The Death of Leviathan: Feminist Dilemmas and State Phobia

The Death of Leviathan: FeministDilemmas and State Phobia

Nikita Dhawan*

This essay takes the growing popularity of “hijab/refugee porn” in the West as a

point of departure to revisit the historical feminist debate on pornography. While

Catharine MacKinnon criticizes pornography as an eroticization of violence and

advocates state intervention, Judith Butler warns of the dangers of state censor-

ship, alternatively proposing nonjuridical forms of opposition. Instead of taking up

unequivocal positions for or against the state, this essay addresses the political

costs of evacuating the state as a site of redress of racial and sexual injustice and

examines the risks of state phobia for postcolonial queer–feminist politics.

Introduction

Since the sexual assault incidents in Cologne in 2016 and the #MeToo

movement, the issue of gender violence is increasingly receiving attention in

the media, policy discourses, as well as feminist scholarship in the West. This

is a step in the right direction, as in previous decades, the widespread percep-

tion was that violence against women was primarily a Third World problem.

At the same time, there are justified concerns voiced by postcolonial queer–

feminist scholars and activists regarding the weaponization of sexual violence

to stigmatize migrant communities and postcolonial societies as inherently

misogynistic, while White women are constructed as “victims” of lustful and

predatory Black and Arab masculinity. In my view, there is a selective politics

of how sexual violence is addressed such that violence against certain privi-

leged subjects mobilizes public attention, while violence committed by hege-

monic masculinities is invisibilized. While some bodies are coded as requiring

protection, other allegedly threatening bodies need to be protected from. To

have one’s body understood as vulnerable is a privilege that is granted to a

few, although it should actually be a right for all. The effort in this essay is to

draw attention to a hitherto neglected but increasingly pervasive form of racial

and sexual violence in the hope to contribute to postcolonial queer–feminist

scholarship and activism on gender and the state.

Institute of Political Science and Gender Studies, Justus Liebig University, Giessen, Germany*[email protected]

socpol: Social Politics, Fall 2021 pp. 682–703

doi:10.1093/sp/jxz031

# The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]

Advance Access publication September 5, 2019

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Demand for pornographic videos that depict refugee women, particularly

those wearing headscarves, having submissive sex has been increasing in

Germany and in other European societies since 2015. The genre of “hijab/refugee

pornography” (Amjahid 2018), which mainly focuses on commercial heteroporn

and depicts refugee women having submissive interracial sex, raises difficult

questions of whether it is a sign of hate speech, with eroticization of racist and

sexist violence, or an expression of sexual desire of Arab and Muslim women. Is

the presence of hypersexualized, racialized, and orientalized bodies in porn evi-

dence of empowered sexual subjects or is it a sign of absence of agency?

Invoking international human rights law, there have been calls for

European countries like Germany to grant asylum to individuals and groups

fleeing persecution and conflict. Does this imperative to “protect” refugee

women also extend to the realm of violent hate speech? If the injurious poten-

tial of “refugee/hijab porn” is accepted, should the (German) state be interpel-

lated as a motor of (racial and sexual) justice? Or should vulnerable

individuals and groups pursue nonjuridical forms of opposition instead of

calling on the state to intervene on their behalf, as calls for censorship risk fall-

ing into the trap of “respectability politics” (Miller-Young 2014, ix)? Does

censorship consolidate the state’s coercive powers while obstructing other

forms of resistance to hate speech? Does mobilizing the state’s protective pow-

ers perpetuate the orientalist victimization of (Muslim, migrant) women that

legitimize “rescue narratives”? (Abu-Lughod 2013; Spivak 1988).

Pornography has been one of the most divisive issues in feminism, with the

feminist sex wars pitting anti-pornography groups against the sex-positive ones.

The claiming of pornography as a feminist issue instead of being a matter of

public morality was a watershed moment, in that pornography was defined not

just as “obscene” but also as violent sexist hate speech that is harmful and ex-

ploitative (Dworkin 1981). The feminist anti-pornography movement drew on

testimonies of women like Linda Boreman,1 who were forced into pornography,

to argue that pornography eroticizes violence, such that women are depicted to

enjoy their own sexual subjugation. Morgan (1978, 169) summarized this idea in

her often-quoted statement, “Pornography is the theory, and rape is the

practice,” thereby drawing an intimate link between pornography and sexual vi-

olence. Radical feminist MacKinnon (1993, 5) argues that pornography is the

sexually explicit subordination of women in pictures or words. For MacKinnon,

pornography is both (hate) speech that is representational and (violent) action

that is performative. Pornography is the subordination and not just the cause of

subordination of women. MacKinnon advocates laws that define pornography

as a civil rights harm and allow women to sue pornographers. The effort is to en-

able women who allege harm by pornography, either as individuals or as mem-

bers of a group, to obtain reparations for the injury. However, courts rejected

legislative campaigns by radical feminists for violating principles of free speech.

In contrast, anti-anti-pornography feminists like Califia (1994) and Willis

(2012) argue that pornography is a free expression of women’s sexual desire, which

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subverts many traditional ideas about women’s sexual agency. Instead of viewing

pornography as a monolithic patriarchal tool exercising unilateral violent impact,

porn becomes a convenient scapegoat for conservative stigmatization of noncon-

forming sexual practices. Instead of being victims of sexism, women’s participation

in pornography is seen as a sign of free choice, with the pornography industry be-

ing one of the few labor markets, which enables economic mobility while overcom-

ing the gender wage gap. Anti-censorship feminists highlight the heterogeneity of

the porn industry, which includes queer, trans, and feminist porn. Advocates of

state intervention are advised to differentiate between the various genres of porn

when thinking about harm and censorship. The recent case of Tumblr is a case in

point. In censoring child pornography, Tumblr’s blanket ban on all adult content

on its platform is viewed as counterproductive. Given that the bulk of user-

generated content focused on non-heteronormative desire, it was a popular digital

platform for feminist, queer, crip, and trans communities. However, in the name

of monitoring racist, sexist, or homophobic hate speech, Tumblr inadvertently

ended up censoring nonnormative sexual expressions (Powell 2018). Anticipating

these conundrums, sex-positive feminists categorically reject any form of censor-

ship, arguing that this will neither reduce sexual violence nor protect women but

will only stifle women’s sexual agency. Furthermore, support of censorship risks

complicity in conservative religious and patriarchal state policies.

The debate about whether pornography is an expression of sexual agency

or hate speech remains just as unresolved as the debate about whether censor-

ship is legitimate and efficacious under certain circumstances or whether the

state must bear responsibility for protecting vulnerable individuals and groups

from hate speech. An antinomy is encountered here wherein the right to free

speech contradicts the right to dignity of every person.

