LIB 151: Queering Classification

As humans, we create categories to help us organize, understand, and navigate the world. You might see yourself as a member of a community or group, but your thoughts and experiences are unique. Have you ever found it difficult to describe your identity in words or neat little boxes? There’s power in naming and being named! Classification is one way we organize people, knowledge, and things by their similarities, but it has its flaws. At every point, someone is making a decision based on their own assumptions and the particular moment in history. Think about your local grocery store. You can find almond and oat milk in the dairy section, even though they don’t contain any dairy products at all! As our idea of what “milk” is has shifted over time, a grocery store manager or marketer assumes that someone looking for milk in any form will find it in that section.

00:48 - Classifications can be helpful, but they can also send coded messages. For example, foods from rich and varied cultures are grouped together in one aisle called “ethnic foods.” What does that say about who the rest of the grocery store is marketing to? Classification is also how libraries and the internet organize materials. It’s how we find books on the shelf, or get results that match what we type into a search box. But, how do librarians and programmers decide what goes where? What message does that send to a community? When an author publishes a new book, a cataloger in an organization like the Library of Congress assigns it a unique call number and descriptive subject headings.

01:26 - This code tells you where you can find it on the shelf next to books on similar topics. Subject headings help you search for and discover items online in a catalog, and each heading has broader, narrower, and related terms. At CSUDH, we use the Library of Congress Classification and Library of Congress Subject Headings to organize materials like most other academic libraries. You might be familiar with the Dewey Decimal Classification system used by public libraries to organize their collections. Both systems organize materials differently, and while these are the primary schemas for library organization, there are tons more out there.

02:02 - Just like how the dairy section has changed over time, libraries have also changed how they organize materials about people and culture. Understanding this history helps us advocate for continual and more inclusive changes to how information is categorized. In the 1970s librarians like Sandy Berman and Joan Marshall petitioned the Library of Congress to change their subject headings, arguing that they failed to accurately and respectfully organize materials about social groups and identities that lack social and political power, particularly queer communities. Library users and librarians were particularly frustrated that these classification systems are portrayed as objective and neutral, when they actually reinforce the ideas and beliefs of those in power. For example, all books on homosexuality were categorized in the psychology section for “sexual deviance” until 1972.

02:50 - Queer scholars like Emily Drabinski have argued, “no matter which name is fixed—whether Homosexuality or Gay men or Lesbians—other identities will emerge at the boundaries of what can be contained by this language.” Many changes have been made over the years, but offensive and inaccurate classifications linger. New subject headings are also added all the time and attempt to correct the record and account for new subject areas. A heading for Transgender People was added in 2007! But, it’s a slow process and the new heading was added decades after the term was already used widely by the trans community and others. In Allison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home, she describes looking up the term “homosexuality” in her college’s library card catalog.

03:31 - The subject heading may not have aligned with how she would describe herself, but she found a “four-foot trove” of books that helped her understand herself and find her community. Most, but not all materials on queer people today can be found in the HQ section of a university library, or check out the books in the Queer Culture and Resource Center! From your grocery store to the library stacks, classification is not a natural reflection of the world but rather our interpretation of it. If you’re interested in this topic and want to help others see themselves more accurately reflected in classifications, you can advocate to the governing bodies of classification systems to make a change! Or, create your own alternative and liberatory classification schemes, like the folks at the Lavender Library, Archives, and Cultural Exchange of Sacramento. You can also create new knowledge and identities that defy our current systems and resist existing categories all together. .