speech and respect - College of Social Sciences and International ...

The Excesses of State Regulation
feminist erotica when crafted by women, as when Judy Chicago's
"Dinner Party" honoured 39 great women by decorating dinner
plates with vaginas. 43 A Connecticut casino dressed cocktail waitresses
as Pocahantas, with feathers in their hair and beaded miniskirts
slit to the thigh. Imagine the outcy had it been owned by
Anglos ratherthan Pequot Indians. 44 The difference between thegolliwogon
the Robertson'sjam jar and a "Black Is Beautiful" doll depends
not just on the images but also on who produces them for whom.
Audiences can disagree utterly and unpredictably about the
meaning of a message. Sexual texts may be particularly open to
conflicting interpretations, exemplified by the feminist split over
lesbian sado-masochistic pornography, but political statements also
permit diametrically opposed readings. Anselm Kiefer, one of the
first post-war German artists to risk using Nazi symbols, published
photos of himself giving the Sieg Heil salute in a variety of Roman
amphitheatres, in a volume ambiguously entitled "Besetzungen"
(occupations). Germans initially saw him as a Nazi sympathiser and
have remained wary. But Americans, especially Jews, embraced
him as an anti-Nazi German, elevating him above Marc Chagall as
their favourite purveyor of Jewish themes. 45 When the fall of the
Berlin Wall exposed Hitler's bunker the city's chief archaeologist
wanted to incorporate it into the new German Parliament being built
above the site: "It's an important and provocative memory, especially
for people who will be working in the new ministry buildings.
It would remind them every day of how evil governments can
become." But at a public hearing one Berliner said: "This is a
continuity of history that I don't want. I'm all for honoring the victims
of Nazism, but this plan sounds like a way of honoring the
perpetrators." 46
The relationship between speaker and audience can colour the
message. The Congregation for the Causes of Saints is said to be
considering canonising its first African American—a Haitian who
accompanied his impoverished master to New York after the late
eighteenth-century slave revolt, cared for and supported him even
though emancipated, and turned to good works after his master's
death, tending cholera victims, building an orphanage, and helping
the poor. Rev. Lawrence E. Lucas of the Resurrection Catholic
Church in Harlem was contemptuous: "The man was a perfect
creature of his times. He was a good boy, a namby-pamby, who kept
the place assigned to him." Princeton religion professor Albert
Raboteau was equally dismissive: "It calls out the sarcastic, 'Gee,
thanks for finding us a hero' response." 47 A change in both speaker
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