Introduction A Book Is Being Cataloged

• Published in: Cruising the Library p. 1
• Main Author: Adler, Melissa
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: United States Fordham University Press 2017
• Subjects: Anthropology; Applied anthropology; Archives; Arts; Behavioral sciences; Cataloging; Communications; Communications media; Controlled vocabularies; Cultural anthropology; Cultural institutions; Economic disciplines; Economics; Employment; Information professionals; Information science; Institutional libraries; Labor economics; Language; Lexicology; Librarians; Libraries; Library circulation; Library operations; Library science; Linguistics; Literature; Occupations; Print media; Social sciences; Subject headings; Terminology
• ISBN: 9780823276363; 0823276368

In her 1987 essay “A Poem Is Being Written,” Sedgwick wrote about her own encounters with the organizing practices in the library, hinting that cataloging effectively withholds information and stifles interpretation. She suggested that the erasures of potential homosexual readings in the library are instructive in doing the history of sexuality: “The wooden subject, author, and title catalogues frustrate and educate the young idea.”¹ It seems that her experiences of libraries informed one of the central arguments she subsequently developed inEpistemology of the Closet—that the “performative aspects of texts” and “reader relations” are “sites of definitional creation, violence,