Not only is academic research hard to do (well), it is often hard to read – especially if academic work is not part of your everyday experience and expertise. At the same time, it is crucially important that others can understand if we are to expose, analyze, and suggest solutions to our social, medical, economic, technological, and political problems.

While my work is focused on an analysis of popular culture representations of librarians in modern media, the underlying messages revealed in my selections offer some explanation of why the work women do — wherever they are — is so frequently devalued. Further, it suggests that work in caring and supportive roles is devalued because it is women who are associated with such work.

My scholarship specifically looks at how messages about gender shape our assumptions about what work is valued and not valued. Just as librarian Sam Popowich blows up the idea that neutrality and making decisions from an unbiased standpoint is impossible for librarians (and anyone, for that matter), I argue that the social world is always subject to relations of power. We can resist this power, we can be coerced by it, and we can be complicit in its use. In our daily lives, it can be hard for us to see or be aware of this power. This power functions as “truth” and helps in explaining why women continue to be subject to discrimination, sexism, exploitation, and other forms of devaluation. This is part of the interconnected systems of power and oppression and I strongly advocate for intersectional feminism because “Western women [are not the] only legitimate subjects of struggle” (Heidi Safia Mirza 2015, p. 4) .

Using librarianship as the launchpad, I explore how modern pop culture examples assert/reassert “feminine” behaviours in problematic ways. For example, caring work, frequently associated with women, emerges over and over again as something that is tied to mothering. Women who fail to care are often revealed as failures as women. They become the butt of jokes, people to be pitied and/or disliked, and/or not worth our attention (just think of the “old maid” librarian). Such views about femininity contribute to our material circumstances because they build truths around what kinds of work deserve to be acknowledged and which do not. The hegemonic (dominant) narratives of heroes and “strong” leaders (just think of Marvel movies) leave little room for other approaches to living/leading, including approaches that are seen as “feminine” (e.g. caring, nurturing, supporting). This results in an ongoing preference to reward strength, restrained emotions, and control that are highly gendered and women, who exhibit such characteristics, are judged differently because they are supposed to practice femininity well. Consider, for example, the fictional character of Cersei Baratheon in Game of Thrones whose hunger to wield/retain power, her failure to mother properly, and her infidelity characterize as positively villainous, even though that world is saturated with male characters who are not so dissimilar.

In the less fantastic realm of everyday labour, the “othering” of women (i.e. made to feel that they fall outside of systems of power) reinforces value systems that privilege men and “professionalize” work through an emphasis on order, control, and rationalization. Prestige and status are associated with managerial control, not caring work. Women’s professional advancement continues to be informed by male-dominated value systems that limit women’s access to power. In the library world, this is illustrated in the disproportionate numbers of male library leadership and tenured faculty in Canadian Library and Information Study/Science programs.

The privileging of male worldviews means that even professions like librarianship, numerically dominated by women, are historically rooted in patriarchal knowledge systems that continue to shape the ways these professions function and how they “valued” in broader culture. This means that certain ways of leading are also better acknowledged and rewarded than others. For example, emphasis on leaders to demonstrate effectiveness and accountability through a neoliberal lens diminish the value and importance of actually caring about people, showing empathy, and not always being right.

Reconfiguring work to better align with notions of management, rationality, and accountability actually denies the value of certain kinds of work. As an example, librarianship is a field that has struggled to define itself as a “real” profession and in that struggle there have been numerous calls for librarians to behave differently, orienting them to the dehumanizing practices associated with efficiency, effectiveness, and quality assurance. There is a need to openly debate and explore how the social structures that perpetuate racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and other forms of discrimination limit who gets to lead and in what ways. For librarians, there has been a long history of male-dominated leadership (alarming when 80% of the field is women). Even though there has been an improvement in historically troubling ratios, leadership has become more rationalized over time, indicating that patriarchal influence remains a powerful element in the field’s leadership. This is because what is understood to be knowledge is based on the experience of (white) men, diminishing creative and diverse approaches to work because there is little space for other ways of “seeing” the world, including feminist perspectives.

Librarianship has an extensive legacy of blaming itself for its professional woes, turning on itself by advocating for greater management and computer science training/education, credential inflation, renaming job titles, changing behaviour/appearance, and just working harder. Yet, the material conditions of library workers has improved little. In fact, the field continues to face issues with diversifying its workforce, confronting the
“white supremacy and racism [that] has permeated our profession and our professional events,” (Hathcock, 2019) and improving salaries. This is because the field has not made more concerted efforts to turn its attention to the alienating social practices that depoliticize and depersonalize our lived experiences.

There is hope, however. As more librarians engage in critical discourse, whether it is through scholarship, informal exchanges of stories, or through social media. (e.g. critlib), we can shine a light on why it is we frequently, “routinely make decisions that oppose our declared values,” (Yousefi, 2017, p. 92). As my project on librarian representations reveals, we need to turn our critical eye on the ways broader culture characterizes our profession if we are really going to understand where our profession “fits” in the 21st century. In addition, we desperately need to explore these ideas in our education programs.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.