“Inconvenient” Book Choices: Becoming Un/censored

• In Event: The Productive (In)actions of Do-Nothing Literacies

Abstract

In their recent monograph, Butler (2024), asks, “Is the assumption that if children read about something, they will become that thing? What strange powers are attributed to reading and books?” In this paper, we examine the panic-fueled call to remove texts centering themes of sexuality, gender, and race in US classrooms and libraries, with similar censorship on the rise in the UK, Canada, and Australia. While book banning in schools and libraries is nothing new (Knox, 2015; Author 2, xxxx), the fear that teachers are “sneaking” pornographic and other inappropriate materials into schools to indoctrinate children is (Author 1, xxxx). These anxieties have ushered in a new form of affective educational politics wherein managing affect works to (re)set the boundaries of what is allowed to be felt in (and out) of schools and (re)shape national sexual citizen-subjects.

This postqualitative (St. Pierre, 2012) study draws upon classroom observations and informal interviews across two research sites. We think-with-theories (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) of inconvenience and slow death (Berlant, 2022; 2011) to map out the complex “traffic in affects” (Lesko et al. 2010; Author 2, xxxx) swirling around one primary and one high-school classroom in the northeastern United States. In these classrooms, students’ desires to disregard normative reading expectations – by “sneaking in” or “smuggling” books deemed ”inappropriate,”such as Rick Riordan's (2015) Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard – fueled moments of furtive joy that serve to trouble the metanarrative of “indoctrination.” We argue that by (dis)engaging in “productive (in)actions,” students refused school-sanctioned curricula, and by doing so, participated in acts of resistance/survival that became “inconvenient” to the slow death of their knowledge-cultures and relational ways of knowing/being/doing literacies.

Authors

• Bessie P. Dernikos, Florida Atlantic University

• Alyssa Niccolini, Goethe University Frankfurt