Thread by @richterscale

Just so we're all on the same page here, this is the nudity-containing image that the Mcminn County School Board objected to as pretext for removing Maus from the curriculum.

You probably can't tell, but that's the author's mother in the bathtub where she died of suicide.

I cropped it because the image of suicide is clear in context, and I didn't want to just drop that into your feed unannounced.

It's a gut-wrenching moment in the story, where Spiegelman includes his actual underground comic story about the tragedy and its impact on his life.

To think that it is a prurient image, even for an 8th grader reading the story, is the sign of a mind warped by a disgustingly misogynistic sexual morality.

The mendacious book-burners in Mcminn describe that image thusly:

"You see the naked pictures, you see the razor, the blade where the mom is cutting herself. You see her laying in a pool of her own blood."

You do not.

Don't do this in this context.

The transcript makes no specific mention of any other instance of nudity in the book, and they wanted to redact *only* this image--so no, they aren't objecting to the images of naked mice.

That doesn't make what they did any better.

They are *sexualizing* a horrific, tragic, and artistically vague line drawing.

They're using that violation of their standard of respectability as a *pretext* for trashing Maus. "oh well, we can't redact like we want, so the whole thing has to go, ha ha."

And this is what those standards of decency and respectability are there for in the first place: to police that which challenges the bounds of white Christian supremacy.