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Labels have the power to constrain, but they also provide a sense of belonging and identity, and it is the latter that has formed the basis of B. M. Watson’s research, which is expanding beyond borders at Western.
“Just having a label let me find books, let me find community,” said Watson, Faculty of Information and Media Studies (FIMS) professor who goes by Bri and uses they/them pronouns.
For Watson specifically, those labels include polyamorous, disabled, queer, non-binary and settler. Labels like these also help form the foundation of the infrastructure designed to organize data that we all depend on in galleries, libraries, archives, museums, and special collections (GLAMS).
“Books and libraries were a pathway for me to not feel alone in the world anymore. And that’s been a big theme in my life and why I’ve focused my research, work and activism in this area.”
That work includes the Name Change Policy Working Group which aims to push academic journals to introduce policies allowing authors to retroactively change their names in published works; the Homosaurus, a data vocabulary of LGBTQ+ terms for use in GLAMS; and the Trans Metadata Collective, which aims to improve the description and classification of trans and gender diverse people in cataloguing.
Finding community through cataloguing
Watson’s joy for the unique sense of belonging and identity that cataloguing brought was born out of a significant sense of being “other” as a child and young adult.
While they believe they were born deaf, it wasn’t discovered until they visited the dentist at the age of three and, for the first time, masks prevented lip reading. Watson said they grew up in unceded N’dakina in the Dawnland (Wabanaki) Confederacy, colonially known as New Hampshire, and spent time at a deaf school before getting hearing aids and switching to public school.
“A lot of the framing from medicine and sciences at that time was ‘we can fix you’ but deaf culture goes back hundreds of years.”
This experience made them aware of the intricate relationship between language and community.
It was in public school where a teacher first helped them find that sense of belonging through catalogues.
“She took her own personal time to take me to the library and show me how to find things about people like me, starting with Beethoven,” Watson said. “It was this really inspiring moment.”
From an undergraduate degree in history at Keene State College in New Hampshire, Watson went on to pursue a master’s degree in history before taking a year off and self-publishing the widely successful Annals of Pornographie: How Porn Became Bad, a history of pornography, sexuality and the creation of privacy in Western culture, which landed them an interview with Conan O’Brien.
The experience of researching the book led to the pursuit of a library science degree in Indiana, where the Kinsey Institute is located. Watson worked at Kinsey as a student archivist when the American Psychological Association launched a small working group on the polyamory movement. Watson got involved, recording oral histories of people or elders involved in the movement and archiving artworks or scholarship in the Kinsey Institute Library and Special Collections or the ArQuives in Toronto, the largest independent 2SLGBTQIA+ archives in the world.
Watson completed a PhD at UBC and started teaching there before taking on a role as a professor at Western last July. In that short amount of time, Watson has already secured two grants to build on their work with the Homosaurus, focusing now on translation to bring it to Quebec and Europe.
Cataloguing is often invisible to the public, but it creates a framework that allows us to recognize our past, find community, and look to the future.
Archiving information related to the Stonewall uprisings, for example, helped organize, store and provide access to information that grew into larger activist groups fighting for LGBTQ+ rights.
“That wouldn’t have happened without the archives and having the little, small community archives and collections that activists developed, allowing communities to form around them and then develop into national and international movements,” said Watson.
“Trans people have always existed. Queer people have always existed. Black people have always existed. And so cataloguing and description and metadata is both our love letter to the future and our testament of how we care: we’ve reached out to this community, we’ve talked to these people.”
Learn more about how Western is turning curiosity into solutions
