Meta-muscle

My head aches from the near incessant discussion in all my classes about everything that is behind what librarians and archivists do to manage information. Perhaps because I've been reading Everything is Miscellaneous for several weeks now I'm ornerier than usual but frankly I'm sick of seeing "meta-" anything.

That being said I enjoyed feminist article. I've waited for something Sandy Berman-esque to pop up since I've always enjoyed breaking down social precepts. The analogy of the great Sex-Race-Class sort is really illustrative of not only how sorting can arrange containers of knowledge but what that says about base assumptions.

That, together with the remarks about bell hooks, reminded me of Weinberger's annoying use of the hypothetical person as "she" or "her" throughout. It's something of a starting gate equality issue but I don't think using "she" in every instance is going to somehow strike a blow for equality. He obviously made a conscious effort to be inclusive--and that's fine--but alternating would accomplish the same goals better especially if he used sex stereotypes against themselves. Have a "The woman is the doctor" scenario but without the twist ending.  "Anyone can post anything she wants" (pg. 189) irked me to no end since it struck a blow against gender neutrality. While perhaps not grammatical, the trend is to create a singular-hypothetical "they" to accomplish the linguistic hurdle required to prevent the transition from the ambiguous-neutral "anyone" to the specific-actor "he" or "she". Yes language can be intellectually oppressive but do you know what else is? Slavery. Women don't deserve reparations either and we should instead strive for a more equal society.

That issue with bell hooks essentially losing her name through authority headings gets little sympathy from me in part because it isn't her real name and this is more of a language issue, of which classification systems and subject headings must exist within, and people who go out of their way to defy basic precepts should accept a loss of message. If I decide to name my child after the linguistic character of a schwa, little more than an upside down lower-case "e", it is just as invalid. When Prince adopted the unpronounceable symbol in the 90s, promoters and record stores had to devise a way to place him and if their decision made him lose part of his identity he would have no right to complain.

The same goes for the movie "I [heart symbol] Huckabees" on Wikipedia. Although it is information by community editing and allegedly superior in many ways, Wikipedia's excuse for keeping the symbol out is that even though they are capable of expressing the symbol in a title is that not all browsers will recognize the symbol and thus the title will be distorted. bell hook's pen name is probably indicated as she prefers in the MARC record and I doubt catalogers are personally editing the author biography to unwitting patrons aren't confused by the difference.