The Hermeneutical Work of Anti-Gender Book Challenges

Abstract

Anti-gender book challenges work to disrupt and damage our meaning making practices; this is the hermeneutical work that these challenges perform, whether or not they induce a ban. A challenge may be understood as ‘anti-gender’ when it appeals for justification to the idea that some underspecified gender ideology is poisoning mainstream society and the minds of its young people. These challenges, which have greatly increased in frequency since 2021, consequently communicate objections to the permissive inclusion and representation of transgender, gender-nonconforming, and queer persons or related topics in books. In so doing they advance a larger epistemic project aimed at suppressing marginalized interpretive resources that have begun to secure some mainstream traction. This paper draws on B.R. George & Stacey Goguen’s philosophical account of hermeneutical backlash and Emily Knox’s sociological analysis of book challengers and their worldviews to explain how anti-gender challenges perform this distinctively hermeneutical work. This work entails not only restricting physical or digital access to reading materials but the pernicious conceptual distortion and the discursive reclassification of literary works as ideological teaching aids. Understanding how anti-gender book challenges target (equitable access to) our shared pool of interpretive resources will give us clearer insight into the ways in which public libraries serve as venues for contesting the vary terms of our personal and collective meaning making.