Contesting Obscenity: Book Challengers and Criminalizing Literature

Abstract

Book challenges have long been a regular part of library and school operations. “Book challenges are requests by members of the public to remove, relocate, or restrict books from or within institutions” (Knox 2015, 3). At base, the book challenger sees some information contained in a book as dangerous and seeks to make it harder to access. In recent years book challenges have exploded in frequency, escalating rapidly in 2021. This was driven increasingly by national conservative activist groups attempting to purge what they perceived as dangerous information from the public sphere.