Our Bodies, Our Shelves. Human sexuality, reproductive health, gender, and sex: these subjects are more topical than ever.
The constant barrage of information can be bewildering, but these recent offerings make complex topics accessible and ensure that teenagers will be informed about issues that affect them. Amber J. Keyser’s The V Word is a thought-provoking and honest collection of pieces about virginity that challenges assumptions about sexuality.
Two titles from Lerner, Feminism and Reproductive Rights, provide comprehensive treatments that will get students thinking about civil liberties and social justice. How Librarians Can Help Fight the Culture of Slut-Shaming. Everything about the word “slut” changed for me when I read an online article by a woman who shared her experiences as a former slut.
Ostracized at school for her sexual behavior, this woman revealed that as a teenager, she had multiple sex partners as a means to redress her sexual abuse as a child. She was attempting to write over that abuse with positive experiences—to take back control of her sexual life. Reading her story was, for me, one of those eye-opening moments. I was reminded that whatever my—anyone’s—personal beliefs may be, we can never understand others unless we truly hear their stories. Now, I am thinking about what we can do to better understand slut-shaming in the teen community and to help to put an end to it. A queer, feminist agenda for libraries: Significance, relevance and power. Bess Sadler and I are slated to present a paper on Feminism and the Future of Library Discovery at the Feminisms and Rhetorics conference here at Stanford next month.
It has been really interesting to think about how to present these ideas to a primarily non-librarian crowd. Bess is doing most of the real work, but I promised to try my hand at providing some context in an introduction. This is super drafty, so comments very welcome. Libraries have never been neutral repositories of knowledge. Libraries need a feminist agenda…but which one? Hey gang.
Sorry I haven’t posted in a while; I’ll tell you, it’s been a heck of a busy semester. Still, I couldn’t bear the thought of ending the year with my last post all the way back in September. So, let’s end the year with everyone’s favorite kind of post: cis-hetero white guy writes some stuff about feminism. There’s no way this can go bad, right? Charleston Library Hands Out “Some Girls Are” After School Bans Book.
A South Carolina high school’s decision to pull Courtney Summers’s Some Girls Are (St Martin’s Griffin, 2010) from its freshman summer reading list has led to a public campaign to get the title into students’ hands another way.
Andria Amaral, librarian and young adult services manager at Charleston (SC) County Public Library, received more than 1,000 copies of Summers’s young adult novel after BookRiot editor Kelly Jensen (@catagator) spearheaded an online donation drive to offer the book to students for free. Students are already cracking open the pages. “They are amazed,” says Amaral. “They say, ‘I can keep it? Anderson’s Speak Under Attack, Again. By Rocco Staino Just in time for the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week, Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak (FSG, 1999) is under attack once again.
This time, Wesley Scroggins, an associate professor of management at Missouri State University, is cautioning parents of the Republic School District against what he refers to as “soft porn” books used in the curriculum, including Speak, which is about rape. Scroggins’s op-ed piece in Missouri’s News-Leader has generated more than 300 comments on the newspaper’s website, is the topic of several blog posts, and prompted its own Twitter feed (#SpeakLoudly). School Library Journal spoke to Anderson about the controversy. Out Of The Shadows Program by publiclibrariesonline. San Diego Public Library Raises Sex Trafficking Awareness. Photo credit: Monnee Tong While slavery is often not thought of as a contemporary issue, sex trafficking is a form of modern slavery that affects some 4.5 million people globally.
Since 2007, the National Human Trafficking Resource Center hotline has received more than 14,000 reports of cases inside the United States. According to the FBI, San Diego is one of the 13 highest child sex trafficking areas in the nation (Los Angeles and San Francisco are also on the list). Feminism and libraries: Knowledge is our superpower. The Feminist Library held its first salon of 2015 on Saturday 31st January.
This year our salons are celebrating the library’s 40th anniversary with each monthly salon themed around a different section of our unique cataloguing system to highlight our collection. Knowledge is our Superpower. Book: Feminist Pedagogy for Library Instruction (Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies) (9781936117550): Maria T. Accardi.
Book: Informed Agitation: Library and Information Skills in Social Justice Movements and Beyond (9781936117871): Melissa Morrone: Books. Information Literacy and Social Justice: Radical Professional Praxis: Lua Gregory, Shana Higgins: 9781936117567: Amazon.com: Books. Book: Questioning Library Neutrality: Essays from Progressive Librarian by Alison Lewis (Editor), Alison M. Lewis (Contributor) Library Feminism and Library Women's History. Activism and Scholarship, Equity and Culture. Feminism and the Future of Library Discovery. By Bess Sadler and Chris Bourg Libraries are not Neutral In spite of the pride many libraries take in their neutrality, libraries have never been neutral repositories of knowledge.
Research libraries in particular have always reflected the inequalities, biases, ethnocentrism, and power imbalances that exist throughout the academic enterprise through collection policies and hiring practices that reflect the biases of those in power at a given institution. In addition, theoretically neutral library activities like cataloging have often re-created societal patterns of exclusion and inequality. For example, in The Power to Name, Hope Olson documents the ways the Dewey Decimal system has historically reflected patterns of knowledge organization that now seem archaic, such as classifying the subject of pregnancy under the heading of disease, and the subject of lynching under the heading of law enforcement (Olson 2002).
Thesis: “Strong views about what you call things” : how disability studies scholars interact with information classification systems. The feminist librarian. ALA Feminist Task Force. The Subversive Librarian. AnnaClutterbuck-Cook (@feministlib) Feminism and the collective collection. Text of my talk at BLC Networking Day 2015 below: title slide: feminism & collective collection I guess I should start by explaining my title a bit.
Sexual Abuse Resources and Booklists. Show this graphic to anyone who says rape isn't a real issue in America. Home - Sex Trafficking Awareness - Resource Guides at San Diego Public Library. Ms. Magazine: Top 100 Feminist Non-Fiction Countdown. In this next batch of books, feminists consider the everyday: how we eat, shop, marry, parent and worship. Is there something sinister lurking behind a young girl’s love of the color pink? Is matrimony in the 21st century all it’s cracked up to be? Our chosen writers have a lot to reconsider, reframe and dismantle. And bell hooks makes her first (but not last!)
Appearance on the list. 69 Books Every Feminist Should Read, From Mary Wollstonecraft To Roxane Gay. As bell hooks once wrote, feminism is for everybody. Coming to embrace feminism can be relief, but a challenge, too. Once you've identified as feminist, you might have questions about the history or what's happening within the movement. What does "third-wave feminism" mean? What about the goals of feminists of color? Can I wear high heels and be a feminist? 10 Life-Changing Books Every 20-Something Feminist Needs to Read - Mic.