Libraries provide access to information and to activities around information (searching, evaluating, using, etc.). This is one of our central values. It is disturbing to see a large segment of the country invested in a "post-truth" culture that effectively undermines the value of information. Disagreements are no longer based on interpretations of the objective data. Each side in a wide range of arguments distrusts the other side's sources as well as their methods of evaluating data.
The degree of consensus within the scientific community on things like climate change (>97% of scientists who study climate) means nothing if the expertise of the scientific community itself is not valued. Scientific support for ideas such as separate genetic origins for gender and biological sex or the value of diversity don't stand up to knee-jerk "common sense" (otherwise known as "what we believe because we've always believed it"). I'm showing my own biases here, but my central point is still intact: Information means very little when anything we don't like is immediately dismissed as "Fake News." Federal funding is on the chopping block. Facts are subject to individual prejudice. Critical thought is undervalued. Inclusiveness is a leftist plot. "Black Lives Matter" is radical propaganda. What is to become of public libraries--champions of information literacy, diversity, and community--in this environment? At the end of a chain of admittedly paranoid logic, as government entities, we would either be used for State propaganda or dissolved. I have no answers. I'm willing to keep pushing the boulder up the hill, to do the right thing as best I can on a daily basis, but these days are getting darker fast.
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When I was a teenager and a twenty-something, I learned about androgyny from David Bowie. When I studied literature, I learned about androgyny from Margaret Fuller, Carl Jung, Adrienne Rich, and beyond. Gender fluidity was the special mark of Decadents of all shapes, sizes, cultures, and eras. Morality turned on its head by late 19th-century literary rebels, artists, drag queens, punks, activists. Despite being a male in a female-dominated profession, despite what I have heard about the “queer-friendly” nature of libraries, I never expected to see androgyny in Library School. Imagine my pleasant surprise when I was assigned to read Ayman and Korabik’s “Leadership: Why Gender and Culture Matter” (2010) and discovered the concept of androgyny in leadership. Before I go on, I’m going to lay out several assumptions so that I don’t get mired down in attempting to prove basic points.
Male and female leaders both have access to instrumental and expressive traits. Some research has found, in fact, that women in leadership positions already have a grasp of the instrumental approach. Men lag behind in the process of broadening their leadership skill sets. As Gartzia and van Engen state, “men generally show lower scores in expressiveness than women whereas women do not show lower scores on instrumentality than men” (2012, p. 297). At the same time, as definitions of leadership and workplace methods and expectations have evolved, expressive traits have become just as essential to organizational effectiveness as instrumental traits (Gartzia & van Engen, 2012, p. 292-293). There are two points that I extract from this. One is that any residual resistance to women in leadership positions is an artifact of obsolete modes of thinking and of fear. According to Ayman and Korabik’s research, “women leaders are viewed as being less effective when they are in male-dominated settings or leadership roles that are defined as more masculine” (2010, p. 159). However, objective measures show women to be more prepared for leadership than men. Men’s perception otherwise is irrational and counterproductive. Society’s conscious acknowledgement of the fact of gender equality and the equal valuation of stereotypical gendered traits as skill sets independent of biological sex go hand in hand. Opportunities for women to thrive in power positions is one obvious benefit. Ayman and Korabik make an interesting point about this: Overall, a trend has been observed in which androgynous individuals have the same chance as masculine individuals to be identified as leaders … These findings are encouraging for women’s leadership prospects. Androgyny may offer women a way out of the double bind they are put in when they are expected to have the instrumental qualities that are associated with leadership ability but also the expressive qualities associated with their prescribed gender role. In this formulation, gender bias still operates: the use of the expressive skill set allows women not to rub their male subordinates the wrong way, so that their instrumental skills are more palatable. That message hits a sore spot for me, though. The point of androgyny in leadership is that modern organizational success requires both “masculine” and “feminine” traits. When traits ascribed to both genders are acknowledged to be equal in value, I would hope that that represents a giant step toward an acknowledgement that all people are equal in value regardless of gender. In this scenario, women would be given their due because they employ all of the relevant skill sets, not because their behavior somehow matches their reproductive organs. The second point is that men have as much to gain from this evolution as women. As Gartzia and van Engen point out, “a particular aspect to take into account when promoting communal leadership dimensions in the practice is the need to reduce gender stereotypes and the resistance of men in the development of expressive traits” (2012, p. 306). Reduction of stereotypical thinking translates into a greater acceptance of more relationship-based modes of being. This has positive implications for men as leaders, as employees, and simply as human beings. The less credence given to traditional ways of classifying men and women, the better off we will all be. Androgyny represents a way of tapping into human potential by utilizing the full range of tools available to human beings, regardless of cultural prescriptions. As much as it offers women a chance to “legitimize” their attainment of authority, it offers everyone, of all sexes and genders, something much more essential. References Ayman, R. & Korabik, K. (2010). Leadership: Why gender and culture matter. American psychologist, 65(3), p. 157-170. Gartzia, L. & van Engen, M. (2012). Are (male) leaders “feminine” enough? Gendered traits of identity as mediators of sex differences in leadership styles. Gender in management, 27(5), p. 292-310. DOI: 10.1108/17542411211252624 A rededication to openness and inclusiveness is necessary. It means being willing to serve the information needs of the public regardless of who they supported in the last election and being willing to push the boundaries of the collection and programming to show the largely conservative population here some perspectives outside of their own. This is not, I think, a prescriptive position. A library is, in one sense, a gathering of resources that tell the whole story, from multiple angles. Some parts of the story, some perspectives, the community is not going to agree with. But the availability and the introduction to those varying viewpoints can widen someone's personal perspective or comfort someone who finds him/herself in the minority. Personally, navigating this stuff requires that I stay grounded in the present. Going off into speculation about what the future holds, fighting battles not yet ripe to engage, is not only a waste of time but a distraction that costs me my peace of mind and my effectiveness in the present. It is difficult at times to remember this, but it is necessary.
