Presenters: Avi Bauer, Caleb Simone, and Jordan Dias Correia
Trans and Gender Diverse Voices in Libraries (2023) is a compilation of experiences that speak to the lived realities of trans and gender diverse librarians and archivists. Each of us contributed chapters about our own professional and educational experiences: Avi Bauer focused on visibility within the workplace; Caleb Simone wrote about legitimacy and jargonization in the field; and Jordan Dias Correia discussed how inclusivity is often framed reactively rather than proactively. Together, we hope to share our experiences as a call to action for all LIS professionals to move from trans-inclusive theory to trans-inclusive practice.
Presenter: Valen Werner
Many people understand that all-gender restrooms are important to TGNC+ inclusion, but they are intimidated by the seemingly complex process of creating more of them. I will help to demystify the all-gender restroom and present practical strategies for de-gendering existing restrooms. Centrally, I argue that we can and must raise our standards for TGNC+ inclusion by reframing a lack of sufficient all-gender restrooms as gender-based discrimination. This talk will equip attendees to bring more all-gender restrooms to their own libraries and empower them to advocate more strongly for TGNC+ community members’ right to access public facilities.
Presenter: Heath Umbreit
Information about transgender identities has exploded into the mainstream media over the past few years, and as a result, trans people have become the subject of an intense national debate. As information has proliferated, however, so too has misinformation. Attendees will learn about how and why anti-trans misinformation is created and spread, how to distinguish between reliable and unreliable information, and why LIS workers have a uniquely important part to play in countering anti-trans misinformation. This presentation includes a Q&A.
Presenters: Natalia Kapacinskas and Veronica Arellano Douglas
We will explore the intersections between emotion and information access with a focus on topics related to the marginalized body, including reproductive health, illness and disability. For each of these topics and their associated life experiences, there are socially accepted and expected emotions. These expectations exemplify Gibson & Martin’s theory of “information marginalization,” wherein significant barriers exist for those seeking to create or access information that expresses or elicits emotions at odds with socially expected or acceptable narratives. We encourage information professionals to consider these barriers to accessing a complete picture of the emotional and physical realities of such experiences.
Presenters: Imani Spence, Sophie Reverdy, and Alicia Puglionesi
How can the public engage with local histories of gender and sexuality, and how can primary sources connect with present-day queer and feminist communities/activism? Our conversation springs from an open-source public history project, the Abortion in Maryland Wiki-thon, tracing how abortion history can be an opening into broader questions around feminist and queer memory. While our project began with a commitment to normalizing abortion as a historical practice and bringing academic publications out from behind paywalls, we realized it was necessary to reimagine the information lifecycle through collaboration between the public, scholars and activists.
Presenter: tal ness
This paper examines the unequal treatment of trans and nonbinary individuals in libraries. Amidst targeted legislation and misinformation, the study urges a self-reflective assessment of current Illinois library practices. Through a quantitative, cross-sectional, and descriptive research approach, employing a critical queer theory lens, the paper investigates bias and inclusion efforts. Using point-biserial correlation coefficient, it determines the relationship between gender identity, bias, and inclusive practices. Results suggest reinforced structural cisgenderism, and a correlation between cisgender-identifying participants and bias and use of inclusive practices. This research enriches predominantly qualitative literature on trans experiences, offering practical insights with implications beyond Illinois libraries.
Presenter: B. M. Watson
Why are there so many queer terms? Will the work of the Homosaurus ever be finished? To find out, I go into the past and present the results of a documentary investigation into the Kinseys (the man and the Institute). First, I report on the annotations and marginalia of Alfred Kinsey's private library and what they reveal about his inherited methods, concepts, and classifications around sexuality and gender. Second, I turn to the Institute (and its card catalog / custom Dewey) to discuss how it's organization and understanding of specific sexualities, fetishes, and bodies was built upon Kinsey and how, in turn their data was interpreted and developed upon by the broader public.
Presenter: Julia Bullard
As an instructor in a library and information studies program, I have seen my queer and trans students display a particular affinity for categorization and metadata work. This could be because their lived experience with the harm of flawed and small-minded categorization coexists with the experience labels as personally affirming and as powerful tools for labour and political organizing. What if queer and trans students come to library and information studies attuned to a deeper level of understanding when it comes to cataloguing, metadata, and technical services? What does this mean for instructors and research supervisors in knowledge organization?
Presenter: Lynne Stahl
Important scholarship has shown the damaging potential of subject headings related to sexual identity. While some favor corrective approaches that update language with current, ostensibly community-preferred terms, I caution against such approaches—and against a mindset that seeks affirmation in the catalog, rather than an understanding of any taxonomic project as intrinsically complicit in sexology and race science’s problematic classificatory logics. This paper brings together critical librarianship and queer theory to elucidate and challenge the paradigm of exposure—ultimately a form of “outing” texts—around Library of Congress Subject Headings and to illustrate the fundamental irreconcilability of queerness with the principle of aboutness.
