<
https://theconversation.com/gender-queer-was-the-last-book-an-australian-council-tried-to-ban-its-still-being-appealed-in-federal-court-229026>
"
Gender Queer, a graphic-novel memoir of coming out as non-binary, was at the
centre of Australia’s perhaps highest-profile book banning furore in recent
years – that is, before western Sydney’s Cumberland City Council banned books
on same-sex parenting.
And
Gender Queer’s status is still threatened: Bernard Gaynor, the
conservative Catholic activist who led the call to ban it is taking the
Minister for Communication and the Australian Classification Review Board to
the Federal Court of Australia. The decision will come later this year.
Researcher Nicole Moore told
The Book Show’s Sarah L'Estrange yesterday that,
contrary to what many of us think, this wave of book bannings is not copied
from the US.
Australia has a long history of book banning and before Gough Whitlam’s
government in the 1970s, was “one of the most censorious countries in the
English-speaking world”. For example, in 1932, Aldous Huxley’s
A Brave New
World (now a standard school text) was banned in Australia.
“We have a long history of Christian associations and churches organising to
ban books,” Moore said, particularly citing sex, sexuality and gender as
reasons. The
Gender Queer ban, she said, provoked “concerns about some models
of Christian understanding that are perhaps narrow in their models of how
people should live and how books should express the ideas of gender identity
and sexual expression”.
Sexually explicit illustrations, including of a sexual fantasy inspired by
Plato’s symposium, are often cited (and taken out of context) by those looking
to ban the book. But American author Maia Kobabe (who uses e/em/eir pronouns)
told
The Book Show that’s not why the book is so embattled. Rather, it’s the
title, its comic form, its several major literary awards and that it’s a
“happy” coming-out story “where I face no negative consequences from coming
out”.
The book – which began life as “a well-received but minor debut book from a new
author” – has become a story of censorship, culture wars, and of the way young
trans lives have been caught up in ideology wars."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
