The Unacceptable

This book probes the issue of the unacceptable as a social and cultural category.

The unacceptable is a grey zone. We are used to identifying the unacceptable with what is proscribed, forbidden, censored and banned. Yet this implies a juridical model of power as command and repression and a ‘police’ complex to secure and enforce the ban. What is unacceptable often finds itself under the ban, such as a film rejected by a censorship board. On many occasions, however, the unacceptable falls short of what essentially is a juridical-theological model.

Over the past 30 years, sexuality and schooling has been subject to increasing media coverage that has been central to activating political, educational and popular concerns. Such concerns have circulated through a number of ‘sex scandals’ that include sex education, pupil sexual relations, technology and pornography, sexual relations between teachers and pupils, and teen pregnancies. Such scandals reveal the moral fault-lines that underpin the boundaries between the acceptable and the unacceptable. Hence, educational researchers have tended to explain such scandals by applying the sociological concept of moral panic.¹

A painting by Australian artist Cherry Hood hangs in the hallway of my home. It depicts a young girl, aged six or seven, her head half turned to gaze back at the viewer. The left side of her face is illuminated by a silvery unseen light source. The other half is washed with a shadow that gathers into darkness below her neck. Her body is obscured. The child is beautiful: full-lipped, with large almond-shaped eyes. It’s not her beauty, however, which makes the portrait so compelling; it’s the ambiguous nature of her gaze. She fixes the viewer with a look that can be read as fear or defiance, depending on what the observer is inclined to see. Hood’s capacity to capture the ambiguity of children’s gazes — to make that ambiguity visible — is the hallmark of her extraordinary talent. The more I’ve studied the painting in my hallway, though, the less I see it as a portrait of a child and the more I’m inclined to see it as a portrait of myself or, indeed, of any other adult viewer.

The issue of gay marriage has come to symbolise better than any other boundaries of what is considered as unacceptable in modern societies. It not only forces them to make explicit and confront their deepest fears and prejudices, but in the process it also reveals their inner contradictions. Looking at how a particular society deals with homosexuality is, therefore, akin to placing it in front of a mirror.

Western societies at the turning point of the 1960s and 1970s saw a massive and rapid increase of legal and illegal drug consumption, valorised by the counterculture of the period, and disproportionately affecting many youths through disturbing addiction cases. Public drug scenes, that is, gatherings of wandering addicts, with drug transactions and public drug use, appeared in central or peripheral areas of all large Western cities. Drug abuse, including that of cannabis, heroin, LSD, and (later) cocaine and crack and misused legal medicines, was termed an ‘epidemic’ by the media, designated a ‘social plague’ by politicians, and conceptualised by intellectuals as a threat to civilisation. In France, for instance, the writer Jean Cau used the metaphor of a contaminant disease to warn public opinion of the arrival of this terrifying wave in a mainstream magazine in 1970:

Parents, beware! The plague comes to you […] No one knows where it will stop and how deep it will ravage the American nation. Heroin, morphine, cannabis, hallucinogens have established everywhere their hideous reign. From there, the monster jumped in Britain and Sweden. For two years now, he has put some tentacles on France.¹

As smoking indoors is now considered unacceptable in vast sections of the world, the next frontier, for certain sections of the anti-smoking lobby at least, is outdoor public space. My own institution, Macquarie University, implemented a campus-wide outdoor smoking ban in 2011, hastily installed without community consultation, yet enacted with little resistance. As indemnification against litigation continues to motivate anti-smoking policy, institutional liability continues to take precedence over advocacy. While such directives are regrettable, they are not an entirely unexpected outcome of the public relations stranglehold that governs campus life these days. Yet, there persists an even more disconcerting dimension to such initiatives: this general rubric of ‘health concern’ mobilises certain private individuals to feverishly enforce anti-smoking measures on behalf of their institutions. Within this environment, the beleaguered smokers find themselves involuntarily indulged with yet another over-zealous rant, from an uninvited party that walks ten metres to deliver it. While the chastened smokers are becoming used to hostility and derision, that they should also suffer unsolicited displays of sanctimonious remonstration as well, remains a sore point. The question that must be asked is whether it is actually the business of smoking that is truly at the heart of the protestation in question?

The focus of this chapter is the family. More precisely, I am concerned with the changing status and definition of family, including the accession to normative or acceptable status, within Western society, of a certain mode of family. This process has had, as a corollary, the construction of other types of family as unacceptable, undesirable, dangerous, even monstrous. Representations of these other families — outlawed, vilified, feared — are analysed in this chapter. There is no shortage of material in recent television, cinema and literature, because these other, unacceptable, families generate fascination as well as loathing within the judgement of acceptable society.

Simone de Beauvoir says of Sade that ‘the supreme value of his testimony lies in his ability to disturb us’.¹ Indeed, the work of Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, is renowned for its associations with the ‘unacceptable’: with the celebration of excessive corporeal and moral repugnance. However, analysis of Sade using knowledge from the human sciences, particularly cognitive and affective neuroscience, reveals a hesitancy in Sade’s transgressive impetus that is broadly unacknowledged by critics. Sade’s determination to ‘tell all’ was tempered by the constraints imposed by social decision-making processes and evolutionary disgust, both of which work together to mediate the relationship between the author, characters and reader — a relationship highly significant in libertine fiction, due to its didactic imperative. Sade used textual strategies to encourage an alliance between narrator/educator and reader/student and to buffer the impact of the disgust evoked by his work. The result is a conflicted negotiation of social and moral transgression that, at times, concludes with conventionality and conformity.

Scheduled to appear in a 2010 episode of Sesame Street, Pop singer Katie Perry’s duet with the lovable puppet, Elmo, was pulled by the programme’s producers on the grounds that Perry’s costume was too provocative for daytime television in the USA. With the video now widely available online from sites such as YouTube, people can determine for themselves the veracity of the censor’s objections. The censorship of the Perry duet is yet another manifestation of the idiosyncrasies of US censors, and to understand the many incongruities that have framed our contemporary moral standards requires a broader examination and contextualisation of the US legal and constitutional frameworks. To this end, this chapter attempts to foreground some key events of the past and present landscape of censorship in the USA, to establish the over-zealous moral framework inherited by contemporary American audiences.