Now is the time to confront the dangers of progressive censorship
The work of Iranian American artist Taravat Talepasand is cheeky, erotic and defiantly anticlerical. One painting in her new midcareer survey, “Taravat,” incorporates Iranian bank notes with images of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini dosed with LSD. A graphite drawing titled “Blasphemy X,” depicts a veiled woman giving the finger while lifting her robe to reveal high heels and a flash of underwear.
There are sculptures of women in niqab face coverings with enormous exposed breasts. On a gallery wall, “Woman, Life, Freedom,” the slogan of Iran’s recent nationwide protests against the morality police, is written in neon in English and Persian.
When “Taravat” opened late last month at Macalester College, a left-leaning school in St. Paul, Minnesota, some Muslim students felt it made a mockery of modest Islamic dress and thus of them. They expressed their outrage, and this month Macalester responded by temporarily closing the show and then, apparently unaware of the irony, surrounding the gallery windows with black curtains.
The uproar over “Taravat” was directly connected to a recent controversy at Hamline University, very near Macalester, where an adjunct art history professor named Erika López Prater was fired for showing a 14th-century painting of Muhammad in an art history class.
In late January, Macalester — where, as it happens, Prater now teaches — hosted a discussion between faculty and students, most of them Muslim, to address issues raised by the Hamline incident. There, some students described being upset by “Taravat.”
Ultimately, Macalester handled the student complaints better than Hamline did. No one was fired and “Taravat” reopened. But the administration’s response was still distinctly apologetic, demonstrating the anxious philistinism that can result when bureaucratic cowardice meets maximalist ideas about safety.
In a message to campus, the provost, Lisa Anderson-levy, said that Macalester understands “that pieces in the exhibition have caused harm to members of our Muslim community.” The black curtains came down, but they were replaced with purple construction paper and frosted glass panels, protecting passersby from “unintentional or nonconsensual viewing,” in the words of the administration. A content warning is affixed to the door.
“There’s a lot of nuance and complexity in these kinds of situations,” Anderson-levy said in a statement. “We believe that taking time to slow down and listen carefully to the diverse perspectives ... allowed us to create space for conversation and learning.”
Some readers might object to dwelling on one instance of misguided sensitivity when the country is in the midst of a frenzy of right-wing book bans, public school speech restrictions and attempts to curtail drag performances. But I think this moment, when we’re facing down a wave of censorship inspired by religious fervor, is a good time to quash the notion that people have a right to be shielded from discomfiting art.
If progressive ideas can be harnessed to censor feminist work because it offends religious sensibilities, perhaps those ideas bear rethinking.
Just last week, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on a school district that removed Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” a frequent target of censorship, from the freshman honors curriculum. A parent had complained that exposure to the book’s “graphic images of sexual violence” could be “emotionally traumatizing.”
This, said Talepasand, “is where the far left and the far right look very similar.”
I’m not naive enough to believe that if the left rediscovered a passionate commitment to free speech, the right would give up its campaign against what it calls wokeness. But I do think that if the left is to mount a convincing response to a wholesale assault on intellectual liberty and free expression, it needs to be able to defend challenging and provocative work.
Art need not defer to religion. If that’s no longer obvious, we’ve gone astray.