Abstract: This essay explores the parental rights movement's recent book bans targeting LGBTQ+ material in US public school libraries. Upon studying their sensational logic, these bans frequently rely on epidemiological narratives about the outbreak of pornography and queer gender/sexual ideologies in public schools. Through this outbreak narrative, antiqueer activists enact longer histories of a medicalized viral imagination about queer identity to motivate a return to exclusionary citizenship practices for LGBTQ+ students, as well as a larger backlash to social justice politics by eroding public trust in educational and academic expertise. Working to make public knowledge of this epidemic "viral" using digital organizing tools, this parental rights activism attempts to imagine a new gender and sexual public health regime to manage the "ideological spread" of queerness and so-called transgenderism using these book bans. Drawing on critical theorists like Lauren Berlant, Sara Ahmed, and Priscilla Wald, this essay critiques how this outbreak narrative is crucial for the parental rights movement's images of medically vulnerable youth as a vehicle for repositioning the family as a model of national health and governance. Aiming to "slow the spread" and promoting social control over transness/queerness, these restrictions, as the essay demonstrates, are premised on historical narratives of queer contagiousness that presume media exposure produces LGBTQ+ subjects.
Michael M. Reinhard (Mon,) studied this question.