Confronting the democratic discourse of librarianship : a Marxist approach
1 2021-03-31T12:46:02-07:00 Natalie K Meyers 4b3948ab8901940da5f2eb884c2cc86b3dc6ac22 33948 3 Popowich, Sam. 2019. Confronting the Democratic Discourse of Librarianship : A Marxist Approach." plain 2021-04-17T10:45:33-07:00 2019 Traces the connections between library history and the larger history of capitalist development, suggesting that the relationship between the library and capitalism is closer and more insidious than the democratic tradition allows Popowich, Sam. 2019. Confronting the Democratic Discourse of Librarianship : A Marxist Approach. book Popowich, Sam 978-1-63400-087-1 1-63400-087-0 Natalie K Meyers 4b3948ab8901940da5f2eb884c2cc86b3dc6ac22This page has tags:
- 1 media/dctermstimeline.png 2021-04-12T00:11:25-07:00 Natalie K Meyers 4b3948ab8901940da5f2eb884c2cc86b3dc6ac22 Genealogy of Refusal Timeline Natalie K Meyers 36 timeline 2021-09-14T21:36:29-07:00 Natalie K Meyers 4b3948ab8901940da5f2eb884c2cc86b3dc6ac22
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2021-01-09T16:02:31-08:00
Why don't librarians "Just say No"?
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Do we prefer to suffer in silence because its a vocation and not "just a job"
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2021-04-20T11:28:44-07:00
In this page we begin to explore why the librarian stays silent, why the word "No" never seemed to make its way into the vocabulary of librarians, and why sometimes it is difficult for librarians even to say: "I prefer not to."
We started this page laughing about anti-drug campaigns (DARE and "Just say No") and then found ourselves returning to a circumstance that will not shock anyone who has ever worked in a library: libraries and librarians are often complicit in their own silence, organizationally so desperate to prove their worth, that refusal is not an option.Morgenstern's Starless Sea takes things quite a bit further. Reviewers describe the book as a beautifully written and compellingly imagined book that introduces a mystical library. These librarians are physically and emotionally inculcated to their vocation, devoting themselves entirely to serving the library.
The librarians will be blindfolded with their hands tied behind their backs and then either be branded or de-tongued before they can start work. The mutilations are the critical prerequisites that mark the point at which the librarians in the Starless Sea can be trusted to do their jobs.
Why elinguation? Because, borrowing from Popowich, their role is to be caretakers who can't say "No". Not meaning makers. (2019)
In the 1995 film Party Girl, Mary gets fired from her job at the public library and her godmother, the librarian, goes on a rant about the demands of the profession. She tells Mary that "Melvil Dewey hired women as librarians because he believed the job didn't require any intelligence! It was a woman's job! That means it's underpaid and undervalued!" (Mayer 1995)
The feminization of the profession plays a big role, but there is of course, no single reason, librarians don't "Just Say No." But it is worth remembering that even Bartleby in all his mental anguish was able to voice that he "preferred not to"--surely this is a language we can adopt more? Scarcity scenarios have been playing out at universities worldwide, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic situation which drives counter-intuitive decision making.
For example, some libraries unnecessarily delayed closing during the COVID-19 pandemic, as other academic libraries closed to protect their patrons and their staff (Hinchliffe and Wolff-Eisenberg 2020). The rationale for those that remained opened was the library staff were up for the risk and that their sacrifice was worth it.- Were library administrators able to just say "No" and Refuse to send their people to work without PPE during a pandemic situation?
- Were library staff able to say "No PPE? Then I'm not coming in to work/I'm not working where I don't feel safe [around co-workers who wont practice social distancing or around maskless patrons]?"
- Were library staff able to refuse to work when they found themselves denied surveillance or diagnostic testing offered to other members of the campus community like students living in dormitories or professors doing classroom instruction?
- Were library staff able to say "if you want us to "Stay open/re-open without COVID-19 testing available, I'm not coming in to work"?
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2021-04-19T18:27:51-07:00
Feminized Labour
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Saying Yes all the Time
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2021-09-15T13:16:31-07:00
Library work, like nursing, cleaning, caregiving, early childhood education, and social work is a profession where efforts tend to be performed by feminized labour. Labour that always says "Yes" when faced with human need.
