... it cannot be denied that literary criticism in YA lit lags behind grownup lit crit, and that what YA lit crit there is tends to focus on what to do with the literature, or what the literature is doing to the kids. Pure criticism has the added benefit of legitimizing an artwork for itself, instead of as a means to an end, a tool. Think of it this way: Which question is more appreciated by a teenager, What do you want to be when you grow up? or What are you really into right now? I want to go over this idea again. There is a difference between asking a kid Who are you right now? and asking them What do you want to be when you grow up? The former says I value you as you are. The latter reaffirms the truth they have received throughout their lives that developing humans* are worthwhile primarily for what kind of productive cog they will be in the great machine called "society," which is comprised of full-grown adults. If we rear them right, they will help the system run smoothly. If they don't get "what they need," or if they get "the wrong stuff," they will mess the system up. According to this plan, they are supposed to come out of the educational assembly line believing I am worth something if I accomplish X (i.e., if I am a "really useful engine").
If we value them as they are, godz forbid, they might instead come to believe I am worth something regardless of what I do, or even The concept of "worth" does not belong in reference to human beings, for we are not assessable in material terms. This would be the death of the system.
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This is a comment I threw together for a discussion board in my Public Libraries class. Don't know how true I think it is, but it's worth sharing. If I'm way off, feel free to tell me. Topic for Module 1: Factors supporting public libraries Libraries generally suffer from a PR problem that places them in a more precarious position than when the movement was young and growing. Libraries are often pegged as nothing more than quiet study spaces, book repositories, antiquated resources for information much inferior to the Internet, and sources for free DVD “rental.” This isn’t the case in every community, but I believe it’s fairly common outside of the library profession and the relative handful of regular users. Many of the external factors that would otherwise support libraries fail to penetrate these misconceptions, and every library that has successfully changed its reputation has had to work very hard against these misconceptions.
The economic situation for libraries was far different in the 19th century than it is today. The country was still more rural than urban, taxation on all levels was very low compared to today, and the public library was relatively new and exciting. “Captains of industry” gave to libraries, whereas modern tech billionaires and others with money today give more to schools and politics. In rural Van Buren County, there are many towns and villages that are struggling economically, and there is no Andrew Carnegie looking out for them. Having an awesome public library is not, I think, a point of pride anymore for most communities. We tend to be seen as old-fashioned, and most communities don’t want to be seen that way. There are plenty of opportunities to change this, but it will take a lot of work and patience. On the other hand, scholarship, conservation, and local pride combine to lend support to one library service: local history/ genealogy, which has a small but loyal base of users. The focus of public resources in support of universal public education tends to be the schools these days, to the exclusion of public libraries, although that doesn't help school libraries. There is often a disconnect between the school library and public library, which presents another problem and/or an opportunity. I have seen quite a few parents who opt for homeschooling making extensive use of our public library. Self-education is alive and well in free computer classes for seniors and some other programming, but many of the cultural programs designed for younger and middle-aged crowds tend not to do well in my area. Vocational influence offers another opportunity for improvement. There is a lack of programming aimed at helping blue-collar working people. Even factory employment these days often requires basic computer skills. Increasingly, working people have to go online to apply for jobs, follow up on applications, check schedules, and retrieve paystubs. Although the younger ones among them have been exposed to computers in grade school, older working people are often at sea, technologically. There is a need for support of both employed and unemployed working-class people that often goes unfulfilled. Vocational focus could work in favor of public libraries with an increase of attention and marketing. The relationship between these factors and the success of libraries is also complicated by the change in basic assumptions over the decades. Libraries generally no longer emphasize Americanizing immigrants as much as providing collections that strengthen connection to their culture while helping them navigate the American bureaucratic structures. We also no longer prescribe “good” literature for moral uplift, but often instead focus on providing popular material and diverse literature for underrepresented groups. This impacts the effect of the self-education factor as well as the religious factor. (Here's where I get into some sweeping and frankly unfair generalities for the sake of time and space and the aesthetics of rhetoric. There may be more exceptions than adherents to the "rules" that I seem to indicate here. There is a vast and growing Christian Left that stands for diversity and inclusion. If the following offends, I apologize. I couldn't resist a few choice words at the end.) Middle-class White Anglo-Saxon Protestants were once inspired by their religion to use public libraries to tame the heathen and savage foreigner. Today, they are too frequently inspired by their religion and morality to oppose collections and programming that support disaffected young people, LGBTQ people, and other vulnerable populations. 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. 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. 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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