Censorship, Teaching the Taboo, and Monstrosity at the Nexus of Art & Politics
During the spring semester of 2024, about a month and a half into my usual 16-week writing composition course, one of my classes encountered a problem. I had assigned a short speculative fiction story to be read as homework and discussed in class. But while I was able to open the story without issue on my personal laptop, my students were met with error messages. I watched them blink and shuffle as they squinted at the screens of their chromebooks, issued by the school district and on occasion personalized here and there with Sanrio stickers. After a chaotic minute, a student lifted his head and informed me that Clarkesworld, one of the leading English-language publishers of literary SFF, had been added to the school’s block list seemingly over the past weekend.
I paused in confusion, my planned lesson derailed for the day. As a college instructor, the issue of network blocks was still largely unfamiliar to me, but this was a dual credit class — a university course offered to high school juniors and seniors looking to get ahead before graduating, hosted on a high school campus and beholden to the limitations of high school infrastructure. In most school districts I’d lectured at, the routine block list covered Youtube, Reddit, Tumblr, Discord, most social media, streaming services, and a handful of gaming sites. But Clarkesworld Magazine, a reputable publisher with an upmarket reputation? I expressed my consternation to the class and asked whether anyone knew if there had been some sort of incident to cause this. My students shook their heads, looking awkwardly to one another. “They don’t like us reading this stuff,” said a young woman, shrugging.
“What kind of stuff?” I asked.
She shrugged again. “Anything, really.”
NEW FRONTIERS OF CENSORSHIP
Faculty teach (and students learn) in an educational environment that has become increasingly censored in recent years, with no signs of letting up. In Texas, the state where my colleagues and I live and work, the ultimate example of this censorship is the now-infamous House Bill 900. The law, which was signed by Texas Governor Gregg Abbott and went into effect in September of 2023, requires books vendors to rate books all titles based on depictions of or references to sex. Books assigned a “sexually explicit” rating must be removed from the shelves of school libraries, and librarians must obtain permission from a student’s legal guardian in order to allow the student to check out books deemed “sexually relevant.”
The bill’s proposal was initially met with widespread outcry from teachers, booksellers, and librarians — but not enough to stop it from passing in the legislature. Aside from ushering in a new age of classroom censorship, HB900 has garnered criticism for the massive amounts of labor it foists upon book vendors, the parties ultimately responsible for rating books. A coalition of booksellers (whose plaintiffs include the Association of American Publishers, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, the Authors’ Guild, and most recently, Barnes & Noble) filed suit in an Austin federal court in July 2023, months before HB900 was scheduled to go into effect, over the “vague and overbroad” language of the law and the threat it poses to protected speech.
It’s not hard to find evidence of the challenges implementing this law have presented. If you peruse the website of the Texas Library Association, the organization responsible for aiding libraries in complying with the new requirements, you’ll find an FAQ page riddled with unanswered questions. The wording of the law is so imprecise that vendors are left scrambling to figure out how to comply while preserving their business models; even more shocking are some of the solutions they’ve come up with to navigate the problems the law has caused. In Austin, the state’s capital, Half Price Books has adopted an every-man-for-himself strategy, requiring educators to sign a form stating that their usage of classroom materials purchased from the store will comply with the law when they sign up for a teacher’s discount. I confirm, the sheet of paper reads, that any donation received and/or any purchase made using the Half Price Books Educator Discount will remain in compliance with any local, state, or federal laws that place restrictions on how books and educational materials are to be distributed in library and classroom settings.
The choice to target book vendors rather than teachers and librarians is largely because teachers and librarians are already facing threat of censorship at the local level, and by targeting book vendors the law aims to curtail not simply which books can be sold to schools but which books will inevitably be published. It’s simple supply and demand. If school libraries suddenly become unable to legally purchase certain materials, the demand for those materials shrinks, which means the supply ought to shrink accordingly. HB900 was written to censor books in schools, yes, but it was composed with a broader net of censorship in mind. Policymakers don’t just want to control content for kids, they want to control content in all its permutations.
