Cruising the Library: Perversities in the Organization of Knowledge

by Melissa Adler

Overview

Cruising the Library offers a highly innovative analysis of the history of sexuality and categories of sexual perversion through a critical examination of the Library of Congress and its cataloging practices. Taking the publication of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemologies of the Closet as emblematic of the Library's inability to account for sexual difference, Melissa Adler embarks upon a detailed critique of how cataloging systems have delimited and proscribed expressions of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and race in a manner that mirrors psychiatric and sociological attempts to pathologize non-normative sexual practices and civil subjects.

Taking up a parallel analysis, Adler utilizes Roderick A. Ferguson's Aberrations in Black as another example of how the Library of Congress fails to account for, and thereby "buries," difference. She examines the physical space of the Library as one that encourages forms of governmentality as theorized by Michel Foucault while also allowing for its utopian possibilities. Finally, she offers a brief but highly illuminating history of the Delta Collection. Likely established before the turn of the twentieth century and active until its gradual dissolution in the 1960s, the Delta Collection was a secret archive within the Library of Congress that housed materials confiscated by the United States Post Office and other federal agencies. These were materials deemed too obscene for public dissemination or general access. Adler reveals how the Delta Collection was used to regulate difference and squelch dissent in the McCarthy era while also linking it to evolving understandings of so-called perversion in the scientific study of sexual difference.

Sophisticated, engrossing, and highly readable, Cruising the Library provides us with a critical understanding of library science, an alternative view of discourses around the history of sexuality, and an analysis of the relationship between governmentality and the cataloging of research and information—as well as categories of difference—in American culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823276363
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	04/03/2017
Pages:	248
Sales rank:	1,134,791
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Melissa Adler is Assistant Professor in the School of Library and Information Science at the University of Kentucky.

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction: A Book Is Being Cataloged
1. Naming Subjects: "Paraphilias"
2. Labeling Obscenity: The Delta Collection
3. Mapping Perversion: HQ71, etc.
4. Cruising the Library: Aberrations in the Catalog
5. The Trouble with Access / Toward Reparative Taxonomies
Epilogue. On Using and Being Used: Sadomasochism in the Library

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

"An original study on an old institution—the U.S. Library of Congress. Adler's reading of crucial and cultural theory are accurate and insightful. She presents a practical example of the philosophical power of library documentation as a tool of metaphysics and political economy."—Ronald E. Day, author of Indexing It All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data

"In this rewarding study, Melissa Adler shows how systems used to classify and catalogue information for libraries operate as mechanisms of control. In particular, she focuses on the ways sexual identities are constructed and disciplined through library practices. Using Eve Sedgwick's work as a paradigmatic test case, and the Library of Congress as a site, including its infamous Delta Collection, she produces a study that is as compelling as it is far-reaching in its implications. A must-read for present and future professionals, but also, a useful text for anyone concerned with official instruments for the production of knowledge. "—Johanna Drucker, Breslauer Professor, Information Studies, UCLA

"This compelling book should be read by everyone who cares about the complex politics of knowledge production and dissemination. Melissa Adler's highly readable account of the fate of queer, non-normative sexual knowledge within the Library of Congress is both startling and important. It speaks to the very real importance of libraries and librarians to contemporary intellectual life."—Janice Radway, Northwestern University

From the Publisher

In Cruising the Library, Melissa Adler places the systems and structures of library organizational schemes at the center of the production of gender and sexuality in the United States. For Adler, library shelves are not merely rows of books, but formations that, like other political, social, and economic systems, govern and discipline gendered and sexed ways of being... Adler reads the library as a site for cruising, reading across and against the hegemonic story of sexuality told by the library to find the frisson at the limit. Read perversely, suggests Adler, the library can be a space for pleasures of all kinds.

Los Angeles Review of Books

...Cruising the Library contains much of interest: it is an invigorating and thought-provoking rallying cry for fresh discussion about the organization of knowledge.

Times Literary Supplement

An inquiry into how classifying protocols operate as control mechanisms, Cruising the Library is a hands-on guide for the queer academic.

