Let me begin in the tiny rural public library of my childhood. As I started to come out as queer in the late 1970s, drenched in teenage isolation and shame, I tried to find myself in books. In that one-room library, I had read my way through the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries, Harriet the Spy and The Phantom Tollbooth, migrating over the years to adult fiction and non-fiction. I became proficient in finding books, looking up my favorite subjects in the library catalog. Without Google, the Internet or desktop computers at my disposal (because they did not exist yet), I learned to flip through drawers of index cards organized alphabetically by Library of Congress subject headings. I came to adore the process of searching for books and knowledge, and so in my coming-out process, it made perfect sense to turn again to that card catalog. I furtively searched for the subject Homosexuality, finding only a volume or two of homophobic rants. But later—in a bigger, urban library—I discovered Jane Rule's early lesbian novel Desert of the Heart amid an overwhelming number of pathologizing psychology tomes. Whether a queer kid finds vibrant LGBTQ books in her public library or a newly disabled wheelchair user finds books that open the door into disability culture depends on how subject headings and keywords are assigned. If they are assigned in one way, we find isolation and pathology, and in another way, connection and the possibility of community.

Systems of classification carry power. They define and maintain hierarchies of categories used to describe and understand objects and beings—human and other-than-human, organic and inorganic. These systems often appear unassailable, and the people who create and employ them are often more inclined to bend what they are categorizing to fit their categories than vice versa. I want to think about the power of categorization by examining Library of Congress subject headings, which may seem at first glance a bit absurd. The classifying of books holds so little power over people's lives compared to other systems of classification—the gender binary or diagnostic categorization as laid out in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and the International Classification of Diseases, for instance.