THE VALUE OF THE GROTESQUE
Let’s undertake a thought experiment here. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that we somehow succeeded in accomplishing the frankly impossible task of removing all “unnecessarily” sexual and violent literature from school libraries, whilst simultaneously leaving “relevant” educational resources on the shelves. If this effort is successful, only one question remains: what is lost by curtailing students’ access to non-educational literature that deals with sexual and violent topics? In other words, what is lost by getting rid of the grotesque?
I should specify that I am casting my net wide in defining “educational literature,” so as to render this thought experiment as good-faith as possible. Let’s say we keep the widely-recognized classics on the shelves, including the lurid, the problematic, the genteel controversial, the modern: Toni Morrison, Oedipus, Dickens, Steinbeck, Twain — hell, we’ll even keep very contemporary work (Laurie Halse Anderson comes to mind) on there too. So what’s left on the chopping block? The answer is, material that’s uncomfortable — but crucially, material that’s uncomfortable in an ambiguous way. Books that critics haven’t made up their minds about, books that are popular rather than literary, books for which no mainstream interpretation yet exists or will ever exist, books that handle heavy topics in ways that toe the line between insightful commentary and pulp schlock, books in which the grotesque is artistic rather than didactic.
What is lost by getting rid of such works? I’d argue that we lose opportunities for question, discussion, challenge. There is nothing more challenging than a book which doesn’t tell you why it handles its subject matter in the ways it does, or how the reader ought to feel about it. Something I always ask my students is “What has the text left unsaid, and what is accomplished by leaving that element unsaid?” Ambiguity is a rhetorical tool that gives us space to figure out where we stand. Ambiguity forces us to sit with the parts of a story that are uncomfortable, incongruous, or perhaps just confusing. No tool is better suited to aid in the development of critical thinking.
But teaching tools aside, I think it’s also worth talking about grotesquery and ambiguity as storytelling elements with artistic merit. When I was in middle school, all my friends were reading a trilogy of Young Adult books called The Mortal Instruments by Cassandra Clare, a fairly run-of-the-mill urban fantasy series save for one element: the infamous incest plotline. To summarize as concisely as possible, the heroine and her love interest meet for the first time in their late teens and quickly fall in love, only to later find out that they are siblings. Horrified, the couple break up and try dating other people, but they aren’t able to shake off their romantic feelings (and lust) for one another. In the final book it is revealed that, through a convoluted series of events I barely recall now, they are actually not biologically related. They resume their relationship and get a happy ending (if you’ve ever seen the 2011 Studio Ghibli film From Up On Poppy Hill, this trajectory should feel familiar.) Recently, reviewers and critics have pointed to the presence of this plotline as evidence of Cassandra Clare’s moral bankruptcy as a writer, which feels kind of amusing given that the incest is, in my view, a necessary grotesquery: it makes these books truly unsettling in a way few of Clare’s contemporaries were able to achieve. In a marketplace of not-so-scary monsters and YA cliches, the incest plotline stands out as a sustained moment of genuine terror; it plays on our fear of committing a taboo, on our feelings of disgust, on our fear of doing something unforgivable. It elevates the series from garden-variety supernatural romance to the level of genre horror.
I haven’t read The Mortal Instruments since I was 14, and I don’t think I’d recommend them now; there’s much better stuff out there for teens to read these days. That said, I am interested in how readers and critics talk about these books. At the time of the trilogy’s release, I don’t remember the incest plotline receiving much backlash; the books also featured an on-page gay couple (who were not related to each other, I feel compelled to point out) as main characters, and in the intensely homophobic zeitgeist of the 2000s, portraying gay people was seemingly more controversial than suggesting the possibility of incest. I had a friend from school whose religious mother was apparently fine with the incest plotline, but ended up confiscating her daughter’s copies for fear the books would indoctrinate her child into “the gay agenda.” But in recent years, Cassandra Clare incest jokes have become something of a comedic staple in book communities, as well as an easy cash cow for monetized reviews: BookTube is full of sensationalist videos “calling out” Clare’s obvious incest kink, and these videos can pull in a quarter of a million views with ease. These tirades can make for fun entertainment, but they sometimes strike me as a little naive. There is, after all, no hard line separating intellectual curiosity and artistic interest from kink; for many artists, creating is both a genuine exploration of theme and a celebration of kink, and expecting writers to pull these creative impetuses apart comes off as juvenile. I have no interest in defending Clare, but I am surprised by how the conversation around the incest plotline has shifted in the last decade. I’m especially surprised to see readers condemn the incest plotline because frankly, it’s the one of the only memorable elements of the series. Suggesting that the hero and heroine of your YA trilogy are actually siblings was shocking then and it’s shocking now. It shows a commitment to the grotesque that I see less and less frequently in fiction for young readers. In many ways, I find The Mortal Instruments trite and unchallenging, but in this one regard I respect the series for daring to make its readers so viscerally uncomfortable. Gone is the excitement of the whirlwind romance, gone is the security in having your feelings reciprocated — we, like the books’ heroine, are left with nothing but intolerable guilt and squirming revulsion. In that sense, I think it’s clear that those books were made better by the suggestion of incest, not worse. In an era of sanitized YA that too often infantilizes its target demographic, Clare at least dared to write something truly gross and frightening.
