Gender and Sexuality, Self-Identity, and Libraries: Readers’ Advisory as a Technique for Creative (Dis)Assembly

This paper addresses the theme of gender, sexuality, and information by considering how libraries might offer readers’ advisory services to young readers in socially just ways. Readers’ advisory is a service found in public and school libraries in which librarians recommend materials to library visitors, who are often young readers. Although libraries are commonly perceived as neutral, apolitical institutions, the paper shows how readers’ advisory in libraries is a site of struggle and contestation for young readers in terms of their gender identity and sexuality. Drawing from the works of Nikolas Rose and Michel Foucault, the authors show how readers’ advisory is a technique of self-assembly where young readers negotiate their self-identities amid surrounding library discourses. The authors provide several reasons why readers’ advisory approaches, as they are presented in professional library literature, are problematic. As an alternative conceptualization of readers’ advisory, the paper then proposes what is dubbed a “disjunctional” approach. The authors explain what this approach is, provide concrete examples of how it might be adopted, and suggest avenues for further study.