censorship

Female characters are not permitted to laugh in books presented at the Tehran International Book Fair, which opened this week. What would Jane Eyre say?

Discussions around sex and sexuality can sometimes be dignified by being medicalized or being couched in the terms of education. But sometimes that very frankness makes these discussions culturally unacceptable, even alongside completely normalized images of sexualized bodies, themes of promiscuity, and genres of “romance” that serve as thin excuses to repeat a hackneyed story about sexual conquest.

On Saturday, the Wall Street Journal fired a shot heard around the literary world: a so-called book review by Meghan Cox Gurdon condemning the YA genre. Gurdon begins by describing a mother looking at covers in a young adult section and finding nothing she considered appropriate for her daughter, only "vampires and suicide and self-mutilation, this dark, dark stuff." Of course, many YA readers (myself included) could name titles that are not "dark, dark" at all, but Gurdon uses this dubious anecdote as a launchpad for a deluge of problematic assertions, contradictions and tacit accusations.

Read more about this misguided article, and the awesome responses by YA lovers, after the jump!

It's Banned Books Week, which means that schools and libraries across the US are rallying readers in order to celebrate access to information while bringing attention to the realities of censorship.

The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom received 460 reports on efforts to remove or restrict materials from school curricula and library bookshelves in 2009. Let's take a look at a few of the books that have been banned (or challenged) over the past few years.

This past spring, Revolutionary Voices, a multicultural queer youth anthology published in 2000, was pulled from the shelves at a Mount Holly, New Jersey high school library. A formal complaint was filed by Beverly Marinelli, a resident of Lumberton, NJ who just happens to belong to a local chapter of Glenn Beck's 9.12 project. Marinelli stated that the book is "pervasively vulgar, obscene, and inappropriate". Following the request to remove the book, a review committee voted to take the book off the shelves at the school library.

Revolutionary Voices, edited by Amy Sonnie, has been described by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) as "the first creative resource by and for queer and questioning youth of every color, class, religion, gender and ability". The anthology is comprised of prose, art, letters, diary entries, and performance pieces.

More after the jump!