Librarian stereotypes are so prevalent in popular culture that the library profession has playfully and/or sardonically adopted them. Examples of these exaggerated feminized stereotypes are depicted book cover parodies, such as the Bookmobile Bad Girl and the Reference Tramp. These caricatures of librarians enact their role by always answering the call (with a "Yes!"). They are the ones who "give it away all over town." Along with Morgenstern's acolytes they occupy the far end of the bell curve in our workplace refusal kinship diagram.
Men populate the other side of the curve when we look at how workplace refusal is gendered. Men in music like Todd Rundgren and Johnny Paycheck have literally made a fortune celebrating refusal. Male characters like Peter Gibbons in Office Space foment rebellion and bond over it with co-workers. Other male characters like Dante and Randal in Clerks simply revel in turning up but preferring not to work.
When academic librarians seek to prove themselves and create externally recognizable value, whether through the credential of the MLS, or through determining which achievements will be acknowledged by faculty appointment and promotion committees, we distance ourselves from the service/maintainer and feminized side of the profession. We re-define our role to align more with the masculine to prove our worth alongside our other colleagues in the patriarchal world of the ivory tower.
As argued by Seale and Mirza (2019). 258-259:
Why would we do this? Though we may seek prestige, our efforts rarely lead to increased influence or power within the academy. The truth is that many of the collective benefits depicted in the 9 to 5 film back in 1980 are still among those most valued by today's workers: on-site daycare, job-sharing, flexible hours. One of the most hoped for benefits imagined in the 9 to 5 film hasn't materialized, though: equal pay.the actual work involved in academic librarianship is frequently invisibilized. This invisibility is only emphasized by the fact that much of that work entails emotional labor or maintenance. ...Academic librarianship’s erasure of feminized forms of labor and the field’s “inherent femaleness” is inextricable from its search for markers of professionalization outside of librarianship, in the form of non-MLS degrees, more appealing domains of knowledge, and nonfeminized types of labor.
"Isn't the academy becoming a more welcoming place for women?" you might ask. "Aren't half the students we serve women?" In terms of gender balance in the professorial ranks, particularly in the United States, in the most recent American Association of University Professors' salary survey we find that religious institutions have finally got their gendered salary gaps down to a single digit percentage (AAUP 2021). That's good news. But the survey data also show there's still an 86.8 percent difference between number or men and women serving as full professors at private-independents (AAUP 2021).
Picture a woman going up for faculty appointment or promotion. When the time comes for her to convince decision makers that what she does is worthwhile, only 16% of those people are likely to identify with her at the most basic level of having experienced gendered labour like she has. Things aren't likely to get better soon in the US, because the outlook for the academic job market and compensation is pretty bleak. This past year "real wages for full-time faculty decreased for the first time since the Great Recession, and average wage growth for all ranks of full-time faculty was the lowest since the AAUP began tracking annual wage growth in 1972. After adjusting for inflation, real wages decreased at over two-thirds of colleges and universities. The number of full-time faculty decreased at over half of institutions" (AAUP 2021).
The patriarchal organization of the academy with its sliding wages and hyper-competitive employment situation is where academic librarians work and are compensated. Further complicating the compensation outlook within academic librarianship are pay gaps between innovators (often gendered as masculine) and maintainers (often gendered as feminine) and how they are comparatively compensated. Popowich explores this tension and more, observing that:
In this situation how do you justify yourself, your cost, your service? How do you hang on to your part of the pie if you're really working in the empty middle of the doughnut hole?Librarianship—like the world itself—is full of contradictions or antinomies, tensions, productive or causal, non-static dichotomies, dialectical “unities of opposites,” such as that between enlightenment and social control, between concrete library work and the more intellectual labor of library science, or between men’s and women’s work, the center and the periphery, etc. (Popowich 2019)
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2021-09-14T12:53:02-07:00
Feminized Labour
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2021-09-14T13:02:48-07:00
As a field, librarianship is predominantly female and tends to focus on work, such as service and maintenance, that is not recognized by systems that value more “masculine” work.