Reading like a criminal

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Sarah Gaily wrote this as a presentation at the Ann Arbor District Library's annual Big Gay Read festival. Her book Upright Women Wanted was selected as the featured book. It is about a group of women librarians who take banned books to readers. Given what is happening in the media today it is a lot less improbable sounding now than when I read the book in 2020. Here is a link to the video of the presentation and the text along with some of the slides from it too.

stone-soup.ghost.io - Read like a criminal

Hello, friends. I’m Sarah Gailey, author of Upright Women Wanted, which is about living under an authoritarian regime that achieves its goals by deprioritizing public and social services, leaving people to largely fend for themselves, while tightly controlling what media and literature they have access to.

When people ask me how I went about building the world of Upright Women Wanted, I always tell them the same thing: I took a close look at how existing and historical fascist regimes treated the people who lived within them, and I saw the future that many people in power want for this country. I wrote about that future–a future in which the government prioritizes the consolidation of wealth and power, corporate profit, and imperial expansion at the expense of the material, physical, and social needs of citizens using violence and strict control of information to pursue those goals and enforce compliance.

It’s vital to understand that there is a direct relationship between state-inflicted violence and state-governed control of information. Tonight, we’re going to take a closer look at that relationship, so we can come to a shared understanding of the purpose of authoritarian media censorship–and the necessity of learning to identify oneself as a criminal in the eyes of the State.

Before I begin, I want to make sure you’re aware that tonight’s talk will include discussion and images of police activity and conditions of incarceration. I think this subject is worth your attention and time, but if this subject matter isn’t something you think you can engage with here and now, I’d encourage you to watch this talk at home online later instead, where you can attend to your physical and emotional needs safely.

To get a better understanding of authoritarian media censorship, we’re going to do exactly what I did when I was researching Upright Women Wanted: we’re going to look into history. But rather than looking at the history of Germany or Italy or Japan, we’ll be sticking a bit closer to home.

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