2017 August. “University-Community Digitization Partnerships: Accessing Trans Collections in LGBT Community Archives,” co-presenter on long paper with Dr. Cait McKinney, Digital Humanities 2017 conference, Montreal. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Archival Activism, Symbolic Annihilation, and the LGBTQ2+ Community Archive
Archivaria, 2020
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.
Beyond Pillars of Evidence: Exploring the Shaky Ground of Queer/ed Archives and their Methodologies
Research in the Archival Multiverse, 2015
In this chapter, I critically consider the ways that heteronormativity, homonormativity, and the politics of respectability come together to both haunt and produce the digital narratives that constitute the Arizona Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) Storytelling Project, in order to discover how memories are sometimes disciplined to re-produce normative narratives about queer pasts. I look and listen for the queering potentials in shared stories and in the digital and participatory technologies that record them. While conversations about “queering the archive” are not new and are, in fact, taking place transnationally, these conversations are extended here to explore the ways in which conformity to archival norms can be treacherous. I ask whether an archive can be a space of radical intervention or if it must always and only be a repository for stories that reproduce normative iterations of histories that inform powerful and normativizing national imaginaries. For those of us committed to intervening in traditional archival constructs and related practices of collecting and documenting, we can see that such practices run the risk of reproducing sexual normativities and social divisions.We should, therefore, understand the queer/ed archive as always in motion—forming and re-forming itself as we constitute and re-member its collections. Ultimately, this chapter argues for the need to develop a Queer/ed Archival Methodology, Q/M, to help ensure that complex, non-normative, and even contradictory histories have their places in society’s record.
TSQ: The Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2015
This piece discusses current trans oral history projects that bring together feminist methodologies, transgender studies, and queer archives. I offer a map of some of these oral history projects, and their archive partners, while offering some reflections concerning how prior work in transgender ethnography and poststructuralist history are helping to shape contemporary approaches to trans oral history. Projects discussed include the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, the Transgender Archives (University of Victoria), the Digital Transgender Archive, the New York City Trans Oral History Project, the Trans Oral History Project, and the Transgender Oral History Project, Tretter Collection, University of Minnesota Libraries.
Accessing Transgender // Desiring Queer(er?) Archival Logics
Archivaria 68 (Fall 2009): 123-140., 2009
While efficient and satisfactory access may be a common goal for most archives, it is rarely achieved in full. In this article, the author considers specific access barriers for both transgender patrons and transgender materials within archives. In particular, the author argues that environment and language shape the ways in which patrons encounter archives and the materials contained therein. Rather than seeking satisfactory access, the author suggests that deferred or denied satisfac- tion might also produce productive encounters for archival researchers.
Radical History Review, 2015
Sara Davidmann is a photographer working in London, and Elspeth H. Brown is a US cultural historian who lives in Toronto. Both of us are engaged in the creation of queer archives concerning recent lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI) history, with an emphasis on trans* and queer archives. Brown is currently describing trans* activist Rupert Raj’s collection for the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives (CLGA) as a volunteer, while also conducting an oral history project concerning the histories and experiences of partners (cis and trans*) of trans* men in the United States and Canada. Davidmann has been photographing her queer and trans* community in London for fifteen years, while also interviewing her image collaborators about their lives. Together, we developed a few questions that allowed us to address the intersections between our various projects. The conversation that follows concerns our ruminations concerning archives, photography, ethics, queer methods and bodies, and trans* lives.