ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the right to free expression, one of the most fundamental rights that democracy offers, allows one to tell a different story about human rights. Rights are constantly contested between groups, individuals, women, men, racial minorities, sexual minorities and children. Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita has managed to escape censorship, despite the fact that there were cries calling for its banning, on the grounds that it would 'deprave and corrupt' young girls. By focusing on Lolita, people can see how their western mythology fails to live up to the possibility of synthesising conflicts or contests of rights through a higher principle. Lolita is not pornographic when placed in context. It conveys knowledge about possible life events which can produce a catharsis, a release of fear and pity through punishment. For Berlant and Warner, the public space and what is permissible to be exhibited in public is pre-ordered by heteronormative trajectories. One such trajectory is 'intimacy'.
