Wtrettien: Created page with "Drabinski, "Queering the Catalog" L ibraries are spaces where language really matters. 2 than US users did: while “Kaﬁrs” is simply descriptive in the US context to US catalogers, it was virulently racist in Zambia ð Gilyard 1999, 3 Þ . 3 The idea that language has meaning only in context, an idea articulated abstractly in ﬁelds like philosophy, comparative literature, and anthropology, was made very materially evident: subject headings, often cast by cat..."

2022-10-23T18:33:26Z

Created page with "Drabinski, "Queering the Catalog" L ibraries are spaces where language really matters. 2 than US users did: while “Kaﬁrs” is simply descriptive in the US context to US catalogers, it was virulently racist in Zambia ð Gilyard 1999, 3 Þ . 3 The idea that language has meaning only in context, an idea articulated abstractly in ﬁelds like philosophy, comparative literature, and anthropology, was made very materially evident: subject headings, often cast by cat..."

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Drabinski, "Queering the Catalog"

L ibraries are spaces where language really matters.

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than US users did: while “Kaﬁrs” is simply descriptive in the US context to US catalogers, it was virulently racist in Zambia ð Gilyard 1999, 3 Þ .

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The idea that language has meaning only in context, an idea articulated abstractly in ﬁelds like philosophy, comparative literature, and anthropology, was made very materially evident: subject headings, often cast by catalogers as a kind of pure, objective language, are not; where and when and by whom subject head- ings are used makes all the difference in terms of meaning.

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The critical cataloging movement has addressed the problem of bias in these structures primarily as a functional problem: materials are cataloged incorrectly, and they can be cat- aloged correctly with the correct pressure from activist catalogers. This project has mean- ingfully pointed out the trouble with classiﬁcation and cataloging decisions that are framed as objective and neutral, calling attention to the fundamentally political project of sorting materials into categories and then giving those categories names.

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While this work has been productive, its emphasis on correctness locates the problem of knowledge organization systems too narrowly as the domain of catalogers themselves.

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From the perspective of user services, the problem of inaccessible knowledge orga- nization is one that can be productively addressed at the moment of mediated research: where librarians assist users in dialogic engagement with library access structures.

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Queer theory provides a useful theoretical frame for rethinking the stable, ﬁxed categories and systems of naming that characterize library knowledge organization schemes and strategies for helping users navigate them.

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Rather than taking these identities as stable and ﬁxed, queer theory sees these identities as shifting and contextual.

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Lesbian and gay studies is concerned with what homosexuality is. Queer theory is concerned with what homosexuality does.

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This analytic approach locates the trouble with library classiﬁcation and cataloging sys- tems in the project of ﬁxity itself: as we attempt to contain entire ﬁelds of knowledge or ways of being in accordance with universalizing systems and structures, we invariably cannot account for knowledges or ways of being that are excess to and discursively produced by those systems.

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In simpliﬁed terms, while classiﬁcation decisions might tell a story to the browser, subject-heading choices tell a story to the searcher.

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This example points to the challenge posed by a politics of knowledge organization that seeks to “ﬁx”—both as correction and in place—classiﬁcation and cataloging decisions in library structures. Such corrections are always contingent and never ﬁnal, shifting in re- sponse to discursive and political and social change.

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Queer theory resists the idea that stable identities like lesbian or gay exist outside of time. Rather, these identities exist only temporarily in social and political contexts that both produce and require them. Queer theory sees claims to universal and unchanging identities as both unattainable and undesirable, particularly in the sense that they elide the social power of uncontested claims to truth.

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The entire project of library classiﬁcation and cataloging is at odds with queer ideas about historicity, contingency, and the impossibility of a ﬁxed system of linguistic signs that would contain identities that are always already relational and contingent. A queer perspective on classi- ﬁcation structures sees categories as discursively produced and historically contingent rather than as essential or articulable once and for all. A queer approach to language resists the idea that naming is ever outside of power or resistance.

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A queer analysis intervenes in this shared discourse and offers a way to reconsider such systems as always already biased, remedied not by correctness once and for all but engaged as a site of productive resistance.

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It is not a problem of ﬁnally determining the correct word that will describe myself; any such decision simply inaugurates the play of resistance all over again. In this sense, library classiﬁcation and cataloging productively provide a ﬁeld of context against which I can describe myself both in terms of identity and resistance.

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Further, the discursive construction of categories means that categories produce each other: once a social category comes into being, it makes space in a ﬁeld for the articulation of other categories.

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Categories are not mutually exclusive, but mutually contingent, a way of thinking about boundaries that challenges the assumptions of exclusivity that lie at the foundation of library classiﬁcation and cataloging practice.

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These queer theoretical perspectives on classiﬁcation and cataloging challenge the idea that a stable, universal, objective knowledge organization system could even exist; there is no such thing if categories and names are always contingent and in motion. Movements to correct classiﬁcation and cataloging are therefore simply examples of instances of cate- gorical production, doing the same kind of work that LC classiﬁcation and cataloging deci- sions do, and just as subject to critique from different contingent positions.

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Such incorrectness reveals ruptures in the otherwise seamless objec- tivity that the classiﬁcation pretends to.

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The politics of correction advanced by Berman and others smoothes out the ruptures in the catalog that lay bare its contingencies, rendering the constructed quality of library classiﬁcation and cataloging less visible to the user and, therefore, more difﬁcult to appre- hend and understand.

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Such work has the unintended effect of implicitly afﬁrming the possibility that library classiﬁcation and cataloging could be done correctly, once and for all, and outside of discourse or ideology.

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Rather than placing a correction at that exposed limit, a queer analysis suggests inter- ventions that highlight that limit and invite the user to grapple with it.

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Such a project contains an inherent tension: correction can mask the inescapable contested ideological work performed by catalogers who must make these deci- sions every day.

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Approaching the problem of library classiﬁcation and cataloging from a queer perspective demands that we leave intact the traces of historicity and ideology that mar the classiﬁcation and cataloging project. Such traces can reveal the limit of the universal knowledge organi- zation project, inviting technical interventions that highlight the constructed nature of classiﬁcation structures and controlled vocabularies.

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Drabinski 2013 - Revision history