Review of Documenting Rebellions: A Study of Four Lesbian and Gay Archives in Queer Times by Rebecka Taves Sheffield (Litwin Books, 2020). American Archivist, vol. 84, no.1, Spring/Summer 2021, pp. 191–193. (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Emergence, Development and Survival of Four Lesbian and Gay Archives
2015
Lesbian and gay archives, particularly those established within the context of the homophile, gay liberation, and lesbian feminist movements, serve as social movement organizations (SMOs). That is, they are organizational and administrative members of activist communities that acquire, manage, and share resources for the purpose of collective action for social change. Archives are nevertheless absent from literature on social movements and social movement theory. This project was designed to expand on current research in the fields of archival studies, social movement studies, and sexuality studies to better understand the experiences of lesbian and gay archives. A multiple case study was conducted at four community grown archives: The Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, The June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives, and the Lesbian Herstory Archives. Site visits took place over six months in 2013 and 2014, during which time interviews were conducted with 33 community archivists, volunteers, and community partners. In addition, more than 20,000 pages of organizational records related to the founding and development of these archives were reviewed. By tracing the emergence, development, and resource struggles of four lesbian and gay archives, this dissertation shows how these organizations have been shaped by broader movement goals, local geographies, socio-political structures, and the particular interests and energies of those who have nurtured their collections over the years. I examine how these archives have sustained themselves over time. Discussions with community archivists, volunteers, and community partners ii have generally confirmed that the four archives that inform this study are SMOs, but have also raised important questions about the sustainability of archives established by and for social movements. The dissertation tells a history of each archives and comments on the common challenges that they have faced over the past forty-plus years. Engagements between these archives and their local academic institutions are also explored, as are their continuing relationships with the communities they serve. By tracing the emergence and development of these organizations, this project uncovers representational politics, institutional pluralism, generational divides, shifting national politics, interpersonal relations, and challenges with sustainability, both financial and otherwise.
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.
A Genealogy of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, 1974-2014
This paper traces the collection development of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, a community based repository founded in 1974. I argue that the collection grew organically as a reflection of a dialogue between an evolving cohort of volunteer archivists and a community of donors. Primarily focusing on the first five years, this paper pinpoints key early decisions made by volunteer archivists. Specifically, I examine the Archives’ early collecting priorities and the introduction of the special collections in 1978. These decisions, I argue, laid the foundation for the Lesbian Herstory Archives and continue to shape it today, forty years later.
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.
Getting from Then to Now: Sustaining the Lesbian Herstory Archives as a Lesbian Organization
This article is a compilation of six narratives written by collective members of the volunteer-run Lesbian Herstory Archives, the oldest and largest collection of lesbian material in the world. Narratives draw on a yearlong series of conversations, which culminated in a panel discussion at the 40th Anniversary celebration. Authors' narratives detail the significance of the Lesbian Herstory Archives as a successful and sustainable lesbian organization. Topics covered span four decades and include: the organization's history and practice, founding and activism, the acquisition of the current space, community engagement, and processing of special collections.
The archive has been theorized as unstable and even fever-ridden, but what might it mean to deploy it in ways that counter its logic, or to activate it in ways that we might call queer? Using the example of Leah DeVun’s photographic exploration of the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives (the world’s largest LGBT research collection), this essay traces the manners in which an archive, as a repository of information, might always shore up certain histories while delimiting others. In contrast, the authors imagine using the archive badly – that is, not as a historian would, but through interpolation and anachronism, focusing on the archive’s feel and “mere” form. Rather than reconstructing the ways in which archival materials inhabit a discrete historical period, this essay explores what might it mean to focus our attention on the human agents that pull archival objects from circulation, as well as how such objects might circulate again. Ultimately, we consider an archive as an accretive space that continues to build up, and as a history in which we might live, rather than as a document of an already finished time.
Queering Archives: A roundtable discussion
Radical History Review, 2015
A Roundtable Discussion with Anjali Arondekar, Ann Cvetkovich, Christina B. Hanhardt, Regina Kunzel, Tavia Nyong’o, Juana María Rodríguez, and Susan Stryker
Radical History Review, 2015
Queer theory’s embrace of instability paints stabilizing practices as normalizing and unjust. Rather than upholding a stance of opposition by championing instability alone, what can be gleaned for queer theory by examining the tension of the in/stability dialectic? In this paper I reflect upon my own embodied experience as researcher within the social and spatial dimensions of the Lesbian Herstory Archives. Informed by critical geographical studies and queer theories, I suggest that the usefulness of in/stability—all at once together and in conflict—is the work toward justice that results when Archives sits in the juxtaposition. The resultant practice of useful in/stability suggests a turn for queer theory as it illuminates a turn in queer analyses by examining and struggling with concepts rather than succumbing to binarial mores.