The Queer Indexers by Natalie Mattox

 

The Queer Indexers

"Losers, freaks, and deviants started this movement, not these control freaks.” 

                                                                                    - Penny Arcade in the 2017 documentary
                                                                                        Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution [1]

    Queering Library and Information Science (LIS) methods comes with possibilities as expansive and beautiful as the expanse of gender and sexual identity. Reconsidering and reimagining LIS practices in classification, subject heading, cataloging, and means of access to records of memory and experience through a Queer Theory lens is essential for the affirmation and consideration of those who live, and those who struggle to live, within the dominant societal margins. The foundation of current hegemonic library and archival practice was constructed through strict binaries, controlled vocabularies, white supremacy, and proclaimed objectivity under the guise of neutrality. These values unsurprisingly parallel and reinforce the harmful gender and sexual binaries that permeate society today. In her article “Queer Theory”, Katherine Watson argues that “Being ‘queer’… is perhaps to be like someone in therapy; that is, to be a person in flux, contesting boundaries, eliding definition and exhibiting the constructedness of categorization.”[2]  How are LIS professionals and scholars to validate and affirm those of us who exist outside the binary, exist in flux, under these rigid structures?

    In “Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction”, Emily Drabinski writes of current, dominant classification and description methods: “The materials themselves are linguistically controlled, corralled in classification structures that fix items in place, and they are described using controlled vocabularies that reduce and universalize language, remarkably resistant to change. In terms of organization and access, libraries are sites constructed by the disciplinary power of language.”[3]  She then argues that “Viewing classification and cataloging from a queer perspective—one that challenges the idea that classification and subject language can ever be corrected once and for all, outside of the context in which those decisions take on meaning—requires new ways of thinking about how to be ethically and politically engaged on behalf of marginal knowledge formations and identities who quite reasonably expect to be able to locate themselves in the library.”[4]  If even one single person cannot find themselves in the library, LIS has a lot work to do.

    I am fascinated by The Circle of Lesbian Indexers that Cait McKinney investigates in her book Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies.[5]  From 1979 through 1986 this circle of a rotating group of four to seven women worked collectively towards creating an accessible and complete “subject-based” index of lesbian literature outside of any formalized institution. This group of pioneering women developed an early “predigital” method of organizing and cataloging that existed entirely outside of traditional practice, adapting their indexing process and “designed systems for their work built out of deep community knowledge and a lesbian-feminist understanding of classification as a material, social, and ethical process.”[6]  McKinney describes the group’s efforts as “not merely ‘documenting’ experience but necessarily “organizing it,” a process that required ongoing choices about what to include and exclude, what words to assign to subjects and their politics, and ultimately what mattered enough to constitute a high-level subject heading for the lesbian public this index imagined. These were deeply political choices caught up in broader lesbian-feminist critiques of language, self-representation, and movement making.”[7]  For example, at the time that The Circle was doing this work and most libraries utilized the standard subject headings of the Library of Congress to organize lesbian materials, “Lesbian” had a cross reference to “Sexual Perversion.”[8]  Their work had to start completely from scratch to design a system that appropriately and compassionately reflected their own experience. McKinney adds, “Materials were produced using low-cost, quick-and-dirty strategies such as self- publishing, small print runs, diy periodicals and pamphlets, and other kinds of gray literature inclined toward ephemerality.”[9]  There’s something very punk about their work.

    The Circle of Lesbian Indexers operated nearly four decades ago when, one could argue, their work could be considered revolutionary for its time. Today, however, this documenting and classifying endeavor should be pushed further to adopt a method as fluid as the fluidity of gender and sexuality. For as Drabinski states, “Queer theory… argued that this recuperative approach was dangerous. It froze identities in time and universalized them, erasing the real differences that accompany same-sex sexuality on the scales of time and place… Rather than taking these identities as stable and fixed, queer theory sees these identities as shifting and contextual.”[10]  In a patriarchal society that continuously oppresses nonbinary, transgender, and other fluid queer identities that fall outside the binary, and exponentially so for queer people of color, it is urgent and imperative that LIS practitioners work towards preserving and maintaining records, memories, and histories of the marginalized in ways that affirm and intentionally serve the most unaffirmed, violated, and silenced in the LGBTQIA+ community.

    Although many have come before us to propel library and archival practice towards queerer possibilities, the rigidity and control still cemented today is woefully outdated and harmfully oppressive. I ask myself what a collaborative, collective cataloging system would look like. What if every individual had the power to create their own vocabularies in cataloging, documentation, and description? What if we could start from scratch? I invite you to ask yourself these same questions. As current and future LIS practitioners we have much to learn from queer theorists, and a small circle of revolutionary lesbian women like The Circle of Lesbian Indexers, who have laid a groundwork for a self-determined, punk revolution of disruption and celebration of identity in LIS. 

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[1] Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution. DVD. United States: Altered Innocence, 2019. 

  

[2] Watson, Katherine. “Queer Theory.” Sage Journals. Sage Journals, 2005. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0533316405049369?ssource=mfc&rss=1. 

[3] Drabinski, Emily. “Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction.” The Library Quarterly 83, no. 2 (2013): 94–111. https://doi.org/10.1086/669547. 

[4] Drabinski, “Queering the Catalog”, 94.

  

[5] McKinney, Cait. Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020.

[6] McKinney, Information Activism, 106.

[7] McKinney, Information Activism, 111.

[8] McKinney, Information Activism, 129.

[9] McKinney, Information Activism, 112-113.

  

[10] Drabinski, “Queering the Catalog”, 96.