How Cute! Race, Gender, and Neutrality in Libraries

IntroductionCertain types of subjects appear in particular spaces, and the ways in which these subjects self-present or are perceived can tell us about the sorts of projects they work in service of, even if (and perhaps most often) unintentionally. Given the predominance of white women in libraries and related fields, it is worth considering how gender and race are co-constitutive, how they recruit and inform one another, and, subsequently, the work they together do. Here, I am interested in exploring how femininity and a particular aestheticization thereof is called upon to attempt to mitigate or even veil the violence of whiteness and white supremacy. Espinal (2001), in her essay calling for an interrogation of whiteness in librarianship, details one of the ways these mitigating effects unfold in libraries when she demonstrates how attitudes towards race can quickly turn blithe when expressed in relation to gender. She describes how seemingly humorous comments such as "the library staff is mostly a bunch of 'white women in sensible shoes'" (p. 146) effectively renders whiteness unthreatening, safe, and even comforting or somehow appealing. Espinal's example is a compelling one, prompting us to look more closely at how feminization can work to neutralize white supremacy. Bernstein, in Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (2011), picks up similar themes in her analysis, pointing to a "busy cultural system linking innocence to whiteness through the body of the [female] child" (p. 6). Let us consider how innocence might be linked to whiteness through the feminization of libraries more generally. How might this femininity's purported universal or timeless appeal be called forth to assert its whiteness as innocent and without agenda?This essay takes up this question, exploring it in relation to cuteness. Here, cuteness is understood as what Ngai (2011 with Jasper, 2012) refers to as a minor aesthetic, which we will learn is a historically-specific category shaped by and deeply invested in hegemonic formulations of race, gender, and consumption. This essay also draws upon Natarajan's forthcoming chapter, "Nostalgia, Cuteness, and Geek Chic: Whiteness in Orla Kiely's Library," in which she analyzes aesthetics in Kiely's Library for Fall 2015 fashion show. Both Espinal and Natarajan's scholarship raise a number of additional questions, some of which I will attempt to address here. I am also interested in the political work cuteness might do for a profession that is heavily plagued by whiteness and that remains heavily feminized, specifically how it might function in service of librarianship's commitment to neutrality, which, as I will elaborate on later, I take to mean the (aspirational) state of being for all and against none.1 I also recognize that cuteness has surfaced in critical LIS spaces, meaning that not only is it complicated and complex but that it can also be made subversive or otherwise politically productive.Ngai (2012) writes that aesthetic categories "call forth not only specific subjective capacities for feeling and acting but also specific ways of relating to other subjects and the larger social arrangements these ways of relating presuppose" (p. 11). It is with the aim of uncovering the ways in which LIS reflects, reinforces, and at times challenges these larger social arrangements that this essay is written. My work is concerned less with interpersonal manifestations of racism, sexism, classism, ableism, etc.-which is not, however, to say that these are not worthy of analysis or important to challenge- and more with how narratives, projects, and here, even aesthetics, in LIS might support white supremacist and patriarchal enterprises that are central rather than peripheral to the way in which all subjects experience daily life. Drabinski (2015) reminds us to "look up from our close reading of library problems to the social, political, and economic forces that structure those issues for us" (para. …