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.

Kahn on Mask Bans as Expressions of Memory Politics in the United States

Robert Kahn, University of St. Thomas School of Law (Minnesota), has published Mask Bans As Expressions of Memory Politics in the United States. Here is the abstract.

Mask laws have a lengthy history in the United States, one primarily, but not exclusively tied up with the Ku Klux Klan. They also are an instance of memory politics. In particular, mask bans complicate Nikolay Koposov’s distinction between narrow, self-centered memory politics (society casting itself as a victim), and broad, universalistic memory politics (society recognizing its past crimes). Sometimes, as in the Reconstruction Era, mask bans sent inculpatory or universal messages, albeit weak ones. By the 1920s, the mask bans protected Southern elites and by the 1950s, they partially exculpated the regime of segregation by focusing attention on the Klan as uncouth, cowardly, and unworthy defenders of a “progressive” South still deeply invested in segregation and White supremacy. As such, mask bans show that memory laws are sometimes used as tools of moral distancing, something also on display in recent attempts to anoint Antifa as the new Klan by “unmasking” it.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.