Pride versus Prejudice: LGBTQ+ Representation and Unequal Censorship in Young Adult Literature

• In Event: Political Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Politics and the Media (Table 9)

Abstract

Cultural products in the United States have become more diverse in their representations of gender and sexuality, even as censorship efforts have intensified. While recent research documents rising book challenges and bans disproportionately targeting LGBTQ+ books, scholarship has paid limited attention to how diverse representations are differentially censored. Book challenges are a form of community censorship that unequally distributes risk through increased scrutiny. Using original data on more than 80,000 young adult books (1833-2023) and longitudinal book challenge records from the American Library Association Office of Intellectual Freedom (1990–2023), this study employs repeated risk models to estimate challenge rates for LGBTQ+ versus cisgender-heterosexual books. Despite constituting a minority of young adult titles, LGBTQ+ books are significantly more likely to be challenged than cisgender-heterosexual books, with disparities widening sharply after 2020. Among LGBTQ+ books, those with transgender and queer content face higher challenge rates than both cisgender-heterosexual literature and other LGBTQ+ books, disparities that intensify post-2020. These findings demonstrate how censorship operates through community scrutiny alongside legal exclusions, offering insight into how contested forms of knowledge are regulated by non-legal actors during periods of political polarization.

Author

• Margaret M Palmer, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill