| Although sexuality scholars have widely explored the production and effects of taxonomies and knowledge, there is not yet a thorough account of the role of libraries in the construction of knowledge about sexuality. This dissertation fills a critical gap in the literature by presenting an historical account of the selection and cataloging of materials on sexual deviance at the Library of Congress, which operates at the center of scholarly discourses. The Library of Congress is the nation's oldest federal cultural institution, and occupies a critical space where medical, social science, political, literary, and other discourses are collected, arranged, and disseminated to Congress and the public. LC not only collects and arranges research from all the disciplines across the globe, but also sets the standard by which subjects are organized in libraries of all types around the world. This study demonstrates the role of knowledge production in the construction of sexual deviance by looking to the place where these discourses are stored and categorized.;I have examined the social construction of sexual deviance through the lens of the LC subject heading "Paraphilias" by analyzing catalog records, LC cataloging and acquisitions policy documents, and books assigned this heading since its creation in 2007, as well as the earlier forms of the heading, "Sexual perversion" (1898-1971) and "Sexual deviation" (1972-2006). By tracing the evolution of the meaning and usage of "Paraphilias" at LC, I methodologically and substantively expand on the existing scholarly literature about the history of sexuality and classification. I describe and interrogate how definitions of "perversion" and "deviance" have changed over time and how the LC both reflects and contributes to the production of meaning. Drawing especially on Judith Halberstam's notion of "perverse presentism," Hope Olson's feminist deconstructionist and Bowker and Stars' Foucauldian analyses of library classification systems, as well as Sanford Berman's three principles for subject access--intelligibility, findability, and fairness, this dissertation shows that the heading "Paraphilias" reflects a small portion of the current literature and serves a limited audience--psychiatric professionals, while it presents important questions of authenticity and retrieval power with regard to earlier works. |
