Publication: Navigating a Doctrinal Grey Area

I have finally published my first academic article from my censorship research, a little later than I hoped thanks to the never-ending pandemic. “Navigating a doctrinal grey area” is online with First Amendment Studies and will be in print in the next few months I believe. If you don’t have access just email me for a copy. The paper uses two New Jersey controversies over Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home to explore some themes in book challenges in the grey area of the law.

In brief, I am interested in the grey area of constitutional law around free speech, the right to read, and parental rights in schools and libraries. One of these controversies centered on a New Jersey high school utilizing Fun Home in senior English as a means of improving the LGBTQ content of its curriculum. Some members of the community objected strongly, lobbying for removal of the book and rejecting any aspect of compromise. Some were so unhappy that they even sued the school in a frivolous but interesting legal action trying to utilize obscenity law creatively to subvert the very concept of obscenity. In the other, a principal heard about the book and ordered it removed.

The lessons I draw from this turn upon the nature of book challenge arguments. Challengers focused largely on a few images of nudity and sex in the graphic novel, seeking to transform these images into the equivalent of pornography. The theme and literary value of Fun Home became irrelevant, nothing could possibly justify such material in class or in a library. In doing so they unknowingly entered the complicated legal relationship of the right to read and parental authority. Some parents assert a right to dominate all curriculum and reading choices, for their child and all other children. The article explores the ways in which these claims were resisted creatively.

All of the underlying data is available here for people curious to explore this type of material.