Co-moderators: Robert Canada and Gina Schlesselman-Tarango; Panelists: Emerson Morris, Robin Shamp, Tanesa King, Tierney Gleason, Emily Vardell, Brenda Linares, and Jennifer Marino
Contributors to the forthcoming collection, Information, Power, and Reproductive Health (Library Juice Press, expected 2025), will be in conversation with one another about their work, highlighting how gender and sexuality intersect with information and reproductive health.
Presenters: Aeron MacHattie, Katharine Hall, Kawmadie Karunanayake, and Susie Breier
This project seeks to determine whether training about gender diversity is offered to workers in Canadian academic libraries. Previous literature has identified staff training as an initiative that can help to reduce the barriers faced by trans library users, but there is limited research about how common or effective this training might be. This project consists of a survey of Canadian academic libraries that will determine how many of these libraries offered staff training about gender diversity, identity, and expression, how these trainings were initiated, what form they took, and whether participants felt the need for further training.
Presenter: Stephen G. Krueger
One way that some libraries attempt to improve their services to trans and gender diverse patrons is by encouraging employees to attend a Trans 101 workshop or equivalent. But this alone isn’t enough; it needs follow-up and long-term commitment to actually make a library inclusive for people of all genders. In this session, the presenter (who has led many trans inclusion workshops and presentations for libraries) will address the limitations of current attempts at trans and gender diverse inclusion in libraries, and offer strategies for building on these to more meaningfully integrate gender inclusion into library work.
Presenters: Marcus Ortiz and Soren Ruppelius
This presentation covers a brief overview of drag in the United States military, drag story time origins, and the authors’ experience facilitating drag story time events at the Ramstein Air Base Library. The authors will unpack the challenges that professionals face when attempting to implement programming that engages queer and trans identities within military environments, particularly military libraries – where library ethics conflict with military standards and regulations. Lessons learned, future directions for these programs, and seeking support within these environments will be discussed, to promote future programming success.
Presenter: Elliot Galvis
Attempts to ban books through complaints of “Sexually Explicit” content, “Body Description or Function”, or just “Homosexuality” have escalated dramatically. In response, many researchers and library organizations tag queer texts to illustrate in quantifiable terms the connections between anti-trans panic and backlash to queer visibility with these book bans. But what makes a text queer? And how do both book banners and defenders constitute new definitions of queerness through their respective projects? Using computational text analysis, this paper explores these constructions of queerness in the hopes of critically assessing the roles of classification in protecting queer people and cultures today.
Presenter: Clark Geiling
This article reflects on the practical considerations for co-creating an oral history project that is by and for the community that it represents. Based on my own experiences designing and undertaking an oral history project centered around transfag community history, I use this space to explore the challenges and opportunities inherent to my chosen methodology, which applies the standards established by Brown and Beam’s work towards an ethos of trans care in archives and public history. I will discuss how access to material and personnel resources impact the practice of trans care in transgender oral history work, as well as the limits presented by scaffolding a project around specific identity terms. Additionally, I will reflect on my experiences recruiting and interviewing storytellers to speak about communities that they may no longer consider themselves a part of, or terminology that they no longer use.
Presenter: Catherina Riesgo
Explore the importance of the creation of the personal archives of queer youth music fans. Here, within collections of mementos such as burnt CDs, lyric-filled diaries, merch, and more, queer timelines are created and thrive. Delve into the liberating process of the curation of these personal archives, and the ways in which their existence outside of the limits of institutional confines preserves queer stories, empowers identity, and fosters a sense of queer community and belonging.
Presenter: Lara Fountaine
In a society where traditionally male-dominated spaces can often be unwelcoming, Femme Space is designed to create a safe and inclusive environment for individuals with femme identities to explore, engage, and find community in gaming, making, and digital media spaces. In this presentation, we will discuss how we developed the Femme Space series, which consists of Femme Game Night, Femme Making Night in the Makerspace, and Femme Beat-Making Night. Femme Game Night provides a welcoming space for femme-identified individuals and allies, to connect, have fun, and showcase their gaming skills.We will explore the strategies employed to build strong and supportive communities, emphasizing the significance of connections that extend beyond the event series and contribute to lasting empowerment. We will also discuss how we secured buy-in from our administration, what challenges we experienced along the way, and strategies for implementing similar events at your institution.
