A Critical Archival Pedagogy: The Lesbian Herstory Archives and a Course in Radical Lesbian Thought (original) (raw)
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Who ’ s Curating in the Classroom ? : situating autohistoria-teorías in the arChives
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During the 2018-2019 academic year, we collaborated to facilitate a workshop for students in an Art Education course, using archival material from the Eberly Family Special Collections Library at Penn State. The course centered on diversity, pedagogy, and visual culture. Using our respective expertise in Art Education and primary source literacy, we chose the design and scope of the two-day workshop and subsequent assignment as a reflection for our passion for feminist theorizing and reimagining the academic White patriarchal canon in a predominantly White institution. As critical, feminist pedagogues, and in an effort to match the course theme, we chose to focus the workshop on critical analysis of primary sources that contain visual depictions and documentation of culturally diverse experiences, many of which were not positive experiences. In lesson planning, we focused on planning student interactions with the library archival materials as a way to critically reflect on historica...
Recollections from a Cultural Memory Worker in the Lesbian Herstory Archives
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The following essay is a reflection of my experience as a cultural memory worker, volunteering in the Video Special Collections at the Lesbian Herstory Archives. An inclusive, independent, grass-roots, community archive that exists to gather, preserve, and provide access to records of lesbian lives and activities. Throughout my volunteering, it is evident that oral history functions as memory, and evolving best practices are feminist within the archival realm. "I first learned about the Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA) a couple of years ago while scrolling through my Instagram feed. It was through a shared post made by Eleanor Medhurst, a fashion historian specializing in the sartorial remembrance of lesbian historical figures. Becomingawestruck by her ability to contextualize the cultural zeitgeists in lesbianism through a fashion studies lens, especially as a fellow fashion historian and archivist myself, I quickly developed a riveting inquisitiveness to enrich areas of insight when it came to preserving women’s herstory and understanding layers of feminism. During my initial introduction to the physical location of LHA, I was intensely immersed with the eclectic archival materials stored within the same space, under one roof. A cozy, warm home rather than a cold, isolated facility filled with engaging artifacts where its caretaker meticulously watches over these relics of the past for safekeeping. The LHA is a hybrid archive made available to the public and its community; it “belongs to no one group of lesbians and to no one selected image or formula for liberation; it will eventually pass into the hands of a new generation of rememberers who we [lesbians] hope will keep the door open to the multiplicities of lesbian identity” (Nestle, 1990, p. 93)."
Archival Activism, Symbolic Annihilation, and the LGBTQ2+ Community Archive
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LGBTQ2+ community archives founded in the 1970s and 1980s are not necessarily outside the archival mainstream from the perspective of non-white, and non-cis LGBTQ2+ people. On the contrary, histories of whiteness, settler colonialism, and cisnormativity within the LGBTQ2+ community archive can create the “symbolic annihilation” of trans and BIPOC people within the queer community archive, if left unaddressed. Our current moment requires an active reimagining of what activism means within a legacy LGBTQ2+ community, activist archive. This article describes my efforts, as a volunteer and board member at The ArQuives, as well as the Director of the LGBTQ2+ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, to help bring an intersectional, trans-inclusive framework to an LGBTQ2+ community archive with origins in Canada’s gay liberation movement. The Collaboratory is a five-year digital history research collaboration, funded by Canada’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council, that connects archives across Canada and the United States to produce a collaborative digital history hub for the research and study of gay, lesbian, queer, and trans oral histories. We have four archival partners: The ArQuives (formerly, the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives); the Digital Transgender Archive; the Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria; and the Archive of Lesbian Oral Testimony. In this article, I focus on the Collaboratory’s efforts to bring trans visibility to The ArQuives’ collections.
Published in Carotenuto, Silvana & Jambrešić Kirin, Renata & Prlenda, Sandra (eds.) A Feminist Critique to Knowledge Production. L’Orientale University Press; Naples 2015, 175–185.