Wisconsin Mom Challenges
Nunga-Nungas in School
The mother of an 8th-grader at the Oregon (Wis.) Middle School is seeking the removal of the coming-of-age novel Knocked Out by My Nunga-Nungas from the school library. Linda Rutherford filed a formal complaint October 18, explaining to the Madison Wisconsin State Journal that same day, “I’m no prude, but this is smut.”
The third in a series by Louise Rennison, Knocked Out by My Nunga-Nungas continues the diary entries of fictional 14-year-old Georgia, who writes quite frankly about her emerging sexuality. Rutherford, who read the book after her daughter brought it home, said she was particularly offended by a passage in which a boy was pulling on a girl’s breast. Rennison defines nunga-nungas in the glossary as what “Ellen’s brother calls them . . . because he says that if you get hold of a girl’s breast and pull it out and then let it go—it goes nunga-nunga-nunga.”
“This is fairly typical of the way I hear students talk in schools,” Katrina Carr, a schools program specialist who works with a high-school student group to prevent sexual violence, told the State Journal. She added, “But I’m somewhat surprised that this is a book in a middle school library.”
A materials review committee will reconsider the book, Oregon School District Superintendent Linda Barrows revealed.
Posted October 28, 2002.
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