Revisiting the feminist debate on censorship with particular focus on the

contrary positions of MacKinnon and Butler, the essay examines the role of

the state in “protecting” racial, sexual, and religious minorities from hate

speech. While Butler recommends state passivity, MacKinnon advocates that

coercive state powers could be potentially useful to protect historically dis-

criminated individuals and groups from injurious speech acts. Taking any

steps on the slippery slope of censorship is full of perils, thus instead of an un-

equivocal position, which is anyway impossible, I will share my own ethical

and political dilemmas in the hope that this will contribute to the difficult

project of rethinking postcolonial queer–feminist approaches to the state.

To censor or not to censor?

Most liberal conceptions of free speech foreground the performative enact-

ment of political agency in and through speech so that (state) censorship is

seen to undermine deliberative democracy. This is contested by postcolonial

queer–feminists, who focus on racialized sexual violence exerted through hate

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speech (Matsuda et al. 1993). In questioning liberalism’s freedom-producing

understanding of speech, they challenge one of the foundational underpin-

nings of the humanist tradition laid down in Aristotle’s definition of humans

as political (z�oon politikon) and speaking beings (z�oon logon ekhon).

Questioning the understanding of free speech as means to emancipation, radi-

cal feminists and critical race theorists foreground the intricate relation be-

tween speech and racialized sexual violence. While some argue that minority

groups can “speak back” so that free speech is a tool to combat harm, others

point out that due to power inequality not everyone has the possibility of

speaking truth to power. Even when minorities make an effort to speak back,

their counter-speech is not heard (Spivak 1988). This raises difficult questions

about combating hate speech through a politics of resignification.

In this section, I revisit the historical feminist debate on pornography and cen-

sorship. Since the 1980s, MacKinnon has fought for anti-pornography civil rights

law. In her view, pornography sexualizes inequality and instates male dominance:

With pornography, men masturbate to women being exposed, humili-

ated, violated, degraded, mutilated, dismembered, bound, gagged, tor-

tured, and killed. In the visual materials, they experience this being done

by watching it being done. What is real here is not that the materials are

pictures, but that they are part of a sex act. (MacKinnon 1993, 17)

MacKinnon (1993) argues that through its perlocutionary force pornography

not only causes harm but also constitutes harm. Pornography not only repre-

sents or incites racialized sexual violence, it performs it, wherein coercion is

guised as consent. MacKinnon furthermore argues that pornography eroti-

cizes the prohibited such that obscenity laws obscure patriarchal domination

and present it as a moral issue of virtue and vice. When sexism or racism is

considered as just another point of view, then it falls under that which must

be protected from intolerance. Pornography is defended in the name of free-

dom of speech, even as it silences women’s speech (MacKinnon 1989, 247).

Pornographic representations not only violate individual women but also

harm women as a group by reproducing stereotypical gendered norms. In the

case of “hijab/refugee pornography,” it perpetuates orientalist, racist tropes

about Muslim women and their sexuality, irrespective of whether the per-

formers are themselves refugees or Muslim women. Consumers of pornogra-

phy may be viewing “fiction,” but this form of racist, sexist, and orientalist

“worlding” has far-reaching power effects.

As part of the civil rights hearings, MacKinnon (1989) cited studies in

which men self-reported to being more inclined to committing aggressive sex-

ual acts after consuming pornography depicting violent sex. She also drew on

first-hand stories of how the production of pornography harmed individual

performers. Protecting pornography constitutionally as a right, in

MacKinnon’s (1989, 11–12) view, implies protecting sexual violence as a “free


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speech.” Pornography is defended as “only words,” even when women’s bod-

ies experience immediate violence.As a political solution, MacKinnon (1993) calls for state intervention to

censor pornography as hate speech, rejecting the liberal defense of pornogra-

phy as a private transaction between purveyors and consumers. MacKinnon

points out that sexual violence is obfuscated by presenting pornography as a

“free choice” with women receiving monetary compensation for their labor:

“Money is the medium of force and provides the cover of consent”

(MacKinnon 1993, 28). Challenging the prevalent obscenity-based anti-por-

nography legislation, MacKinnon seeks to enable those forced into pornogra-

phy, and survivors of assaults caused by pornography consumption, the

opportunity to seek legal recourse for the harms done to them.Butler (1997) in Excitable Speech advances one of the most powerful objec-

tions to MacKinnon’s arguments. Before I outline Butler’s criticism in detail,

let me briefly present some other positions that challenge MacKinnon’s sup-

port of state censorship to showcase the diversity of dissenting perspectives.

Against the widespread idea that women should look to the law for redress,

Coetzee (1996) in his book Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship disagrees with

MacKinnon that law, with its deep roots in patriarchy, has the power to right

wrongs. Coetzee (1996) turns to Irigaray (1985, 88), who argues that it is futile

for women to seek justice within the legal system, given that it is part of the

male imaginary and thus profoundly heterosexist. For Irigaray (1985, 162–3),

feminism and jurisprudence are not incompatible, but a feminist jurispru-

dence must be playful and should not accept the authority and legitimacy of

law with unequivocal seriousness. State censorship against pornography, in

this view, would not automatically protect and empower women.

Along similar lines, Smart argues:

Just as medicine is seen as curative rather than iatrogenic, so law is seen as

extending rights rather than creating wrong. . . . we need to consider that

in exercising law we may produce effects that make conditions worse,

and that in worsening conditions we make the mistake of assuming that

we need to apply more doses of legislation. (Smart, 1989, 12, 161)

Coetzee (1996, 25) explains what Smart (1989) means by “iatrogenic” medi-

cine and “juridogenic” law. Just as medicine not only cures disease but also

creates a medical profession and a pharmaceutical industry, so law not only

adjudicates claims but also creates a legal profession and a law industry, which

reinforce patriarchal structures. In particular, censorship laws create a bureau-

cracy of censors and a parallel legal industry.The paradox of censorship is that in a sense pornography needs censorship to

increase its allure, to make it into the forbidden and desired object (Coetzee

1996, 27). Smart (1989) argues that the very idea that pornography is the truth

of sex needs to be challenged, a position she accuses MacKinnon (1989, 114–16,

123–5) of representing in her support of legal censorship. Advertising, soap

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operas, and romantic fiction are more influential than pornography in sexualizing

women, but radical feminists do not necessarily target these (Smart 1989, 136).

Another perspective that Coetzee (1996, 30) highlights is Sontag’s (1969) argu-

ment about the importance of pornographers–writers like Marquis de Sade and

Georges Bataille, for confronting the ideal of integrating sex into a pleasant,

happy, ordered, and productive life. Sontag (1969) sees the great pornographers

as restoring the demonic truth of desire that civility seeks to tame. In contrast to

radical feminist vilification of pornography, Sontag (1969, 56–8) views it as a war-

fare against normalization of sexual practices by showing the diversity of desires.

