From Book Rating to Book Bans: A Critical Content Analysis of BookLooks.org’s Report Cards on LGBTQIA+ Titles
Abstract
When attempting to ban books, challengers often rely on book review and rating sources that are designed and authored by people working outside the field of librarianship and who may have little to no professional qualifications. These sources, while advertising themselves as impartial, are steeped in personal bias and partisan ideological positions. BookLooks.org is one of the resources used to support efforts to remove books from K-12 public schools. However, an empirical examination of these rating sources has not been undertaken. In this manuscript, we use Critical Content Analysis to examine the “report cards” created for Stonewall award-winning (and honored) LGBTQIA+ titles included on the BookLooks.org site. While the site’s mission statement claims to uncover “objectionable content, including profanity, nudity, and sexual content,” the analysis of annotations pulled from the report cards of LGBTQIA+ titles reveals a more insidious and far-reaching agenda. Findings from our study suggest that these report cards undermine allyship and support for LGBTQIA+ students, promote skepticism about factual data and objective definitions of terms, and systematically target gender presentation that lies outside of a masculine-feminine binary. By discussing and naming the rhetorical and ideological implications of resources like BookLooks.org, we offer support for practitioners looking to defend their school and public library LGBTQIA+ collections.
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5860/jifp.v8i4.8142
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