Thoughts on Tumblr's anti-NSFW policy
Dec. 6th, 2018 10:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mysterydissertation[originally posted on Lu Fairchild's tumblr.]
"On every side, our enjoyment of liberty is eclipsed by the lengthening shadow of a Child whose freedom to develop undisturbed by encounters, or even the threat of potential encounters, with an ‘otherness’ of which its parents, its church, or the state do not approve, uncompromised by any possible access to what is painted as alien desire, terroristically holds us all in check and determines that political discourse conform to the logic of a narrative wherein history unfold as the future envisioned for a Child who must never grow up."
- Lee Edelman, No Future
Edelman’s 2004 book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive posits that the protection of an imagined Child (not a real, specific child, but a concept of “the child”) is figured as the goal of any “good” politics. This imaginary Child is “immured in an innocence seen as continuously under siege.” It must be protected from sex, especially queer sex; it “condenses a fantasy of vulnerability to the queerness of queer sexualities.”
This is to say: Tumblr’s use of “adult content” to signify “sexually explicit content” is not a politically neutral choice. In this formula, adult = sex and child = no sex. And since queers are so strongly identified (culturally, not “naturally”) with sex, especially sex that doesn’t produce children, queers are particularly vulnerable to accusations of being Bad For Children–and to a policy like Tumblr’s.
"On every side, our enjoyment of liberty is eclipsed by the lengthening shadow of a Child whose freedom to develop undisturbed by encounters, or even the threat of potential encounters, with an ‘otherness’ of which its parents, its church, or the state do not approve, uncompromised by any possible access to what is painted as alien desire, terroristically holds us all in check and determines that political discourse conform to the logic of a narrative wherein history unfold as the future envisioned for a Child who must never grow up."
- Lee Edelman, No Future
Edelman’s 2004 book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive posits that the protection of an imagined Child (not a real, specific child, but a concept of “the child”) is figured as the goal of any “good” politics. This imaginary Child is “immured in an innocence seen as continuously under siege.” It must be protected from sex, especially queer sex; it “condenses a fantasy of vulnerability to the queerness of queer sexualities.”
This is to say: Tumblr’s use of “adult content” to signify “sexually explicit content” is not a politically neutral choice. In this formula, adult = sex and child = no sex. And since queers are so strongly identified (culturally, not “naturally”) with sex, especially sex that doesn’t produce children, queers are particularly vulnerable to accusations of being Bad For Children–and to a policy like Tumblr’s.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-21 03:37 am (UTC)I have thoughts, which I will share when I’m not doing one-finger typing on my phone while hidden under the blankets of a bed in a room that I’m sharing with three other people