One of the main minority groups that I serve as a youth librarian are queer* teens. One of my regular programs (which is not a queer specific program) draws a crowd where at least half of the participants are part of the queer community. For this reason, I decided to watch a webinar entitled Inclusive and Affirming Library Programs for LGBTQIA+ Youth (cslpreads, 2022) and make some notes to improve my knowledge of creating safe spaces for queer teens. I have also been asked to attend a meeting with some other Council employees to provide any ideas for improving our workplace diversity practices so I thought it would be helpful to take the notes I make from the webinar to my upcoming meeting.
The webinar covered basics such as explaining many of the
sexual identities and gender identities but the main focus was on how to create
a safe and inclusive space for queer youth in the library (cslpreads, 2022). One of the things that has interested me as a
youth librarian when thinking about representations of diversity is whether we
should be labelling our queer Young Adult materials so that they are more
easily identifiable. The webinar’s presenter, Amanda Erickson, expressed the
opinion that while labelling is a nice idea for findability, it would be better
to create booklists so that queer books can be found by those who are interested
in them, since young people are often less likely to borrow a book that has a
queer identifier on it (cslpreads, 2022). Knapp (2022, p. 848) agrees, stating that having labels on items often
serves to ‘out’ or ‘other’ queer youth. This sentiment is echoed by Walters (2022, p. 5) who states that labelling queer items is an
outdated practice and serves to ‘other’ both the materials and the people making
use of them.
One of the main things that I took away from this webinar
was what to do if I accidentally misgender someone. Amanda explained that often
when we apologise, we do so from a selfish place where we hope that we will
feel better afterwards and that we will be forgiven for our mistake (cslpreads, 2022). Therefore, when we apologise for misgendering
someone, the best course of action is to thank the person for correcting us,
apologise briefly and then directly move on with the intention of doing better
in the future instead of focusing on the apology since it serves us more than
it serves the person that we have misgendered. We don’t have the right to
expect for them to forgive us or make us feel better when we have caused them
offence.
I’m proud to say that I was already familiar with most of
the content of the webinar, but I am aware that I need to keep my knowledge up
to date and continue to check in with best practices in future. There are a few
things I would like to put into practice in my workplace, such as creating
queer booklists, having some visible queer signifiers such as Pride Flags and campaigning
to update our public restrooms to gender neutral facilities as some young
transgender people refrain from eating or drinking throughout the day so as to
avoid using the bathrooms if they don’t feel safe using them (cslpreads, 2022). Given that I have several transgender teenagers
attending programs and using our space on a regular basis, it’s important that
I do my best to ensure they feel safe and welcome in my library.
* Please note that I use the term ‘queer’ throughout this
blog post and the accompanying webinar notes instead of LGBTQIA+ as my understanding
is that some people within the community dislike the LGBTQIA+ tag since it
labels some identifiers but not others, such as pansexual and non binary, instead
relying on the plus symbol to signify all those who have been left out.
References
cslpreads. (2022,
December 8). Inclusive and affirming
library programs for LGBGTQIA+ youth [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2B8t4imCgI&ab_channel=cslpreads
Knapp, C. (2022). Creating safe and inclusive spacing for LGBT2Q+ Youth in public and school libraries. Journal of Library Administration, 62(6), 847-855. https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2022.2102385
Walters, J. (2022). Out of many, one: Practicing defensive librarianship. Children & Libraries, 20(4), 5.
Thank you for the blog post Megan. Only last week at work, I received a call from someone who among other things provided critical feedback of the organisation’s use of the word ‘accessibility’ rather than ‘disability’ across its website. The person who used a wheelchair and had Spina Bifida, told me that they didn’t know what it meant until I’d told them, and had found it confusing and annoyingly ‘woke’ but most importantly they believed that it didn’t serve disabled people, or help them make plans to visit. I was grateful for the opportunity to chat with them about their thoughts and the evolution of language and in the end, they suggested that we add the disabled symbol to the relevant text to clarify its meaning (which makes great sense). I spoke with them about how I have purposely engaged with critical disability theory and with ‘disabled’ voices like Andy Jackson’s to learn that disability is a ‘cultural, historical, relative, social and political phenomenon’ (Hall, 2019) largely defined through social norms, of which language is a part.
ReplyDeleteI think that this anecdote is relevant to the challenges of serving any minority group including LGBTQIA+. There is heterogeneity among groups and how they identify, and this changes contextually so that obviously, the terminologies and practices of today (like book labelling) used for LGBTQIA+ would have zilch meaning for e.g. homosexuals of ancient times. That is, I am unconfident that there is an objective best way to navigate practices of identity because identity itself is subjective and relational, not only evident through comparisons across thousands of years, but from town to town, person to person and week to week.
Your points about ‘otherness’ are very interesting. Sociologist Andrew C. Okolie (2003) discusses how social identities are defined in relation to others, because identity has little meaning without the “other”. Okolie expounds that identity is rarely claimed for its own sake, but that it has purposes and consequences which are tied to rewards and punishment (2003). I am now thinking about all these possible consequences and/or rewards for defining identity in a public library setting…
Hall, C. M. (2019). Critical disability theory. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2019.)
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2019/entries/disability-critical/
Jackson, A. (n.d.) Poetry from a body shaped like a question mark. https://amongtheregulars.com/
Okolie, A. C. (2003). Identity: now you don’t see it; now you do. Identity an International Journal of Theory and Research, 3(1), 1-7.
https://doi.org/10.1207/S1532706XID0301_01