I have much to learn, and I won't learn it if I'm not open to whatever the moment holds for me. I know the bit about getting rid of the Library of Congress was a joke. However, we have to ask, from a conservative point of view, what functions does the public library perform? What is its value in Trump's nation?
Public libraries preserve the best of American culture, but the best according to whom? How many voices will be counted in making these decisions? Libraries provide equitable access to information, but that costs money. And why should the “winners” in Trump’s America pay for the “losers” to have access to the Internet or other sources of information? Public libraries connect everyone to information, but will information flow in the same way? I won’t call anyone a fascist … not right here, right now, in this context. Still clinging to some vestige of professional neutrality, I guess. But let’s say fascism were to creep in. Let’s say a figure at the center of a cult of personality gained some degree of unchecked power. Let’s say that that happened. What’s the history of libraries under fascism? Books burned, intellectual freedom suppressed. The majority would be privileged and everyone else is abused, on a scale that would render the problems we see today insignificant. What libraries remain would be tools of the State. I was advised today to make myself unique, differentiate myself if I want to eventually work full-time in the library field. Asante Cain, Reference and Adult Services Coordinator at Grand Rapids Public Library, was very generous with his time this afternoon. (I'm not looking for a new job, I assure you--I'm just trying to understand the operations of a large urban library system for a school assignment.) In the course of talking about the hiring process at GRPL, Asante advised me to be personable and inquisitive and interested in everything my bosses are doing just as a matter of course, as opposed to turning on the "charm" when opportunities for advancement manifest. Good advice. A list of things I want to try to do:
A list of things coming up:
Tuesday Nov. 8 And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born? (W.B. Yeats) Armageddon is no excuse for falling behind.
Next week, I will be attending the 2016 Michigan Library Association Conference. My first professional conference. I'm realizing more and more that it's at least as much a responsibility as a privilege, and that I'm not the only one going who lacks a Master's Degree in Library & Information Science. Still, part of me feels guilty for being chosen to go instead of those more qualified. Like I don't deserve it.
I do realize, also, that I have to go, because I wrote the proposal for and am the facilitator for the program that is up for Library SOUP funding. I am responsible for representing the program and the Van Buren District Library at the competition. But there's a little bit of that old imposter syndrome that I've felt in other professional situations, the child in the position of a grownup through some random mistake of fate. I can do this, though. Just have to put on my big boy briefs and get to it. Working on a paper for my Information Professions class. It seems impossible to define a culture of information professions outside of a general concern with and commitment to access. We all want to preserve and organize the information for ready access. Other distinctions depend upon whether we're talking about the cultural record keepers or the information scientists, the public or the corporate environment, the liberal or the conservative wing. But that makes sense. We deal with information from myriad sources about myriad topics in a multicultural setting.
