University of Oklahoma Graduate College
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UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE CENSORSHIP CITADELS: GEOGRAPHY AND THE SOCIAL CONTROL OF GIRLS A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE FACULTY in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY By AMI ELIZABETH STEARNS Norman, Oklahoma 2014 CENSORSHIP CITADELS: GEOGRAPHY AND THE SOCIAL CONTROL OF GIRLS A DISSERTATION APPROVED FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY BY ______________________________ Dr. Susan F. Sharp, Chair ______________________________ Dr. Ann Beutel ______________________________ Dr. Tom Burns ______________________________ Dr. Meredith Worthen ______________________________ Dr. Penny Pasque © Copyright by AMI ELIZABETH STEARNS 2014 All Rights Reserved. Dedicated to my three beautiful sisters and my three closest friends— Carrie, Erin, and Megan. Keep reading! This dissertation represents the end of a long and difficult journey, but one that I would not trade for the world. Special gratitude to my advisor, Dr. Susan Sharp, who has been a joy to work with and continues to provide a strong example of scholarship, activism, and pedagogy. My educational journey would have been much impaired without Dr. Sharp’s guidance and I feel extremely fortunate to have had her as a thesis and dissertation chair. Thank you to Dr. Loretta Bass for accepting me into the program after I had been out of academia for over a decade. To all the professors who profoundly influenced my life and helped me shape a new identity for myself, thank you from the bottom of my heart for such superb teaching and constant encouragement. The remainder of my doctoral committee also deserves recognition for their encouragement, input, and advice during the writing of this dissertation. Thank you, Dr. Ann Beutel, Dr. Meredith Worthen, Dr. Tom Burns, and Dr. Penny Pasque. During the writing of this project, I received help from wonderful people working at the U.S. Census Bureau, The Guttmacher Institute, the National Vital Statistics System, the American Library Association, and numerous school districts. I was overwhelmed by the quick and efficient communication from strangers willing to help out a doctoral student with information requests. My gratitude goes out to all of them and to everyone who assisted with this project. iv Table of Contents Chapter One: Introduction……………………………………………………1 Chapter Two: Religion as a Cultural Force…………………………………26 Chapter Three: Race and Class in American Culture……………………….37 Chapter Four: Theory and Model…………………………………………...46 Chapter Five: Methodology………………………………………………....57 Chapter Six: Houston and New Orleans…………………………………….76 Chapter Seven: San Antonio and Oklahoma City………………………….112 Chapter Eight: Tampa and Winston-Salem………………………………...143 Chapter Nine: Conclusion…………………………………………………..175 Endnotes……………………………………………………………………191 Reference List………………………………………………………………192 Appendix A: Books Challenged by Houston between 2000 and 2009……..232 Appendix B: Books Challenged by San Antonio between 2000 and 2009…235 Appendix C: Books Challenged by Tampa between 2000 and 2009……….236 v List of Tables Table 5.1: Censorship Citadels and Comparison Cities: Population and Book Challenges 2000-2009……………………………………………………...65 Table 6.1: City-Level Characteristics of Houston and New Orleans between 2000 and 2009………………………………………………………………80 Table 7.1: City-Level Characteristics of San Antonio and Oklahoma City between 2000 and 2009……………………………………………………115 Table 8.1: City-Level Characteristics of Tampa and Winston-Salem between 2000 and 2009……………………………………………………146 vi List of Figures Figure 4.1: Theoretical Model………………………………………………..47 vii Abstract This qualitative study examines the way in which local attempts to censor certain books reflect a greater community agenda of controlling young female behavior, specifically sexual and violent behavior. To abet my argument, I draw on Erikson’s and Durkheim’s theories on boundary maintenance, Gusfield’s symbolic crusades, an intersectional feminist perspective, and scholarship on new forms of religious fundamentalism. Using data on frequently challenged books collected by the American Library Association, I identify the top three cities with populations over 100,000 that issued the greatest number of challenges between 2000 and 2009 (“Censorship Citadels”) and compare these to three cities of similar size that only challenged one or zero titles. I document the changes in percent white, percent foreign-born, percent homeownership, and rates of poverty in each city, in addition to examining visible boundary breaches by girls for each of the three Censorship Citadels and their comparison cities. Visible boundary breaches by girls include 1) higher rates of births to minor girls, 2) no required