A Small Reflection

My three year old niece demanded to watch Mulan. It make me think about whether or not Disney would be willing to vault a queer, trans icon. Her other favorite movies are Moana, Coco, and Encanto. What are the parts of culture that we can't put back in the box?

Censorship is not just disheartening and scary, but a constant threat. The era of the Hays Code may have passed, yes, but it's still incredibly difficult to get a mainstream movie to get thoughtful diversity due to industrial influences. If we're going to start surveying and banning the use of the words transgender, pregnant person and LGBT, and rolling back DEI programs, how far back in culture do we go? Target no longer has an queer section, but will they drop cross-dressing Bugs Bunny? Does the censorship take into account the tone and nature of the joke?

The last major Western case of massive propaganda happened when cinema was fifty years old and lefty Hollywood had to be imported. It is now a hundred and fifty years old and it's us! We are Hollywood! And we have had decades of civil rights activism and it's visually documented in a way that is inconceivable to the rest of human history.

This is not to offer optimism (I just stopped myself from making an argument that the government cannot ban me from watching something in my own home. Actually, they can and will.) but to think through the scope of what's being threatened. Digitization and the internet (while we have it) have made distribution of material possible on such a large scale that to shut it all down is going to take a lot of work - and my plan is to make that work as hard as possible.

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