I myself cross picket lines. I love the radical left of librarianship--acknowledging value in the out-of-power cultures, promoting diversity, empowering people. As much as I get the accusation of elitism toward traditional prescriptive library practices, however, I love canonical literature and I find value in tradition. I believe that keeping up with technology is extremely important, but I think there is a place for old-school, low-tech things like book binding. Paper, after all, far outlasts any digital format devised to date. Why can't we do it all? I'm not saying that I'm going to do it all. Just that somebody within the Information Professions can do some of everything without threatening the integrity of the whole. It is a glorious, sprawling beast, as befits the guardian of the dynamic, pulsating mass of information we have. OK, back to work. If you didn't catch it, the short version is this: the Voice of Youth Advocates magazine published a review of a book called Run and recommended it for mature audiences due to “many references to Bo being bisexual and an abundance of bad language.” Certain parties were offended (rightly so, I believe) that (A) references to the fact of bisexuality were equated morally with "an abundance of bad language" and (B) references to the fact of bisexuality were themselves grounds for audience restriction. Just to be clear, a recommendation for a "mature" audience is not direct censorship, but it can have a chilling effect on the reception of a book by parents and educators. VOYA tried to claim that sexuality was the issue, not bisexuality. However, Phoebe North (according to Hannah Moskowitz) unearthed VOYA's history of recommending books with queer characters for mature audiences, but not restricting their recommendations for books that depicted heterosexual sex. This is a good account of the whole thing, if you want more detail: Oy, VOYA on SorryWatch.
This brings up three specific issues for me: the definition of bias, the definition of sexuality, and the interaction of identity politics and the workplace. I would define bias as the tendency to treat something as morally different from similar things. Morality, as I see it, often is apparent in terms of what “should” be done with a thing: Should it be allowed? Should kids have access to it? If I say a thing would upset the psychological development of a child, I am making a moral judgment about that thing. From what I understand, the folks at Voice of Youth Advocates repeatedly made a moral judgment about non-heterosexuality that they did not make about heterosexuality. On multiple occasions, VOYA recommended for mature audiences only YA books that showed homosexual relationships or made explicit that certain characters were gay or bisexual, even if no sexual act was depicted. At the same time, VOYA reviewed other books containing heterosexual sex scenes without restricting their recommendation. Clearly, if all of this is correct, it is not sexuality that VOYA believes is not for children, but certain kinds of sexuality. VOYA has a bias against homosexuality and bisexuality, based on their past and present publications. *** Some would agree with VOYA’s implicit moral statement. Many people from the LGBTQ community, understandably, do not agree. Many YA authors disagree. Many librarians, following professional values that celebrate diversity and inclusiveness, also disagree. I, personally, disagree. It is reasonable to expect a magazine with such a large audience of librarians to adhere to the values of librarians. When they clearly did not, many of us felt injured and insulted. As they persisted in refusing to admit the bias and make amends, the injury and the insult grew. The depth and sting of the cut I think is related to my second issue: homosexuality and bisexuality and other queer sexualities are not just about sex. They are about identity, emotions, romantic attraction, intimacy, and other things that are perfectly safe for children to read about, as well as about sex. Sex itself is not bad for children, but there are developmental considerations, and there are some depictions of sexual feelings and acts that are widely understood to be not good for kids up to a certain age. But sex is also a loaded term that carries connotations of explicit pornographic material. Many people who disagree with VOYA that bisexuality is harmful to children would agree with the statement that sex is harmful to children. The fact that the word bisexuality contains the word sex allows VOYA to excuse themselves by stating that sexuality is the problem, not bisexuality. It's bullshit, but it's a reasonable dodge, given the common (mis)understanding of sexuality. But the issue still stands: how do we talk about the non-sexual aspects of sex and sexuality? Do we need a new vocabulary to avoid pitfalls like these? *** Part of Tristina Wright’s response to this whole mess was this article, which brings up for me the issue of identity in the workplace. Identity politics is a tricky thing. Those of us whose identities cross into some realms that are not fully understood or accepted in society have a dilemma. Improvements in the situation can only come when more of us “come out” so that society can see different versions of “normal” and the young ones discovering their own identities can feel safe and validated. In the meantime, the more we "come out," the greater the danger we're in, especially if we work with kids. If I say, as Wright does, that I'm a bisexual with diagnosed mental illnesses, I have to take into account other people's (mis)understandings of sexuality, bisexuality, and mental illnesses. Should I be open about who I am and possibly suffer changes in my employment (which, depending on parental reaction and pressure, may be an issue)? Or should I proudly stand up and proclaim who I am, so that the next kid growing up with mood swings or multidirectional attractions doesn't have to feel quite so ashamed. This is nothing to take lightly. Wright cites some startling statistics: compared to gays and lesbians, bisexuals are more likely to experience mental illness and four times more likely to commit suicide. Something has to change. So, by the way ... |
AuthorJeffrey Babbitt, MLIS, is a graduate of the School of Library and Information Science at Wayne State University who is pursuing a career as a librarian in Michigan. Subject Headings
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June 2021
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