Presenter: Teresa Slobuski
Libraries can be many things, but one thing they are is a place. How does a library make that place into a space for LGBTQIA+ folks? What does queer liberation look like when people don’t feel safe enough to come out? Explore the role an LGBTQIA+ collection can have on these questions. Struggle against the cisheteropatriarchy present and embedded throughout library systems, training, and spaces. Embrace the Queer that already exists in the library. Part case study and part journey through theory, join this session to consider how the place of the library can be a site of Queer joy.
Presenter: Mateo Caballero
In university library settings, the collection of patron information through qualitative methods can help develop public services. The desire to glean data from interactions with patrons in physical and virtual space may be intuitive to information specialists, but their methods can prove unsound in practice. The fraught experiences of trans students navigating higher education demonstrate the faults of this metric evaluation and the burdens of self-reporting. Applying a critical trans lens to the topic of collecting library user data will reveal various forms of surveillance pervading university cultures, and permit for reevaluation of library analytics.
Presenters: Claudia Berger, Meina Naeymirad, Erica Weidner, and Gabriella Evergreen
I Called to Her and She Answered Me is a project created for Pratt’s School of Information’s Fall 2023 Advanced Projects in Digital Humanities course, examining the role of women in spirituality and technology in order to reframe and reclaim how we perceive the history of related cultural and technological movements, and how they have shaped the present. It consists of an oracle deck, the Oracle of Tech-Spiritual Feminisms, that is designed to promote conversations at the intersection of technology, spirituality, and gender. At GSISC we will be running a workshop doing concurrent readings of the deck for smaller groups.
Presenter: Matt Rohweder
This session is concerned with exploring how information literacy (IL), and those teaching IL, can challenge white supremacy, heteronormativity, patriarchy, and ableism within the classroom. Specifically looking at the privilege of peer review and which voices are being highlighted and, conversely, which voices are being left out of scholarly conversations. Drawing on research concerning safe spaces and allyship, this session will discuss how the IL classroom can engage in inclusive, equitable, and just methods and practices that actively resist structural oppression through the lens of scholarly conversations.
Presenter: Joseph Kevin Sebastian
This paper introduces and explores Queer Information Literacy (QIL) as a critical, embodied, and transformative framework within academic and digital learning contexts. Bridging theoretical explorations with practical applications, the project delves into the intersections of queerness, embodiment, and information literacy, challenging and subverting normative structures embedded within traditional literacy models and digital learning environments. Personal narratives from the researcher’s experiences as an academic librarian and digital learning specialist enrich the discussion, offering tangible insights and strategies for enacting QIL. The paper ultimately advocates for a QIL that is collaborative, adaptive, and reflective, honoring the fluidity and multiplicity of queer experiences and identities.
Presenter: Xavi Danto
This program examines the possibilities of Linked Data for Sex Archives. Although sex archives have existing access concerns to maintain the safety of their subjects, amid the changing landscape of archival work and knowledge sharing, this presentation will explore whether linked data can lead to communal organizing between information professionals and better representations of search queries. By analyzing online databases from the University of Toronto’s Sexual Representation Collection, The Leather Archives & Museum, and The Kinsey Institute, I aim to propose an ethical framework for linked data both for shared use.
Presenter: Sarah Appedu
This presentation argues that librarians should be wary of the ways in which new technologies like AI may be presented as an “existential threat” from which they must “save” their communities. Trans and Black scholars have long recognized the ways in which certain bodies have been deemed “monstrous” and threatening to the moral order of civilized society. While librarians certainly should be concerned about the harmful impacts of AI, they should resist casting off AI as yet another monster coming to threaten the social order and direct their attention towards the colonizing, capitalist origins of AI being brought to light.
Presenter: Tess Amram
Gender is no longer explicitly recorded in name authority records, but several problems relating to gender remain present for the name authority cataloger. Despite the common maxim that name authority catalogers need not go beyond the item in hand, this presentation argues that cases of nonbinary or trans identities on the part of the person being cataloged warrant extra time and research. To do this, we will take a look at the name authority record for the Public Universal Friend, a preacher from revolutionary-era America who explicitly abandoned the gender binary, and why knowledge of this fact alone is not enough to base conclusions of gender identity and pronoun use on.
Presenter: Emil Lawrence
The library field defines threats to our freedom to read as instances of intentional, external interference in one’s choice of materials. I argue, however, that genuine constraints on the freedom to read may be constituted by institutional arrangements that systematically limit, corrode, or distort our shared interpretive resources for making sense of the world. This is illustrated through an analysis of controversies surrounding the use of meeting rooms by trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) groups. In these cases, librarianship’s ordinary liberal practices and institutionalized anti-censorship commitments help legitimize exploitation of the ‘commons’ in service of anti-trans public confrontations. Significantly, this can occur regardless of the (sometimes good) intentions of individual actors.