Butler argues that hate speech exists retrospectively, only after being declared such by state authorities.[citation needed] In this way, the state reserves for itself the power to define hate speech and, conversely, the limits of acceptable discourse. In this connection, Butler criticizes feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon's argument against pornography for its unquestioning acceptance of the state’s power to censor. Butler warns that such appeals to state power may backfire on those like MacKinnon who seek social change, in her case to end patriarchal oppression, through legal reforms. She cites for example the R. A. V. v. City of St. Paul 1992 Supreme Court case, which overturned the conviction of a teenager for burning a cross on the lawn of an African American family, in the name of the First Amendment.[citation needed]
Deploying Foucault’s argument from The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, Butler claims that any attempt at censorship, legal or otherwise, necessarily propagates the very language it seeks to forbid.[11] As Foucault argues, for example, the strict sexual mores of 19th century Western Europe did nothing but amplify the discourse of sexuality it sought to control.[12] Extending this argument using Derrida and Lacan, Butler claims that censorship is primitive to language, and that the linguistic “I” is a mere effect of an originary censorship. In this way, Butler questions the possibility of any genuinely oppositional discourse; "If speech depends upon censorship, then the principle that one might seek to oppose is at once the formative principle of oppositional speech".[13]
Butler also questions the efficacy of censorship on the grounds that hate speech is context-dependent. Citing J.L. Austin's concept of the performative utterance, Butler notes that words’ ability to “do things” makes hate speech possible but also at the same time dependent on its specific embodied context.[citation needed] Austin’s claim that what a word “does,” its illocutionary force, varies with the context in which it is uttered implies that it is impossible to adequately define the performative meanings of words, including hate, abstractly.[citation needed] On this basis, Butler rejects arguments like Richard Delgado’s which justify the censorship of certain specific words by claiming the use of those words constitutes hate speech in any context. In this way, Butler underlines the difficulty inherent in efforts to systematically identify hate speech.
^^^^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Delgado
CB: See Attorney Mari Matsuda on law of racistic fascist speech. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mari_Matsuda
http://www.advancingequality.org/en/cms/?278
Also, See the Carrie Nation school of American feminism, for outlawing American men's sin and male supremacist rituals, fetishes and performances; suppression of saloon life culture, heavy drinking , gun culture and systems of representation and institutions of rowdy men's symbol systems; See Women's Christian Temperance Union
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrie_Nation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_Christian_Temperance_Union
The WCTU had significant left elements in its program.
"Thus the WCTU was very interested in a number of social reform issues including: labor, prostitution, public health, sanitation and international peace. "
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