“Love is an Expertise”: 21st Century US Book Bans and the Rise of Moms for Liberty

• In Event: The Children Are the Future: Tracking the Rise of Anti-Trans Rights, Eugenics, and Book Bans in the 21st century

Abstract

The recent surge of book bans in the US, has been driven largely by majority-white, conservative pressure groups. The most pervasive of these is Moms for Liberty (MFL). In this paper, I examine how the uptick in book bans has been driven by white maternal anxieties and vigilance as they relate to constraining the ideological possibilities of youth reading culture. Over the past decade, uniting under the slogan, “love is an expertise,” they have achieved great success in advancing racist, transphobic, and homophobic agendas in the name of protecting children vis-a-vis book bans. MFL, in particular, have chosen reading and the public institutions that foster it as their primary cultural battleground and have had outsized influence on pushing forward book bans in the US. Their rise to power in advancing book bans illustrates the nightmarish endgame of what can happen when public institutions that promote reading and literacy, such as school and public libraries, center the desires and values of white heteronormativity.

I argue that MFL uses book bans to strategically align the affluent, white, maternal position embodied by most members with conservative nation-building. Their campaign focuses on diminishing the representation of identities in literature that MFL feels are undesirable, such as LGBTQ identities, because they believe literature can influence individuals to adopt those identities. I show how book bans are the most extreme case of reading cultures being shaped by white, heteronormative hegemony. In this paper, I will explain the three main campaign strategies that they employ to achieve their goals. First, MFL centers white perspectives and heteronormative maternal values to justify censoring reading. Second, in reaction to shifting social and demographic changes in the U.S. that they see as threatening to their identity and values, MFL promotes the radical decontextualization of literature. The third strategy is ironically very much founded in the widespread nonpartisan belief that reading has the power to change people’s minds, dispositions, and behaviors. Applying this ideology to restriction (rather than access), MFL promotes reading as a practice that should make all readers—regardless of race, gender, or background—feel only comfort and validation from what they have read. The group’s justifications for proliferating book bans are grounded in how they define motherhood as a neoliberal discourse of professional expertise predicated on preserving a white, Christian, nationalist vision of America.

Author

• Tamara Bhalla, University of Maryland-Baltimore County