In the context of “refugee/hijab pornography,” one could argue that race

and gender power plays are important elements of all porn, including bondage

discipline submission/sadism masochism (BDSM), queer, and feminist porn

where social norms of “acceptable” sexual practices are transgressed.

Bourgeois framing of “respectable” desire renders porn and its explicit depic-

tion of bodily fluids, genitalia, and orifices as distasteful and disgusting.

BDSM practices often play with humiliation and submission; however, strict

rules premised on equality and respect, it is claimed, make them nonexploita-

tive and noncoercive. Queer, trans, and feminist pornography, it is argued,

can undermine heteronormative and racist sexual imagery by facilitating pro-

cesses of de-subjectivation (Ziv 2015, 230). This is presented as an essential

distinction between harmful pornographic hate speech, which reifies female

subjectivity for male pleasure, and gender-bending feminist, queer, and trans

pornography that enables de-subjectivation through disruptive strategies of

undoing normative framings of erotica, pleasure, and fantasy. This form of li-

bidinal economy could potentially function as a counterpoint to the commer-

cialization of heteroporn.

Turning to race play in porn, it is instructive to invoke Frantz Fanon

(1952), who addresses how racial pleasure functions as a technology of domi-

nation. Interracial sex and its diverse representations cannot be disengaged

from the history of racial trauma, the dehumanization of Blacks and White

anxieties about Black sexuality, especially about Black male sexuality.

Previously, Black feminists have been vehement critics of pornography: In her

short story “Porn,” Alice Walker portrays the devastating effects of Black

men’s consumption of pornography on Black women, while Patricia Hill

Collins traces how public displays of racialized sexualized exotic Black bodies

in Europe, for example, Saartjie Baartman, the so-called “Hottentot Venus,” is

the backdrop against which modern pornography emerged (Miller-Young

2014, x). Audre Lorde similarly condemned pornography, distinguishing it

from the erotic, which in her view is a profound source of feminine power.

Pornography, according to Lorde, flattens, trivializes, and uses sexuality

against women of color and suppresses and denies the feminine power of the

erotic, because the erotic is a threat to heterosexist and racist ideologies and

practices.2 It is interesting to note that Dworkin (1981), McKinnon, and

Lorde drew on each other’s insights in their criticism of pornography.


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Supplementing these positions, contemporary Black/Asian feminist schol-

ars (Miller-Young 2014; Nash 2014; Parre~nas Shimizu 2007) focus on the am-

bivalent role of race in what is constructed as desirable in porn. All porn has

elements of race and gender play, irrespective of whether or not it explicitly

contains interracial sex. Exploring possibilities for racialized pleasures, Miller-

Young (2014, xi) emphasizes “the absolute necessity of conceptualizing porn

as a powerful and important site for Black women’s own imagination, and

yes, feminist intervention.” Miller-Young (2014, 5) employs the trope of

“brown sugar” to explain how porn shapes the world in which Black women

come to know themselves. For Nash (2014, 87), Blackness is a “fraught, com-

plex, and potentially exciting performance for Black subjects, as a doing which

can thrill, excite, and arouse, even as it wounds and terrorizes.” Race-play

porn at once exploits and/or subverts the power dynamics through employ-

ment of racial stereotypes that might be necessary for “naming and claiming

pleasures” (Nash 2014, 105–06). As Saba Mahmood insightfully remarks,

agency is the “capacity for action that historically specific relations of subordi-

nation enable and create” such that at times agency enables resistive action

and other times it is the “capacity to endure, suffer, and persist” (cited in

Miller-Young 2014, 18).

If porn is both representation as well as performance, not only social phe-

nomenon but also individual affective experience, then it can trigger historical

traumas during role-plays such as “slave auctions” and “holocaust scenes.”

However, it can also be pleasurable for racialized subjects as performers and

viewers through boundary-pushing counter-framings of interracial sex where

the power dynamics of gender, race, class, and religion maybe reversed and

subverted (Smith and Luykx 2017). Here, previously disenfranchised subjects

have “possibilities for female pleasure within a phallic economy and possibili-

ties of female pleasure within a white-dominated representational economy”

(Nash 2014, 2), while formerly empowered male subjects are made to occupy

an abject space, for instance, in feminist revenge porn. Thus, even as the sex-

ual act may seem the same, the power effects can be different. Experiments

with domination/submission fantasies in interracial pornography, which

draws on historical tropes, could simultaneously subvert and reinforce racial

and sexual hierarchies within the same film (Smith and Luykx 2107). While

all sexual play has elements of race play reinforcing White racial and phallic

pleasure, those advocating an unregulated porno sphere reject legislation of

race-play porn, arguing that marginal communities use porn to raise aware-

ness about nonnormative sexual practices. However, adopting a sex-positive

stance toward porn, even the kind that subverts racial and gender norms, does

not settle the issue of political implications (Smith and Luykx 2017).

Miller-Young (2014, 278) argues that even as Indie, feminist, and queer

porn redefine and expand the field of pornography in that they create

counter-framings to mainstream race- and gender-play porn and provide de-

cent work for their performers under conditions of racial and sexual

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capitalism, the wages they can offer are much lower than those offered by big-

ger studios. Miller-Young (2014, 278) asks, “whether an ethics of care and

sense of political artistic activism outweigh equal pay.” Given the material

conditions in which mainstream pornography is produced and performed, it

seems disingenuous to claim that subversive pleasure derived by viewers from

marginalized communities is sufficient to reconfigure structures of White su-

premacy and heteronormativity. Analyzing the documentary Sex: The Annabel

Chong Story, Parre~nas Shimizu (2007, 178) points out that the facial expres-

sion of pain and pleasure of the performer look so similar that it is impossible

to draw conclusions about agency or victimhood. Interestingly, the porn per-

formers whom Parre~nas Shimizu cites as examples of having successfully

exerted agency eventually decided to quit the industry (Zheng 2017, 182).

Anti-porn feminists have historically focused on the economic conditions in

which pornography is produced and despite advancements made by feminist,

trans, and queer porn, not all performers have the “choice” to determine how

their erotic labor will be represented. For instance, queer performers of color

are paid less than White cis counterparts, who even get a “bonus” for agreeing

to interracial sex. This racist economy of the porn industry confirms claims of

feminist and migration scholars about racial wage gap (Miller-Young cited in

Ohikuare 2017). As Fanon (1952) astutely outline, pleasure often functions as

a tool by which the oppressed consent to that which is against their self-inter-

est. Does highlighting heterogeneity of genres of pornographies as well as di-

verse possibilities of interpretations and decoding suffice as grounds for

rejecting regulation and censorship? Does nonnormative pleasure legitimize

racist and sexist effects of mainstream interracial pornography?

