![]() ![]() Evison's novel Lawn Boy, about a young Mexican-American yard worker who struggles to forge his way in working-class Seattle, is seventh on the ALA most-banned list. "While the book banners are a minority of the population, they are a vocal minority… and an organised one, determined to impose their wills on every level of governance," author Jonathan Evison tells BBC Culture. ![]() The concern over LGBTQ books is not homophobia, she said, but the "sexually explicit" nature of the texts. "In the past 10 to 13 years, the LGBTQ books have gotten very sexually graphic," Jennifer Pippin, a Florida mother and book challenger, and founder of Moms for Liberty, told the Washington Post. Reasons given by challengers include "gender ideology propaganda", "transsexual material", "embracing trans ideology which is an assault on girls/women", "sexual misconduct", "drug/alcohol use", "LGBTQ content", "violent", "anti-police", "racist", "obscene", "paedophilia", "grooming". The surge of banned books includes more titles that touch on violence and abuse, health and wellbeing, or instances or themes of grief and death. These efforts to chill speech are part of the ongoing nationwide campaign to foment anxiety and anger with the goal of suppressing free expression in public education." Bans occurred in 32 states, affecting four million children and young people. "This school year saw the effects of new state laws that censor ideas and materials in public schools, an extension of the book banning movement initiated in 2021 by local citizens and advocacy groups. We don't get to silence stories that we don't like." The movement to ban books is driven by a vocal minority demanding censorship," Kasey Meehan, director of PEN America's Freedom to Read project, tells BBC Culture. ![]() We get to choose the books and ideas we want to engage with, but we don't get to decide what our neighbours can read and think. She adds, "Americans enjoy the freedom of expression and the freedom to engage with others' expression. It's the job of a librarian to provide access to those authors and stories, whether they mirror the experience of a reader or shed light on an unfamiliar perspective." Those books are on library shelves because someone in the community wants to read them. "Most books that people object to are by or about LGBTQ+ individuals or people of colour. ![]() "Ultimately, attempts to ban books are attempts to silence authors who have summoned immense courage in telling their stories," ALA president Lessa Kanani'opua Pelayo-Lozada tells BBC Culture. Books for young people that have been targeted for topics such as race, gender and sexuality include Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer, George M Johnson's All Boys Aren't Blue, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Jonathan Evison's Lawn Boy. The ALA documented an unparalleled number of reported book challenges in 2022, more than 2,500 unique titles, the highest number of attempted book bans since the ALA began tracking censorship data more than 20 years ago. Now the banning and challenging of books in the US has escalated to an unprecedented level. The banning of Northern Lights could be considered a precursor to censoring books for "moral", world view or religious reasons. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |