This week I read the abridged article by Patricia Hill Collins titled It’s All in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation[i]. Although not terribly lengthy, it is so rich with concepts that I have been furiously scribbling notes, going on Google search tangents, and lecturing my boyfriend as I read. There are a lot of really important issues packed in, and I’m having trouble focusing. So I’m going to take it down to something so local, it’s laughably trivial compared to the many other topics this reading could spawn.
That thing is this: I don’t want an engagement ring. In fact, I don’t want a proposal. My partner and I are planning to be married within a specific timeframe. However, we are not engaged. Why? Because it’s 2017, and people still absolutely cannot handle a 30-something woman who doesn’t want a diamond on her left ring finger. Cannot. Handle. But apparently, people also can’t handle a woman interviewing for a job with an engagement ring that’s too big.
My response to anyone that challenges us – and my response to my non-fiancé when I first introduced this idea to him – was a simple question: Why? If someone can give me a good reason to get a ring, I’ll seriously consider it. But it’s been months of these conversations now, and no one has come up with anything that interests me (since I’m just not really a jewelry person to begin with). In fact, some of the reasons are flat out offensive and eventually boil down to, as Collins puts it, controlling a woman’s sexuality. [Disclaimer: If an engagement ring is your jam, though, no judgments here. It’s not right for us, but we’ll be blindly following plenty of other wedding traditions that others could just as easily pick apart.]
I also do not want to participate in the man-gagement ring non-trend that The Atlantic reported on a few years ago. Ditto the reverse proposal. I think the whole concept of a marriage proposal suggests a power dynamic that does not represent the way our relationship works or will ever work in the future. Simply trying to impose these things I’m not interested in on my partner seems counterproductive; as Collins states in her conclusion, people interested in progressing beyond the hierarchies she describes “might consider recasting intersectional understandings of family in ways that do not reproduce inequality” (303). Reversing gender roles in an oppressive power dynamic doesn’t make that power dynamic more acceptable.
Okay, you might be thinking, but what do these #firstworldproblems have to do with the LIS field? Plenty. Because if it’s this hard for people to think outside the box about a pretty insignificant material good, we have to be that much more aware of how the systems we use to serve patrons aren’t stuffed into that same, heteronormative box full of power dynamics based in race, gender, and sexuality. Does your software provide ways to tie family members together that aren’t based on gendered roles? How do you serve children living with aunts and uncles or grandparents? Children with unmarried parents who share custody and attend the same library? Children who will only ever be brought to a library by an unrelated adult in their life? What kind of independent access do kids have to your collection? Is your programming welcoming to families of all types – not just those in state-sanctioned or traditional relationships? What kinds of signals does the language you use in signage or paperwork send about the construction of a family? Is your library’s reach representative of all community members, or just certain neighborhoods or cohorts? Does your employee training include information about implicit biases so that professionals can more effectively interact with different patrons? If you’re in an academic library, are there ways you could help support students who are parents?
In short, are you serving not only the family in this video, but the ideals they describe? I’m not usually one for TED talks, but a line in that video struck a chord with me. Our guiding principle shouldn’t be to treat others as we’d want to be treated, but rather to treat them as they’d like to be treated. Even when we are trying to be inclusive, we might be performing the reverse proposal or the man-gagement ring equivalent of library activities – jamming new (to us) concepts of “family” into the old, familiar boxes. So, are you serving your patrons in the ways they want and need to be served?
[i] Collins, P. H. (1998). It’s all in the family: intersections of gender, race, and nation. In S. J. Ferguson (Ed., 2016), Race, gender, sexuality, and social class: Dimensions of inequality and identity (2nd ed., pp. 439-442). Los Angeles, CA: Sage.
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