Let us turn to Butler, who unlike MacKinnon, contends that the effect of

pornographic images as a form of hate speech is contingent and contextual

and not monolithic and homogenous. Butler (1997) rejects the alleged efficacy

of hate speech, and questions the mechanical and predictable reproduction of

power through hate speech. In her view, the gap between speech and conduct

offers possibilities of nonjuridical forms of opposition. Against those who ad-

vocate regulation of hate speech for violating rights of vulnerable citizens,

Butler (1997) “delinks” words from their power to injure, thereby opening up

the possibility for counter-speech. Those who fix the inevitable relation be-

tween certain speech acts and their injurious effects foreclose the possibility of

a kind of talking back that disrupts and subverts the effects produced by

hate speech (Butler 1997, 15). This entails “ways of restaging and

resignifying speech in contexts that exceed those determined by the courts”

(Butler 1997, 23).

Butler (1997, 24) warns that strategies devised by, for example, feminist

and anti-racist legal theorists and anti-discrimination advocates tend to en-

hance state regulation and reinstate state monopoly on violence. She warns

that this risks limiting political opposition to the act of legal prosecution.

In this connection, Butler criticizes MacKinnon’s call for state censorship


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of pornography, which in Butler’s view may backfire on progressives

such as MacKinnon, who seek social change through legal reforms (Butler

1997, 67–9).

According to Butler (1997, 67–9), censorship cannot purify language of its

“traumatic residue,” whereby there is no circumventing the difficult task of

resignification. The power of judicial language to determine the domain of

permissible speech implies that the state demarcates the line between the

speakable and the unspeakable (Butler 1997, 143). Butler (1997, 79) is not

only concerned about protecting “civil liberties against the incursion of the

state” but also about the “discursive power given over to the state through the

process of legal redress.” Even those who are otherwise wary of state power

pronounce faith in the capacities of legal discourse in the service of progres-

sive politics, proposing that sexist and racist speech conflicts with the commit-

ments to universal equality that are fundamental to the Constitution and thus

forfeit its right to “protection.” In an incisive analysis, Butler (1997, 90) points

out that accepting such a view would effectively imply that any speech that ac-

tively contests the founding premise of the Constitution should not be pro-

tected. This line of argument goes beyond the question of hate speech and

enters the domain of laying down the criteria of distinguishing legally and le-

gitimately acceptable from unprotected speech (Butler 1997, 90).

Instead of state censorship, Butler advocates a social and cultural struggle

of language, whereby “agency is derived from injury and injury countered

through that very derivation” (Butler 1997, 43). The “breakdown” between

saying and doing deprives the hate speech of its “projected performative

power” so that the one who is addressed can “speak back,” thereby dislodging

the power to injure (Butler 1997, 95). Such a strategy affirms that hate speech

does not destroy the agency of vulnerable individuals and groups, thereby dis-

placing state censorship (Butler 1997, 43).

Adrienne Truscott’s show Asking For It3 could be seen as a positive example

of the power of resignification. During the performance, the artist drinks alco-

hol, takes off her clothes, and makes jokes about rape. She explains that her ef-

fort is to “denormalize the normal,” namely, that it is unacceptable, especially

for women, to narrate jokes about sexual violence. This controversial perfor-

mance raises difficult questions about subversion through recontextualization.

It experiments with nonstandard responses to sexual violence and breaks with

acceptable norms of satire in order to contest what has become sedimented in

and as the ordinary. Against those who proclaim that there can be nothing

funny about rape jokes, one could argue with Butler (1997, 102) that the pos-

sibility of decontexualizing and recontextualizing through radical acts of pub-

lic misappropriation holds the promise of rupturing the conventional relation

between word and injury. What was injurious speech (“slut”4 or “queer”)

can become through resignification the bearer of insurrectionary naming.

The question remains, whether female refugees have similar possibilities to

those of Adrienne Truscott, a White U.S. American citizen, to pursue

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nonjuridical forms of opposition through resignification of sexist hate speech.

It is also important to note that the reappropriation of, for example, queer

succeeded to a certain degree in continuity with the de-criminalization and

de-medicalization of nonnormative sexual practices, namely, with support of

state-sanctioned institutions.

Ultimately, the criteria to distinguish when censorship is desirable or unde-

sirable remain elusive, so that the process by which we employ normative

principles to decide among various practices of censorship is tricky. For, as

Butler (1997) warns, norms themselves pre-structure the domain of the speak-

able and thus our judgment. Lastly, Butler (1997, 136) argues that censorship

is not primarily about speech; rather it operates to make certain kinds of citi-

zens possible and others impossible and is thereby a necessary part of the pro-

cess of nation-building. Historically, censorship has been disproportionately

applied against women and other minorities. Butler (1997, 99) illustrates how

hate speech arguments have been invoked by the state against minority

groups, for example, against the gay artist Robert Mapplethorpe or African-

American rap musicians, whereby in the name of abolishing racism and

sexism, free speech of sexual and racial minorities is censored. Similarly, post-

colonial queer–feminist scholars outline how hate speech legislations are

undergirded by carceral and biomedical paradigms and warn of the dangers of

expecting justice from law and the risks of the “punitive turn” (Haritaworn

2015, 8, 32, 125, 140). Paradoxically, the most forceful appeal for regulating

hate speech comes from members of victimized communities (Matsuda et al.

1993).

Counter to Butler’s claim that censorship produces certain kinds of citizens,

in the case of “refugee/hijab porn” certain privileged citizens enjoy sexual en-

tertainment by consuming violent representations of vulnerable (non)citizens.

Let me illustrate this with an example. In an interview in 2016, the Pakistani-

American Nadia Ali, well known as “the Muslim porn star,” asserted that she

finds it empowering to wear a hijab during her performances (Snow 2016a). A

practicing Muslim, who received death threats for disgracing Islam, Ali wishes

to change stereotypes about Muslim women’s sexuality by contesting sexual

double standards about norms of modesty and chastity (Keating 2016; Snow

2016a). However, in an interview in 2018, Nadia Ali shares her experiences of

racism that prompted her retirement from the porn industry (Snow 2018). She

narrates how she was pressured to bring “something different” to the table that

would set her apart from other porn artists. Initially, she did not receive any

assignments until she took up the suggestion to wear cultural Islamic outfits in

the movies, which then brought her recognition and fame (Snow 2018).

Consuming images of exotic bodies wearing hijab seems transgressive and

feeds into the viewer’s orientalist fantasies, and in porn, taboo sells. A decisive

moment for Ali was when she was asked to wear an Islamic outfit and have a

man resembling Donald Trump have anal sex with her (with her in submis-

sion). Ali shares that she realized that this was not about her individual career


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choice, rather it was to send a message through porn—a political message

(Snow 2018). Although Ali had previous experiences of ideological conflict in

her work, she felt this was particularly degrading and disrespectful in explicitly

pandering to the racism of White viewers.