notification or permission from parents for a minor’s abortion, 3) higher likelihood the school distributes contraceptives and 4) more newspaper articles covering girls’ violence. Lastly, I undertake a content analysis of the books challenged by the Censorship Citadels (N=119) and the comparison cities (N=1) and theorize about the relationship between the books’ contents and the community’s perceived threats from visible norm breaking by girls. I suggest that cities experiencing more demographic changes during the decade and cities housing more megachurches are cities that attempt more social control of girls through frequent book challenges. viii Chapter One: Introduction This project is a content analysis of the books challenged by six American cities between the years of 2000 and 2009, and a qualitative examination of certain characteristics in each city to determine if the books that are challenged have a relationship with the need to control girls’ behavior. The main characteristics I examined in each of the six cities are related to the social control of girls1 and the visibility of girls’ deviance, including births to minors, minors’ access to abortion and contraception, and newspaper coverage of girls’ violent behavior. As the religious climate and demographic evolution of a city also have an impact on the desire to socially control girls’ behavior, I also documented the presence or absence of megachurches, along with changes in race, ethnicity, and social class during the years studied in each city. I investigated the possible relationship between the contents of books challenged in each city and the perceived threat presented by visible breaches of girls’ behavior norms in those cities. Although I could not definitively point to a specific city-level trait or normative behavior breach that predicted more book challenges, the picture that emerged from the data helped illustrate the way in which the local climate influenced attempts at the social control of girls. This research contributes to the sociological knowledge base by examining how local communities react to girls’ norm breaking behaviors. If a community is so threatened by girls who break normative boundaries that community members turn to local forms of social control, this will assist in identification of the ranges of ways that social control operates and will shed light on attitudes toward girls’ sexual and violent 1 behavior norms in a community context. As Mikel Brown, Chesney-Lind, and Stein (2007) state, “What we think about girls translates to how we control them” (852). My hope is that this study will contribute to awareness of the role books play in society. Parents, educators, librarians, and school boards are uniquely positioned as gatekeepers of knowledge in young girls’ lives. The addition and omission of certain books send messages about what will be tolerated and what will be condemned in young girls’ lives. For those girls whose experiences do not fit inside white, middle- class, Protestant, heterosexual prescriptions, the inability to engage critically with literature can have detrimental effects. McDaniel (2004) suggests that critical reading accomplishes a multitude of tasks. This type of literacy allows a population to see itself as oppressed, reveals what populations are expected to be submissive, and leads to transformation in lives. Reading incorporates “critical thinking, questioning, and transformation of self or one’s world” (474). This introductory section begins by visiting the theme of frequently challenged books and the role played in data collection by the American Library Association before moving on to review the larger landscape of symbolic crusades and boundary maintenance. Using those broad themes as a foundation, the work will then narrow in focus to examine the social control of girls, girls’ sexuality and violence, and censorship aimed at girl readers. THE INTERSECTION OF GIRLS AND BANNED BOOKS The American Library Association (ALA), the clearinghouse for all official challenges to books in the U.S., received 5,099 challenges from the years 2000 through 2009 (American Library Association 2013). During this time period, the top objection 2 to a book was for sexual explicitness, the top initiator of challenges to books was a parent, and the institution most often harboring the challenged book was a school, followed closely by a school library (American Library Association 2012). These statistics suggest that the majority of challenged books in America are contested due to an assumed deleterious effect on school-aged minors. Book banning or challenging is no longer a federal matter for the courts in the United States, so an accurate reflection of opposition to titles must come from a source other than court documents. Beginning in the late 1940s, the act of censoring