But what, really, is the value of the grotesque? Yes, the grotesque can enrich a text (aesthetically, thematically, intellectually) but there are plenty of valuable texts out there which feature no grotesque elements. Why can’t we just stick to that stuff? Why do we have to read the weird stuff too? To properly answer his question, I must outline a concept which I have come to call a literacy of the grotesque. In order to do that, I will discuss another example from my classroom.
In my Brit Lit I course, we read some difficult stuff. The material is linguistically challenging, as it involves sifting through dense translations of medieval manuscripts, but it is also intellectually and ethically challenging. The texts we read together (Beowulf, the Mabinogion, Le Roman de Silence, Le Morte d’Arthur, Gawain & the Green Knight, and Bisclavret, to name a few) contain depictions of violence, sexual assault and coercion, non-consensual bodily transformation, bestiality, slaughter, and yes, even incest. They are literary masterpieces and vital sources of information about life and thought in the Middle Ages, of course, but many of them are also unpleasant to read and I don’t see any use in pretending otherwise. When we arrive at an unpleasant scene, I typically ask the class outright: “Why is this here? Why do you think this part of the text was necessary to tell the story?” and, when we compare these texts to their modern adaptations, “Why was this element excluded/included when retelling this story for today’s audiences?” My students puzzle over these questions in silence for several minutes, and one by one they begin to raise their hands. Through their answers, we are able to hold honest discussions about important issues that continue to directly affect us in the 21st century: ideas about the infernal and the divine, attitudes towards women’s rights and bodily autonomy, concepts of justice and punishment, stigmas involving monstrosity and otherness, and how our histories shape our futures.
What these students are developing during these classroom conversations is, among other things, a literacy of the grotesque. They are, in short, learning how to be made uncomfortable. They are, in a safe space and supervised by a responsible adult, allowing themselves to consider the monstrous. By doing this, they learn a couple of crucial lessons: 1) that it’s not automatically unsafe or immoral to think about or discuss frightening and unpleasant issues; 2) how to thoroughly examine the ethics of such issues; 3) how to both separate emotional response from analysis and how to fold emotional response into analysis in nuanced ways; 4) how to examine taboo ideas in the text as artistic and/or didactic, and grounded in their relevant historical, political, and theological contexts; 5) how to ask questions about difficult topics without fear of judgment, and how to emotionally handle judgment when they do encounter it; 6) how to set their own boundaries as readers and self-advocate on behalf of those boundaries.