Interestingly, while the Republican Party whipped up panic about pornogra-

phy as a “public health crisis,” according to the data compiled by the porn site

Pornhub, during Donald Trump’s D-list Republican National Convention, the

Cleveland area experienced a 204 percent increase in “Muslim/Arab” action

searches (Snow 2016b). While the Republican Party opposes equal rights for the

lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender/transsexual, intersex, and queer/questioning

(LGBTIQ) community, the highest rates of porn consumption are in Grand Old

Party (GOP), i.e., Republican Party states, including “Muslim porn” and gay

male porn (Snow 2016b). Ironically, concomitant with the rise of anti-Muslim

racism, watching sexual acts tabooed in orthodox Islam is considered titillating.

Even as Islam is demonized by Trump and the Republican Party, arousal-

oriented online activity focuses on Islam as source of sexual entertainment. In

my view, the growing popularity of “hijab porn” cannot be decoupled from the

political climate of virulent anti-Muslim racism. Violent representations of

“exotic” female bodies in submission do not cause widespread hate crimes, but

to argue that racialized sexual violence represented and performed in pornogra-

phy have no social and political consequences would be disingenuous.

Subsequent to the refugee crisis there has been a marked increase in produc-

tion and consumption of “hijab porn” in the West, which is being primarily pro-

duced for right-wing consumers, but is not limited to them (Amjahid 2018).

Large internet pornography platforms are registering greater number of searches,

especially during peak periods of polarized political debates in countries like

Germany (Amjahid 2018). Shortly before the national election, during which the

right-wing populist “Alternative for Germany” party whipped up racist stereo-

types about refugees and immigration, the number of “refugee” searches on porn

sites increased by 114 percent in Germany (Amjahid 2018). The data sets pro-

vided by the porn site xHamster show a spike in searches for “refugees” during

times when talk shows and election debates discuss refugee caps in Germany and

weaponize anxieties about the alleged Islamization of the Occident (Amjahid

2018). Similar trends are observed in Hungary, Poland, Britain, and Austria,

where during the peak of the “refugee crisis,” parliamentary elections, and Brexit,

the number of search requests for “hijab porn” increased by up to 200 percent

(Amjahid 2018). In these racially segregated societies, wherein intimate interracial

contact is highly limited, violent sexual representations of racialized bodies have

far-reaching political ramifications (Zheng 2017, 186). Pornography not just

shapes erotic tastes but also inflects social, political, and cultural relations. The

question is whether the eroticization of racialized sexual violence and domination

can be mitigated through alternative representations of previously stigmatized ra-

cialized bodies as desirable, thereby delivering equality and agency (Zheng 2017,

188). With right-wing and conservative individuals and groups being

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considerable consumers of interracial porn, this complicates straightforward

promises of undoing White supremacy through positive representations of racial-

ized bodies in pornography. Given that the adult industry makes almost thrice as

many films annually as Hollywood and generates much more revenue, it would

be inadvisable to underestimate its role in hegemony production a la Antonio

Gramsci.

Against MacKinnon’s demand for state intervention, Butler argues that

when the state determines what counts as hate speech and forbids specific

words or images, it deprives the feminist and anti-racist movement of the possi-

bility to subversively appropriate hate speech. Handing over the power of defi-

nition to the state constitutes a restriction of the political field by regulating the

freedom of recontextualization and resignification. Following Butler, this harms

the political interests of vulnerable individuals and groups. However, it would

be imprudent to disregard the political costs of expecting state passivity when it

comes to violent hate speech. My critique targets not just humiliating represen-

tations of racialized and orientalized bodies and the possible incitement to vio-

lence, but highlights the possible link between interracial pornography and

political fantasies of White supremacy. In light of these considerations, anti-

statism would be risky postcolonial queer–feminist politics.

Alternatively, if one were to presume that “hijab/refugee pornography” ena-

bles sexual agency of Muslim women, given that the performer’s participation is

consensual and is in exchange for money, what type of subject do we presuppose

with the idea of consent established based on a contract? The claim that pornog-

raphy enables sexual agency presumes a liberal notion of an autonomous subject

with free will and self-transparency. Moreover, focus on individual acts of resis-

tance via transgressive sexual practices does not necessarily dismantle discrimi-

natory structures. The claim that individuals are “free” to decide whether they

wish to pursue or discontinue a career in the porn industry, as in the case of

Nadia Ali, risks ignoring one of the most important lessons of Spivak’s (1988)

Can the Subaltern Speak?, namely, the ideological construction of the promise of

“free will” disentangled from structures in which agency is exercised. Here the

subject’s inherent vulnerability to social conditions that are not of her own mak-

ing must be considered. This is where the role of the state becomes decisive. If

the state produces and sanctions group-differentiated vulnerability, then the

question is whether the state is accountable to undo this. Alternatively, would

state intervention pave the way for more violence, in which case extra-state space

should become repositories for abolitionist politics?

Feminist Dilemmas and State Phobia

The discussion around the limits of free speech raises difficult questions

about the role of the state and possibilities of nonjuridical forms of opposi-

tion, especially when it concerns individuals vulnerable to hate speech. The


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liberal position is that unless there is “clear and present danger” and not just

speculative potential of future harm, the state cannot justifiably restrict free

speech. Traditionally, radical feminism has supported state intervention on

behalf of women, while Marxism and anarchism recommend abdication of

the state as an arena of political action altogether. MacKinnon (1989, 160)

rightly asks what the latter positions imply for women whom the state does

not ignore or who are in no position to ignore the state. This insight resonates

with the brilliant analyses offered by various scholars in the edited volume

Women, Islam and the State (Kandiyoti 1991), who focus on the ambivalent

relation between law, gender, and the state in countries such as Iran, Iraq,

Turkey, and Pakistan. Their insights make an unequivocal postcolonial

queer–feminist position for or against the state impossible.

If engaging with the state, as argued by Butler, strengthens its coercive pow-

ers, then the question is how should (anti-racist and postcolonial) feminism re-

late to law and the state? Does feminism end up surrendering power to the

state in trying to claim it for marginalized subjects, as might happen in the case

of migrant women, some of whom as noncitizens are caught between intersect-

ing coercive powers of multiple states. Can the demand for equality through

law enable changes in the state’s relation to vulnerable citizens and noncitizens?

Although anxiety about the state’s coercive power is justified, there are cer-

tain risks in renouncing state intervention on behalf of vulnerable groups.