The Bay Area Reporter Online

03/15/2017
Adler (LIS, Univ. of Kentucky) critically examines the knowledge organization systems designed and disseminated by the U.S. Library of Congress (LOC), principally the library's classification system and authorized subject headings. Across five topical chapters, Adler reconstructs the history of classification hierarchies that situate "perverse" subjects in relation to one another—as well as to the controlling norm—on library shelves. Chapters analyze the treatment of race and sexuality to show how complex, intersectional works disrupt, and are disrupted by, the necessity of placing a book in one single place on the shelf. The author also touches upon the genealogy of the modern subject term Paraphilias, and considers the LOC's placement of "obscene" materials in the shadowy Delta Collection. Drawing on the work of queer theorists such as Eve Sedgwick, Donna Haraway, and Roderick Ferguson, this work renders visible the often invisible, routinized library practices that shape how we intellectually and physically relate items and ideas to one another. Cataloging, Adler argues, necessarily requires repeatedly weighing the value of access points against the violence of capturing a work within a schema that replicates social inequalities. VERDICT Library staff and humanities researchers alike will appreciate Adler's self-aware, interdisciplinary analysis.—Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook, Massachusetts Historical Soc.

Library Journal

2017-01-24
By examining the treatment of perversion and queer topics by the Library of Congress, Adler (Library and Information Science/Univ. of Kentucky) strives to make a case for the inadequacy of its systems to organize topics outside the norm.The author begins with an examination of Library of Congress subject headings and its attempts to describe materials about perverse sexual behavior. It's important to note—and Adler does not do it particularly well until the end of her argument—that her use of the terms "perversity" and "perversion" is neutral rather than negative, even as she takes LoC to task for using them to pathologize nonnormative sexuality. Nevertheless, her argument that the opaque catchall term "paraphilias," used to describe both books about consensual kink and those about criminal sexual behavior including bestiality and pedophilia, is wholly inadequate is a powerful one. Her history of LoC's so-called Delta Collection, its closed repository of erotica and pornography, is fascinating, though it's also tendentiously burdened by metaphor: Adler draws on Foucault, Nabokov, and Borges, as well as the myth of the Minotaur, to envision the relationship of the Delta Collection to the larger library. Adler's chapter on "Mapping Perversion" is the most poignant, as she examines the inherent inadequacy of "a vast heteropatriarchal classification" to encompass intersectionality. In remarking on the adoption of the tools of LoC by libraries across the country and even around the world, she describes its catalog "as a colonized space" that has become "an instrument of cultural domination." Adler's envisioned audience is unclear. Her prose is dense, technical, and larded with exclusionary critical language. Moreover, it's hard to imagine a general audience for a book about library cataloging. Nevertheless, Adler attempts to bridge the gap between the practitioner and the nonlibrarian scholar with occasional detours to explain such arcana as how LCSH works and the origins of LoC itself. Tailor-made for the critlib movement, this demonstration that the Library of Congress is not a neutral space begs one critical question: where should it be shelved?

Kirkus Reviews

This compelling book should be read by everyone who cares about the complex politics of knowledge production and dissemination. Melissa Adler’s highly readable account of the fate of queer, non-normative sexual knowledge within the Library of Congress is both startling and important. It speaks to the very real importance of libraries and librarians to contemporary intellectual life.

Northwestern University - Janice Radway

In this rewarding study, Melissa Adler shows how systems used to classify and catalogue information for libraries operate as mechanisms of control. In particular, she focuses on the ways sexual identities are constructed and disciplined through library practices. Using Eve Sedgwick’s work as a paradigmatic test case, and the Library of Congress as a site, including its infamous Delta Collection, she produces a study that is as compelling as it is far-reaching in its implications. A must-read for present and future professionals, but also, a useful text for anyone concerned with official instruments for the production of knowledge.

Breslauer Professor, Information Studies, UCLA - Johanna Drucker

An original study on an old institution— the U.S. Library of Congress. Adler’s reading of crucial and cultural theory are accurate and insightful. She presents a practical example of the philosophical power of library documentation as a tool of metaphysics and political economy.

author of Indexing It All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data - Ronald E. Day