In my Brit Lit class, I encourage students to develop a literacy of the grotesque by reading medieval texts, but the medieval is not a necessary ingredient. In my Writing Comp II course, we don’t read anything from earlier than 1700, but students still grapple with the grotesque in newer texts: poems like Charles Simic’s “Butcher Shop” for instance, or Ellen Bass’s “What Did I Love,” both of which force the reader to confront death in grisly detail. Most of the poems we read in that class are not gross, but last fall nearly all of my dual credit students chose to write their poetry analysis papers over the gross ones. When I asked one student why she liked Bass’s poem (which is about working in an industrial slaughterhouse) so much, she replied, “We never get to read stuff like this. [High school administrators] only ever let us read happy poems.” Curious, I pressed for more detail, and the directness and candor of the student’s answer surprised me. “It’s like, very censored, y’know?” she said, “They’re scared of making us sad so they don’t let us read dark stuff, but we’re gonna be sad anyway, so like, what’s the point?” This student inadvertently got to the heart of why censorship is ultimately unhelpful: children are going to experience difficult emotions no matter what they read, and in stopping them from reading texts that elicit those emotions we are cutting them off from resources that can help them understand and handle their own emotional responses. The grotesque in art gives us a platform to safely explore things that are dark, things that make us sad or unnerved or angry, but these are emotions we already know intimately. A student encountering a description of a gory battlefield in Beowulf might be disgusted, but they have experienced disgust before. A student might feel sad upon reading a poem about the brutalities of commercial chicken farming, but that student has certainly felt sadness before, has maybe even felt sadness when confronted with the ethical issues surrounding meat consumption before — and by reading a poem on the topic, the student discovers they are not alone in this feeling. The grotesque is honest with us. The grotesque holds a mirror up to our inner lives, giving us valuable opportunities to examine the reasons behind the ways we think and feel. The grotesque can even, in some cases, help us feel seen.
In my classes, we mostly read medieval manuscripts, literary short stories, and poems, but I believe that students can just as easily develop a literacy of the grotesque by engaging with pulp sources in addition to literary ones, or with popular sources instead of academic ones. There’s nothing I’ve said here about the value of the grotesque in medieval literature that couldn’t also be said about Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments, or any other mediocre YA product of the 2000s. A student is just as likely to encounter grotesqueries in the Twilight Saga as they are in Bisclavret, a 12th century werewolf tale. This is partly why I feel it’s important that teachers advocate not just for literary classics, but for pop cultural texts as well. When I bring this up, the most frequent pushback I get is “How can children be expected to differentiate between a responsible portrayal of a given social issue versus an irresponsible portrayal?” This isn’t a bad question. What is the difference between gratuitous violence, for instance, and violence deployed as rhetorical device? Is Shakespeare’s Othello a play about racism, or a racist play? If a text utilizes harmful stereotypes about women, where do we draw the line between blatant misogyny and self-aware commentary on misogyny? These are not easy questions, as their answers are highly subjective and, in many cases, up for debate. However, I would argue that the simplest and most universal answer to this dilemma lies in embracing a literacy of the grotesque. How will kids be able to tell the difference between harmful ideas and subversion of harmful ideas? Well, by teaching them to think critically about how those ideas appear in art, obviously. The questions raised by the grotesque are endless, and the more we familiarize ourselves with them, the more adept we become at identifying how artistic elements are used — and to what ends. What is the function of disgust in a given text? Why would a writer purposely elicit a negative emotional response from their reader? What is agency, and which characters display agency in the face of the grotesque? Does the grotesque exist in a text to punish its characters, or does it serve some other purpose? A literacy of the grotesque is the ability of readers to ask these questions and arrive at answers which will form their opinion of both the idea and its execution. The grotesque is a tool for navigating the self, the Other, and the abject space that lies between, but it is also a fundamental component of critical thinking.
ACADEMIC INFRASTRUCTURE & SELF-ADVOCACY
In outlining the parameters of literacy of the grotesque, I listed a number of important lessons that students learn by engaging with the grotesque in art. The final item on that list was how to set boundaries. As far as I’m concerned, this is one of the most significant ways that reading challenging fiction can help students build vital life skills.
At the beginning of the semester, I always give my Brit Lit students a general content warning. I tell them we will encounter heavy topics in our readings, including mentions of sexual violence, and we will also watch a movie in class that contains a brief consensual sex scene. If the course material upsets them, they do not have to read it. If the seminar discussion upsets them, they may quietly excuse themselves from class. As we progress through the semester, I continue to provide more specific content warnings for upcoming texts. Last fall I was approached by a student who told me that he could not continue to read one of our texts because he found its depictions of sexual violence against women upsetting. The student was confident in his decision, but had concerns about how it might affect his grade in the class. I took out a copy of the syllabus and explained to him that students have the option of writing their midterm and final papers (cumulatively worth 70% of the final average) over any text of their choosing; basically, he would not be required to write an analysis of a book he didn’t want to read. The student skipped the reading that upset him and ended up making an A in the course — but in doing so, he gained something much more valuable than GPA points. He gained the skill of recognizing and setting boundaries.