Positions that reject state censorship are based on a specific understanding of

the state as “a single, gravity-like mechanism with causal powers that generates

a corresponding set of ‘actual’ effects” (Jessop, 2014, 483). Herein, interacting

tendencies and countertendencies producing a heterogeneous set of “state

effects” are categorized as a coherent entity endowed with an intentional cal-

culative will (Jessop, 2014, 483). In my view, although there is a discontinuity

between law and justice, insulating justice from law, by informalizing mecha-

nisms of (racial and sexual) justice by limiting them to extra state spaces, does

not guarantee noncoercive, nonviolent politics of contestation. An important

point of critique against Butler is her “selective” opposition to regulation of

hate speech. As Boucher (2006, 131) points out, Butler is against most forms

of legislation and censorship, on the grounds that state intervention may

strengthen coercive institutions while being deployed against victims of hate

speech. Butler equates legal discourse and hate speech as equally pernicious,

leading to dismissal of legal redress and state protection as counterproductive.

At the same time, Butler (1997, 101–02) claims that she is not opposed to all

regulations, for instance “hate speech regulations, that are not state-centered,

such as those that have restricted jurisdiction within a university.” In

Boucher’s (2006, 131) view, Butler’s arguments are suspect, because she works

at a university and would, of course, profit from such regulation. Butler fur-

thermore seems to disregard that educational institutions are not “outside”

the state apparatus.

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Butler’s concept of resignification is also problematic. As an alternative to

state censorship and legal redress, Butler advises victims of hate speech to ex-

ploit the contingency of hate speech by virtue of its citationality, offering the

possibility of resignification as a political alternative. In her view, resignification

can “deplete” the term of derogatory history and convert it into an affirmation

(for instance, “queer”, “Black,” “slut”). Butler, however, fails to address that

this is not an option for all subjects and efficacious in all contexts. Can, for in-

stance, racist structures be reconfigured through the “insurrectionary” resignifi-

cation of racial slurs, as has been attempted in BDSM porn films which depict

Black performers humiliating actors playing White supremacists by calling

them the N-Word? (Smith and Luykx 2017)?5 Or, to go back to the opening ex-

ample, if individual Muslim porn performers take pleasure in being humiliated

and degraded by White German men, does this imply that “refugee/hijab porn”

reconfigures orientalist structures? Butler’s theory of performativity outlines a

stylistic of resistance based on counter-readings and particular subversions of

cultural norms. Despite hostility to liberal political positions, Butler’s own alter-

native seems to be a somewhat more radical version of moral and political indi-

vidualism, instead of reimagining the structural relation of subaltern groups to

law and the state.

The feminist legal theorist Baer (1998, 230) offers another insightful cri-

tique on the issue, in that she accuses Butler of confusing law with justice. In

viewing law as always already authoritative and totalitarian, Butler risks mis-

judging the efficacy of legal utterances. This may correspond to the common-

sensical understanding of law as a dominant discourse, but does not provide

an accurate picture of how law functions. Questioning Butler’s claim that legal

utterances are always efficacious and that state censorship works every time,

Baer (1998) accuses Butler of ignoring how law is equally caught in the ambiv-

alence of signification and interpretation. Baer points out that the Butlerian

suggestion to circumvent law would imply parting from many of the struc-

tures that protect one from racialized sexual violence and discrimination that

are made possible through state monopoly on violence. Baer (1998) reminds

us that those who argue for state legislation against pornography and hate

speech propose that the state can compensate the loss of voice of those who

have been “silenced” and resubordinated by social practices and institutions.

As a feminist legal theorist Baer is cognizant of the heterosexist and racist na-

ture of the state, but still understands the law as an indispensable site of re-

dress. In the context of the example of “refugee/hijab porn,” Baer’s (1998)

insights are extremely compelling as they outlines the tensions between the

state and civil society as sites of vulnerability and agency.

It is helpful to remember that even as MacKinnon recommends state inter-

vention, she warns against presuming that the state and law are either omnip-

otent or impotent. The question is whether the state can be made to serve the

interests of those upon whose powerlessness its power is erected. Can the rela-

tion between state, market, and vulnerable (non)citizens be reconfigured?


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(MacKinnon 1989, 161). The power of the state is often considered a bigger

threat to the individual than vice versa. However, this approach disregards the

issue of intersubjective racialized sexual violence, wherein more powerful

groups exert coercion on vulnerable (non)citizens. Foregrounding negotia-

tions between nonstate actors as the key to countering hate speech and pro-

tecting free speech ignores that one of the most important functions of the

state is to mediate between citizens and noncitizens. Why should nonjuridical

forms of opposition, as proposed by Butler, be necessarily less violent than

state interventions? Just as the state is never neutral in its mediations, extra-

state mechanisms of negotiations between differently vulnerable citizens and

noncitizens are never free of coercion.

I have discussed various positions, and must admit that I am caught in an

ethical dilemma. From a postcolonial queer–feminist perspective, I find racist

and heterosexist hate speech violent and injurious and cannot unequivocally

accept “hijab/refugee pornography” as just another genre of erotic practice.

Following MacKinnon, I believe the state has the responsibility to protect mi-

nority groups from racialized sexual violence, including hate speech.

However, I also find Butler’s intervention equally compelling that language

and violence are tied together in a deeply ambivalent relation. If the state is

harnessed for hegemonic interests, should postcolonial queer–feminists be

wary of state-centered reforms or can the state be instrumentalized to pro-

mote (racial and sexual) justice? Can the state function as a site of redress of

gender, religious, or racial inequality even as it perpetuates sexual, religious,

and racial ideologies, which are founding myths of nation-states?

Alternatively, should the civil society function as the motor of (racial and sex-

ual) justice instead of seeking state intervention? Should one place faith in the

subversive resignification of hate speech and forgo recourse to legal redress?

In the past, the outcome has depended on the gravity of the issue and the bar-

gaining power of the groups making demands for their perspectives to be

heard. One of the biggest dangers of anti-statist positions is that it ignores the

enabling role of the state while foregrounding exclusively the regulatory

aspects.

To focus again on the example of “refugee/hijab porn,” Muslim and refu-

gee women have a vulnerable position vis-a-vis both state and nonstate actors,

for instance, the producers and consumers of pornography. Despite the dou-

ble bind relation of religious and ethnic minorities to a racist and heterosexist

state apparatus, it is tempting, albeit tricky, to call for abdicating state regula-

tions. I find myself positioned between MacKinnon and Butler and view my

approach as supplementing, critiquing, and adding to their perspectives.

Similar to MacKinnon, I believe that the state can be interpellated as a site of

redress. But unlike MacKinnon, I would not consider, for example, Muslim

and refugee women merely as victims of racialized sexual violence but also as

subjects whose agency is often made impossible by patriarchal and imperialist

structures so that nonjuridical forms of opposition are not always an option

696 N. Dhawan

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for vulnerable individuals. I would also disagree with Butler that the power

relations between performers and (right-wing) consumers of “refugee/hijab

porn” could be reconfigured through resignification and recontextualization

without any form of state intervention. Furthermore, my understanding of

the role of the state departs from both MacKinnon and Butler. I am neither a

statist nor an anti-statist but view the state as pharmakon, namely, both poison

and medicine (Derrida 1981).

