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Gender + Sexuality Resource Center Community Library

Goals of Our Library

The Gender + Sexuality Resource Center Library was created to reflect and fulfill the center's larger mission and values. This includes educating the community on topics relating to gender and sexuality, honoring the diversity of human experiences, and highlighting the intersectionality of gender and sexuality with race, class, disability, ethnicity, religion, and other personal identities. When we acquire books for our library, we intentionally center these intersectional experiences, focusing on books that show the complexity and diversity of human experience. 

While browsing our library, you may notice that all of our texts are English language. This choice is in no way meant to suggest that other languages publish fewer or no queer, Trans, or feminist texts. Where there are people, their are people thinking and writing about gender and sexuality, and many important works of queer and feminist literature have been published in a variety of languages. Our library focuses on English-language texts because English is the primary language used to communicate in this current time and place, and we want to make these books accessible to as many people as possible. However, in order to reflect the diverse ways people all over the globe think about gender and sexuality, we have purposefully collected bilingual books and books translated from other languages. This itself presents a challenge because prejudices in the publishing industry make it so that only about 3% of books published in English are translations from other languages; despite this, we have managed to procure books from almost 20 languages, ranging from Spanish, Korean, Chinese, Finish, Mirathi, Kalaallisut, and more. We encourage folks who know more than one language to also seek out additional queer texts in those languages in order to engage with other ways of discussing gender and sexuality besides those that publishers deem marketable to Western, English-centric audiences.

We also know that everyone learns and engages with their identities differently. To reflect this, we have purposefully collected books from a variety of genres. Our main genres include non-fiction, fiction, erotica, poetry, graphic novels, and children's books. These break down further into subcategories. Our large selection of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs invite readers to engage with the internal lives of queer, Trans, and femme individuals. We also have collections of essays, manifestos, historical analyses, ethnographies, photographic collections, and other non-fiction forms of knowledge exchange. Our fiction section's plays, novels, and short stories span a range of genres including cheesy romantic comedy, psychological thrillers, speculative fiction, historical fiction, mysteries, and more! No matter what you are interested in reading, we hope you will be able to find an engaging book that speaks to you.