Bi erasure in bookstores.

bisexual-books:

tearingdownthatfence:

pointyteeth:

My local bookstore is Schulers. For their section on queer books, their label reads “Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Studies.” (Granted, 95% of the books there were L or G really.) I send them a message about their lack of inclusion of bisexual or queer identities. Here was their response.

Thoughts?

I appreciate their politeness, but still. Come on. You really can’t just say “queer,” “sexuality studies,” or “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Queer?”

Gah.

Ugh. Can’t they at least add “bisexual” somewhere in there? I feel like the existing industry categories are a poor excuse. Surely adding something to it would not confuse anyone. Plus, no matter that the contents are “clear” to the majority of their customers, it’s still an act of erasure. And participating in oppression is not ok just because someone else did it first.

I feel like what they’re really saying here is that they don’t care. They obviously don’t think there are enough of us that our feelings matter at all. And if everyone does this, where are we going to go?

Trying to get the publishers to change this sounds like a huge task. I don’t know much about the industry to be honest. Does each publisher set their own guidelines? Should we contact them one by one, or get an organisation to contact them one by one?

First off, this is so crappy and erasing.  I’d much rather see a LGBT Studies sign or Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender.   It’s good that the OP wrote in to point that out, but disappointing that the store isn’t willing to be more inclusive. 

Sadly this store isn’t the only one to do it.  Even when bookstores have bisexual books, it seems like they are in the “Gay and Lesbian” section.

Part of that is because every publisher comes up with their own genre/topic labels.  The book store isn’t going to fight with publishers about this; they’re all out to make money so they will slap ANY label on the book that is most likely to make it sell.  More accurate cataloging exists in (some) libraries but that doesn’t help when you have money in your pocket you actually want to spend on our community.  

BUT

For me this all goes back to the entire reason for this blog.   We NEED more bisexual books!  We need publishers to see that we are a community worth marketing to, worth publishing books about our issues, worth labeling those books as such.   We need to show our numbers and our voice and our community.  I think we need to show the bookstores and publishers of the world that we can make them money frankly before they change the signs and labels.   Which sucks because that same lack of books, signs, and labels discourages bisexual people from coming out as such or from spending the money they do have on something they can’t find.  *sigh*

~ Sarah

I call bullshit on this being the industry standard. “Gay and Lesbian” may be the industry standard, but I have never seen “Gay, Lesbian and Transgender” anywhere else. Random House uses “Gay and Lesbian”, HarperCollins uses “Gay Studies” and “Gay and Lesbian Fiction”, Macmillan uses “Gay and Lesbian Studies”, Simon and Schuster uses “Gay and Lesbian”, and Penguin and Hachette don’t seem to have a queer category.

Basically, there is no industry standard, and if there was “Gay, Lesbian and Transgender” is certainly not it.