognize the harm it has caused.

  More later. I gotta get to school. You are welcome to respond. We will reproduce CENSORED in hard copy, as many copies as we can afford. jeanne

  Here's my first reaction to coloring Naked: