Publication: Contesting Obscenity
A new academic article has hit print: “Contesting Obscenity” over at the Journal of Intellectual Freedom and Privacy. The article explores how book challengers often invoke legalized notions of obscenity to challenge books but in a way that fundamentally ignores key tenets of obscenity law, such as the requirement that works be judged as a whole and not just by excerpts. While this rhetorical use of obscenity has been around for a long time, some disgruntled challengers have turned to filing criminal charges against teachers and librarians.
The genesis of this article arose in a few bits and pieces over time. In the Fall of 2019, I obtained records in a dispute over the use of Allen Ginsburg’s Howl in a Colorado high school. What I uncovered was a first for me: one of the challengers demanded that criminal charges be filed against the teacher. Though I had just finished an article draft, eventually published as “Navigating a Doctrinal Grey Area,” discussing a similar controversy where obscenity law was invoked in a civil suit, I had never seen a modern attempt to charge obscenity based on a prose novel. I wrote a quick short piece intended for an English journal but that was lost in the outbreak of Covid and the professional demands that came with it. Turns out this was fortuitous because in 2021 suddenly a number of stories and rumors began to circulate about attempts to charge people based on arguments that novels in libraries or classrooms were obscene. While an unfortunate development for believers in basic freedoms, this was a dream for a researcher because I had more data.
What emerged was this article linking the rhetoric of book challengers to the official attempts to have folks charged with providing obscene materials. Ultimately, I conclude that while all of these attempts have failed precisely because they ignore the requirements of obscenity law, this refusal itself represents a challenge to that obscenity law contesting settled aspects of the law for about a century.
The underlying materials can be found here.