This lesson would not have been nearly as effective if my syllabus was designed to punish students for refusing to do every single reading. If I had told my student, “Sure, you can skip this reading, but you’ll probably do poorly on the midterm paper,” the student still would have had the opportunity to opt out, but he would have done so to the detriment of his grade. This is, unfortunately, standard policy among most university faculty, and it’s a policy that does allow students some modicum of freedom while simultaneously punishing them for exercising that freedom. As educators, we want our students to do the reading, but I don’t believe that classroom engagement should ever come at the expense of a student’s wellbeing. This is why I construct my assignment prompts and syllabi to reward rather than discourage the setting of boundaries. By allowing students to choose one of a dozen texts to write about for their major papers, I’m able to give them space to decide which texts to engage with and which texts they aren’t ready for.
It’s ironic that critics of censorship are so often slandered as not caring about children’s safety, because my own anxieties about censorship are also anxieties about the safety of children. If a student encounters upsetting material in my classroom, they can opt out; the moment of disquiet is over immediately, and that student has just learned where their personal boundaries lie — as well as how to advocate for those boundaries to be respected. When they leave my classroom, they enter the world armed with knowledge of the self that will help them avoid upsetting content in the future. That student leaves my classroom with skills which will help keep them safe, even when I am not around to protect them. But if my syllabus is censored and my students lose opportunities to engage with challenging or uncomfortable content, they also lose opportunities to discover their own boundaries and to self-advocate. In short, a student whose education has been heavily censored is not safe when they leave the classroom.
CONCLUSION: TOWARD A LITERACY OF THE GROTESQUE
In January 2024, the United States Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued its decision in the HB900 lawsuit. The court’s decision prohibits the Texas Education Agency from enforcing HB900 requirements that book vendors rate library materials as sexually explicit or sexually relevant. However, the ruling also states that enforcement of the library standards requirements was not part of the district court’s preliminary injunction, so the standards will remain in place. “Given the court’s decision,” writes the Texas Library Association, “it seems that anything related to the ratings system in the standards is not enforceable, but other parts of the standards will stand.”
A few months later, on April 16th, the court issued an order denying a rehearing of the lawsuit, meaning that all collection development policies which make reference to the vendor ratings system are in effect inoperable. If we hear any more about this case, the next place we’ll be hearing it from is the Supreme Court — but that’s only if the State of Texas files a request within 90 days of the April ruling. Texas librarians, educators, and booksellers are left to wait nervously, wondering whether HB900 will breathe its last or whether it’ll rise from its grave to bite another day.
All this has made clear to me that advocating for freedom of information and artistic expression is one of the most important things a person can do right now. We are no longer fighting to keep ambiguous texts in schools, we are fighting to keep the classics in schools. We are fighting for the bare minimum. And when we’re being kept busy fighting for the bare minimum — for Toni Morrison and Judy Blume and Anne Frank to stay on shelves — the other texts, the ones riddled with ambiguity and challenging ethical questions but which haven’t garnered widespread critical recognition or support, tend to end up undefended by the wayside. This worries me deeply, as it foreshadows an inability among readers (an inability which is already felt and observed, but which will no doubt worsen in the immediate future) to engage with the grotesque honestly and in good faith.
I have already provided more complex definitions of the literacy of the grotesque here, but the simplest definition is this: the literacy of the grotesque is our ability to look at what’s ugly and, instead of turning instantly away from it, invite it indoors for a chat. Our culture, in its current moment, is moving away from this literacy. But if we are to call ourselves free, it is our job — as creatives, as consumers, as producers, as artists, as critics, as human beings — to move toward a literacy of the grotesque. In the classroom, in the library, in the bookshop, in the voting booth, it is our responsibility to look at what is uncomfortable, at what frightens us. Even for a moment, even just to acknowledge that it’s there, we must interface with the grotesque. Our futures may depend on it.
— Rory G. is an essayist, educator, and horror writer of Scottish and Egyptian heritage. They are currently based in Texas, where they teach Medieval & Early Modern Literature. Their fiction has appeared in The Book of Queer Saints, a British Fantasy Award-nominated anthology series. Their nonfiction has appeared in the Austin-American Statesman. You can find Rory online @gilhouligan on all platforms.