[Happy Banned Books Week! In high school I had
a deeply nerdy sweatshirt
that read “Celebrate Freedom: Read a Banned Book”; this week I’ll do so by
AmericanStudying books that have been frequently banned, in the past or
recently. And yeah, read a Banned Book this week!]
On how cultural
representations threaten prejudice, and why their importance goes beyond that effect.
About a year ago
in this space, I concluded
a series on “American Gay Studies” by examining a trio of ground-breaking late
1990s pop cultural texts that portrayed LGBTQ Americans in significant roles
(really as their protagonists in each case). It wasn’t a coincidence that those
texts were all from that same late 90s moment, as that was really the first
time when mainstream American popular culture began consistently and centrally
representing such American identities (a newness evidenced by the controversy
and backlash faced by the first of that trio, the sitcom Ellen, and its
creator and star). But of course there had long been individual such
cultural representations, and thus also social controversies and challenges to
those representations from anti-gay voices and forces. Offering a prominent example
of both trends, from about a decade before that trio of late 90s texts, is Lesléa Newman’s ground-breaking
children’s book Heather Has Two
Mommies (1989).
The story of Heather is simple enough (as is
generally the case with books for younger children, of course): the title
character, whose parents are lesbian couple Jane and Kate, is part of a
playgroup where family units are being discussed; at first she is upset that
her family differs from those of her peers, but she learns from the group
caretaker Molly that all families are special and worth celebrating. Yet that
simple premise was met with a firestorm of backlash
from anti-gay parents and interest groups, not all of which went as far as
the Fayetteville
(NC) group that paid for a series of anti-library newspaper ads but most of
which sought to have the book
banned from both school and public libraries. Those campaigns relied on the
usual combination of religious objections (I’m very tempted to put “religious”
in quotes there) and more blatantly bigoted ones (the Fayetteville ads compared
homosexuality to “prostitution, bestiality, and incest,” natch). But to my
mind, what they consistently reveal is the simple and crucial fact that to represent
identities in cultural works is precisely to threaten stereotypes and prejudice
directed at those identities, since such bigoted narratives and perspectives
depend entirely on visions of those identities as unfamiliar, threatening “others,”
rather than simply people in our communities and societies.
That aspect of Heather alone would be more than enough
to make it an important text, to this day and even more so in its late 1980s
moment. But I would argue that there’s another audience for a book like Heather, one that reveals an even more important
effect of representation. As I discussed in
this post on the first African American Disney princess (Tiana from 2009’s The Princess and the Frog), it’s difficult
to overstate the value of children seeing themselves represented in pop culture
works. That’s true for all children, but it’s particularly significant when it
comes to children whose identities, families, communities are too often
marginalized in pop culture and/or society at large. In the late 1980s (and in
too many ways still to this day, but certainly then), both LGBTQ children and
children who were part of LGBTQ family units certainly comprised an example of such
marginalized and under-represented identities. No one children’s book could
reverse that trend entirely, of course—but one children’s book could make a
difference, and Newman’s ground-breaking and important Heather Has Two Mommies did just that.
Last banned books
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Banned books you’d highlight?
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