Legal Discourse’s Epistemic Interplay with Sex and Gender Classification in the Dewey Decimal Classification System

The recognition of a spectrum of gendered and sexed people, along with changing social conventions, has caused disruption in the absolute and binary divisions between male and female, man and woman. Gender and sex are formally classified for many purposes; however, formal classifications can marginalize people with variable sex or those who do not identify with traditional understandings of gender. However, the instability is not a recent development, as demonstrated by historically changing conceptualizations of sex and gender in bibliographic classification, as well as in competing and interacting formal discourses. A discourse analysis was conducted on the concepts of women and trans and intersex people in four editions of the Dewey Decimal Classification system, as well as on relevant American legal discourse to investigate how institutionally endorsed epistemology and ontology work together to influence how concepts are defined and classified.