In what follows, I would like to conclude by elaborating my understanding

of the role of the state in the context of debates around free speech and hate

speech. Most scholars, like Butler, who reject progressive use of the state’s co-

ercive powers, believe that the core of the state is its repressive apparatus that

must be resisted. It is instructive to turn to Foucault’s (2008) notion of “state

phobia,” which is an astute critique of political ideologies that exaggerate the

state’s negative role by way of a specific narrative of ontology of state powers.

Although there are important differences between anarchist and neoliberal

positions, both approach the state “as if” it exists instead of seeing it as “the

site of strategic dilemmas as well as structural contradictions” (Jessop 2013).

In his later work, Foucault (2003) seems to distance himself from his previous

anti-statist injunction to “cut off the king’s head” (Dean and Villadsen 2016, 2).

The definition of sovereignty as a “right of death” suggests an omnipotent

genocidal and necropolitical state that is fundamentally nefarious. Foucault

(2003) outlines the pitfalls of this denunciatory attitude toward the state and

its everyday operations, such that even in the exercise of the very authority

that defines the state, it comes to be regarded as repressive (Dean and

Villadsen 2016, 188). In Foucault’s (2003, 135) view, this “assault against the

state” is a strategy of neoliberal rationality that appropriates the powers of

the state by limiting, dismantling, and restructuring the state. The neoliberal

idea is to run the government like a business, where citizens are treated like

clients. Accordingly, neoliberal techniques shape the formation and conduct

of subjectivities, mobilizing norms of freedom and limitlessness.

In the context of our discussion, the neoliberal subject is guaranteed that

everything can be said wherever and whenever. Speech is “free” and should

not have any limits, and each individual has an inalienable right to produce

and consume images and words. Ironically, even as neoliberalism claims to be

pro-individual freedom, it is parasitical on appropriating state power. Those

who reject state intervention propose that the state be placed in a position of

passivity in the legal domain, which echoes the neoliberal demand of state pas-

sivity in relation to the economy (Foucault 2008, 284–6). Adam Smith’s meta-

phor of the “invisible hand” fits this scenario. Along similar lines, Butler’s

objections to state intervention unwittingly echo the neoliberal demand for

state passivity when it comes to hate speech. However, as we know the state is

never neutral or passive.

Foucault cautions that the radical left response to neoliberalism inadver-

tently reinforces it. The antidote offered against the repressive state is to


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withdraw from its scope and abdicate state power to create alternative spaces

beyond its control. In his later writings, Foucault carefully outlines the politi-

cal ramifications of locating politics beyond the state. In his view, which ech-

oes Gramsci’s analysis of civil society as the site for building hegemony, the

liberal mentality of government functions through civil society, which makes

the governing of life operable in mundane spaces (Dean and Villadsen 2016,

24). Herein, subjects can be governed as something more than either homo

economicus or juridical subjects of right, namely, as social subjects with bonds

of association and communal networks (Dean and Villadsen 2016, 138).

Thus, instead of subjugating individuals through discipline and sanction, neo-

liberalism optimizes difference and diversity to subjectify through guarantees

of freedom and tolerance, for example, as promised by discourses of free

speech. The utopia of civil society to free individuals from the domination of

the state obscures that it is a part of the state and not just oppositional to it.

The articulation of resistance and the “will to oppose” is in fact a disavowal of

complicity. Without the regulation of conflicts between civil society actors

and groups by the sovereign state power there can be no exercise of agency in

the civil society (Dean and Villadsen 2016, 36). At the same time, civil society

shapes and frames how and to what extent state institutions exercise power.

By dismantling the mythology and monstrosity of the Leviathan, Foucault

(2008) refigures politics as a play among diverse rationalities (Dean and

Villadsen, 2016, 103). Rejecting Nietzsche’s image of the state as the “coldest

of all cold monsters,” Foucault (2008, 77) views the state as “the mobile effect

of a regime of multiple governmentalities.” Foucault (2008, 4) explains that

the state is constantly in the making and thus “is at once that which exists, but

which does not yet exist enough.” In understanding the state and law as sim-

ply the source of commands issued by the sovereign, anti-state positions ne-

glect that the state is also law-regulated (Dean and Villadsen 2016, 174). The

state is inflected by institutional contingencies and perpetual effort to achieve

coherence. The gap between the state as it is already there and the state that is

to be constructed renders the state as a permanently unfinished project that

has no core (Foucault 2008, 4), and thus capable of both coercion and protec-

tion. This dynamic and ambivalent function of the state is disregarded by

scholars who reject state intervention, for they ignore that the state can be

both poison and medicine.

An instructive illustration of the state as pharmakon played out in the sum-

mer of 2017 in India. Gurmeet Singh, a flamboyant, self-proclaimed guru, was

found guilty by the Central Bureau of Investigation Court of raping two of his

female followers while allegedly watching pornographic films.6 Given the col-

lusion between the guru and powerful politicians, the verdict has been hailed

as an act of judicial courage, which took fifteen years to realize. Of the 130 fe-

male followers who were contacted by the state investigating agencies, only

two were willing to press charges because of fear of retribution and only con-

sented when the state provided them protection to testify. Following the

698 N. Dhawan

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decree, thousands of followers of the religious leader marched in support of

the convicted rapist, vandalizing media vans and setting police stations on

fire. This resulted in the death of over thirty persons with 200 being injured.

The Indian army had to be deployed to protect citizens from the rioting

200,000 followers, who assembled to protest the rape conviction of their spiri-

tual mentor. The insidious mix of religious leaders and corrupt politicians

was countered by the judiciary, which brought justice to the rape survivors.

State violence was mobilized to act on behalf of the rape survivors and to

counter the violence of non-state actors. An excellent example of state as

pharmakon.

It is interesting to note that in an interview, even Butler (2012, 94–8)

admits: “Of course, I want legal protections for certain kinds of freedoms . . . .

The point is not to be against all law, nor is it to live without any laws. The

point, in my view, is to develop a critical relation to law which is, after all, a

field of power, one that is differentially applied and supported.” Similarly, in

an older essay Butler (2002, 27) clarifies:

We do not always know what we mean by “the state” . . . . The state is

not a simple unity, and its parts and operations are not always coordi-

nated with one another. The state is not reducible to law, and power is

not reducible to state power. It would be wrong to understand the state

as operating with a single set of interests or to gauge its effects as if they

were unilaterally successful. I think the state can also be worked,

exploited, and that social policy, which involves the implementation of

law in local instances, can very often be the site where law is challenged,

where it is thrown to a court to adjudicate.

