Kahn on The Authoritarian Semiotics of the New Campus Mask Bans

Robert Kahn, University of St. Thomas School of Law (Minnesota), has published The Authoritarian Semiotics of the New Campus Mask Bans. Here is the abstract.

Campus protests over the Gaza war have led to calls for mask bans. This essay examines these calls from a semiotic perspective. On the one hand, the new and proposed bans invoke the struggle against the Ku Klux Klan to cast masked protesters as modern-day Klan members. Meanwhile, the bans rely on a dislike of masks dating from the pandemic when mask wearers were seen as “cowardly sheep” who allowed the state to exercise “social control.” Both semiotic strategies fail on their own terms. Mask bans trivialize the history of the Klan, while promoting the same social control mask abstainers complained about during COVID. As such, mask bans reflect “face authoritarianism,” under which the state assumes the power to determine who wears a mask and when. A truly free society would reject this overcriminalization of daily life and respect the right to mask (or not mask) in most settings.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.