The Desk Set

I worked in magazines for years before starting library school, I wanted to be a writer. I was a fact-checker at Out, Entertainment Weekly, TV Guide, and then Lucky. That was my last magazine. I worked on the launch, and never thought it would survive. Who would buy a magazine about shopping? Instead, it totally transformed consumer magazines. Before Lucky, buying information was always in the back matter, not printed in the photo spread. (I know, huge deal, right?) I used to count the number of bargains for the coverline, like “648 Awesome Bargains!” I’d count to 648, and then double and triple check it. I once published the phone number for Saks in a story about Barneys or something like that, and it was a huge problem. I hate shopping, and have a rigorous critique of consumer capitalism. What was I doing there? So i quit, got a job as a trainee at NYPL’s Jefferson Market branch, and went to library school.

I’m an Electronic Resources and Instruction Librarian at LIU Brooklyn (go Blackbirds!). I teach library instruction sessions, work the reference desk, do collection development, work on committees, etc. We’re trying like everyone else to adapt to the rapid changes wrought by digital technologies–the electronic resources part of my job involves adapting and using new technologies in the library classroom and at the desk.

I come from queer activist worlds (though I wouldn’t really identify as an activist). My thinking about gender and sexuality is deeply informed by that, so my vision of the series is probably narrower than it will turn out to be. My central preoccupation in this field is the fundamental paradox of classification: in order to make materials accessible, we have to fix them in categories, and at the same time, the edges of those categories cannot hold. If you’re queer like me (in the way I’m queer), I think you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. A lot of us experience that lack of fixity combined with the demand to stay still in a really embodied way. Like, the minute I tell you, “I’m a lesbian,” or “I’m a femme,” which I am bound to do so that you’ll know who I am, the edges of that identity start to fray and give way to other identities and I want to keep explaining. There’s something about gender and sexuality that exceeds classification, exceeds language, even. Nothing’s ever fixed, its all contingent, and yet it must be fixed if its going to make any sense at all. This paradox is endlessly puzzling to me, how it works, what it makes possible, what it blocks, and on and on.

So, when I say ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality,’ I mean gender, not women or men, and sexuality, not ‘homosexual’ or ‘heterosexual,’ but instead this entire odd discursively-produced demand that we all have genders and sexualities, be gendered, live gendered lives in a gendered world, and our books have to do that too, inside our libraries and our library classification structures. I could imagine an entire book series that just talked about this aspect of gender and sexuality in librarianship from theoretical and pragmatic perspectives. That said, this is a book series that is bigger than me, so I’m hoping to bring out work from a range of perspectives, even those I don’t agree with. Like, I don’t think of ‘women’ as a stable or real category, really, but I’d definitely make room on the series for a book that looked at the representation of women in the library workforce, and our relative absence from higher level positions. That’s not something I’m interested in doing myself, but I’d still welcome a book like that. I’m more interested in the prospect of making room for a multiplicity of voices than I am in making my one single voice sound really loud. The length of this email notwithstanding, I don’t really love listening to myself talk that much.

Right now, I have three books on the docket: Tracy Nectoux is editing a volume about the challenges and opportunities of being and coming out in the library workplace, and that’s coming out in the winter, we think. Lyz Bly and Kelly Wooten are editing a collection due fall 2011 about documenting feminist activism when contemporary activism is so ephemeral, digital, and de-centered. And Rebecca Dean and Patrick Kielty are working on a collection about gender and sexuality and information-seeking behavior that I think will take some interesting post-positivist positions. They’re both graduate students at UCLA, a program that’s putting out some really interesting work combining theory from the humanities with our odd little social science discipline. I’m excited to see what they put together.

I also want to work against the idea that theory happens in one place and practice happens in another place. We’re all doing both together most of the time, so hopefully the series will encompass both kinds of research and writing.

And I wouldn’t be doing any of this work without Rory Litwin, whose Library Juice Press is really making space for alternative voices and perspectives in our field.

Jenna Freedman and Melissa Morrone are really your local Radical Reference contacts, if you want to include somebody from that group. I’ve been an occasional member since the Republican convention in NYC, but go very much in and out. I’m actually more embedded in a journal called Radical Teacher, which takes up most of my off-the-clock group and meeting energy. But I definitely have radical politics, and definitely bring that to my work as a librarian. I don’t know how I could find meaning in my world without doing work that has at its root some motivation in working towards liberation, equality, justice. I believe that being able to ask questions, navigate systems and structures to find answers, and being able to engage critically and dialogically with all the voices we encounter can transform the self and transform the world. I wouldn’t spend my life in the library if I didn’t think that at least in some small way I make life and freedom a little more possible for some of the students that I meet in my classrooms and at the reference desk. That sounds extravagant–mostly I show students how to print multiple powerpoint slides to a page. But sometimes a structure is demystified or something that seemed impossible becomes quite easy, and those are the good days I hang onto.