This indicates the inherent contingencies of the state, whose institutions and for-

mations are marked by slippages, ambivalences, and inconsistencies. As pharma-

kon, the state has no stable essence and is plagued by contradictions: violence

and justice, ideology and emancipation, and law and repression. The Janus-

faced nature of the state as pharmakon implies that it already bears its own op-

posite within itself, the possibility of the transmutation of poison into remedy,

curse into cure (Derrida 1981, 127). In approaching the state, two insights might

be helpful. First, as Spivak (1987, 205) warns, one should desist from metalepsis,

namely, substituting an effect for a cause. Thus, instead of seeing the state as the

origin of “will-to-violence,” it should be understood as an effect of multiple,

contradictory, and incoherent forces. Second, the temptation to juxtapose state

versus non-state realms should be resisted: social norms, through their institu-

tionalization cement the state power effects and are not disentangled from it.

As argued by Butler (2004), while new modes of collective agency can

emerge by drawing on vulnerability as a site of political agency, it can also jus-

tify paternalistic protection reinforcing gender ideologies. While I share

Butler’s anxieties about the coercive powers of the state, contra Butler, I would


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propose that although law does not always deliver justice, one “cannot not

want” (Spivak 1999, 84) the enabling and empowering possibilities offered by

law, even as one must contest its coercive and violent aspects. Or as Spivak

puts it “Let’s focus on the law, but think justice.”7 While MacKinnon seeks

compensation for women harmed by pornography, the critical race theorist

Matsuda calls for formal criminal and administrative sanctions against perpe-

trators of hate speech (Matsuda et al. 1993, 17). Criminalizing sexist and racist

hate speech might seem to offer a simple solution to complex and abstract

problems of consent, choice, injury, agency, and vulnerability. But this applies

to nearly any field where we aspire for justice but have to deal with rule of

law, such that the discontinuity between law and justice must be persistently

negotiated in the hope that one can use “the words of law and politics to fight

the words that wound and exclude” (Matsuda et al. 1993, 15). Given the re-

cent rise of online deep fake porn and revenge porn videos that are weapon-

ized to humiliate women, it is imperative to carefully consider how our digital

and political lives intersect and conflict, and the ethical dilemmas that arise

from these interactions. Presently, social media platforms employ under-

trained und underpaid moderators in countries such as Philippines in the

global South with a target of deleting 25,000 posts a day to purge the internet

of sexually abusive images.8 It is questionable whether this “privatization” of

regulation is sufficient to confront the overwhelming challenge of violent con-

tent in cyberspace.

I am cognizant of the dangers of judicialization of politics, namely, legal

mobilization as means for addressing moral predicaments and social conflicts,

which can lead to judicial supremacy and judicial overreach. I am not a naıve

believer of judicial empowerment and am fully aware that the recent rise of

juristocracy mostly benefits political elites instead of having power-diffusing

consequences (Hirschl 2007). However, I am also convinced that the demand

for legal and institutional passivity to social, political, and economic problems

is akin to throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The effort here is not to

have legal procedures replace public deliberation and nonjudicial negotiations,

such that law overdetermines social and political relations. The right to consti-

tutional resistance by (non)citizens to contest the coercive powers of the state

should at no point be foreclosed. Nevertheless, the hope is that legal regula-

tion would not only protect targets of hate speech from injury but also enable

vulnerable individuals and groups to access structures of reparation.

Furthermore, this would facilitate a more democratic and equal society,

wherein vulnerable (non)citizens could rely on the state to right wrongs. This

is not just protecting those targeted by hate speech from offense but about

guaranteeing them dignity as equal members in society. Given the commit-

ment of queer–feminist postcolonial scholarship and activism to fighting het-

erosexism and racism, the political costs of evacuating the state as a site of

political negotiations and expecting state passivity in the face of hate speech

would be self-defeating. Following Derrida (1981), to transform poison into

700 N. Dhawan

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medicine it is imperative to rethink the relation of subalterns to law and the

state, which goes beyond statephobic rhetoric and politics. Such a reconfigura-

tion of the relation between vulnerable (non)citizens, the law, and the state

would ensure that free speech is guaranteed, while hate speech is regulated,

sexual pleasure is protected, while heterosexism and racism is contested: a

complicated and tricky challenge, but postcolonial queer–feminist politics and

ethics are complicated and tricky.

Notes

Nikita Dhawan is a professor of Political Science and Gender Studies at theJustus Liebig University, Giessen, Germany. Her publications include: ImpossibleSpeech: On the Politics of Silence and Violence (2007); Decolonizing Enlightenment:Transnational Justice, Human Rights and Democracy in a Postcolonial World (ed.,2014); Global Justice and Desire: Queering Economy (co-ed., 2015); NegotiatingNormativity: Postcolonial Appropriations, Contestations and Transformations (co-ed., 2016); and Difference that Makes No Difference: The Non-Performativity ofIntersectionality and Diversity (ed., 2017). She received the Kathe Leichter Awardin 2017 for outstanding achievements in the pursuit of women’s and gender stud-ies and in support of the women’s movement and the achievement of genderequality.

1. Linda Boreman starred as “Linda Lovelace” in Deep Throat, one of thehighest grossing pornographic films, which launched the “Golden Age ofPorn.”

2. Talk given by Audre Lorde at the Feminist Perspective on PornographyConference in San Francisco, California, November 1978: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼Wb_kG5JcADE (accessed March 11, 2019).

3. http://www.adriennetruscott.com/asking-for-it/ (accessed March 11, 2019).4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SlutWalk (accessed March 11, 2019).5. The most controversial example being the film starring the veteran Black

gay porn performer Bobby Blake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niggas%27_Revenge (accessed March 11, 2019).

6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurmeet_Ram_Rahim_Singh (accessed March11, 2019).

7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼jSQKojA_XRk (accessed March 11,2019).

8. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/mar/19/the-internets-dirtiest-secrets-review-the-human-toll-of-detoxifying-social-media (accessed June30, 2019).

Acknowledgments

Sincere thanks to the anonymous referees as well as Shirin Rai, Antke Engel, and

Marıa do Mar Castro Varela for their insightful comments and suggestions that

greatly enriched the article.


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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wb_kG5JcADE



http://www.adriennetruscott.com/asking-for-it/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SlutWalk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niggas%27_Revenge

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niggas%27_Revenge

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurmeet_Ram_Rahim_Singh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSQKojA_XRk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSQKojA_XRk

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/mar/19/the-internets-dirtiest-secrets-review-the-human-toll-of-detoxifying-social-media

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/mar/19/the-internets-dirtiest-secrets-review-the-human-toll-of-detoxifying-social-media

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The Death of Leviathan: Feminist Dilemmas and State Phobia

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