GRSJ224/Feminist Archival Practice

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Feminist archival practice refers to the collection, documentation, preservation, and production of the history of feminist movements as well as woman's history more broadly. Feminist archives depart from standard practice because they have consistently exceeded standard preservationist objectives and in doing so tend to challenge how the archive is defined.[1] These collections and organizations tend to enact a larger social relevance[2], as well as draw from non-traditional sources such as memories, fiction, and private experiences.[3]

Feminist Archival practice has an official history beginning in the 1930's, when first wave feminism lost popularity.[4] Since then, feminist archives have had a general focus in the present as well as the past, often working as activist organisations alongside their archival missions. In particular, since the advent of digital technology and the advent of the "archival turn"; a movement towards a broader understanding of the archive feminist archival practice has expanded in many ways.[5] Today feminist archivists interact and utilize digital technology as well as metaphorical conceptions of the archive freely.

History

The beginning of feminist archiving is difficult to assign as this would need to account for woman collectors who accumulated traces of their activism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, outside of institutional collections. Following this, generations of women who participated in archival genres such as scrap-booking would need to be accounted for, an area of research which has not yet been done. [6]

1930's and 1940's: The WCWA and the IAV

Invitation to organize a World Center for Women’s Archives

The establishment of women's collections originated in a time of feminist decline; the 1930's and 1940's as veterans of first-wave feminism placed their private collections into institutional settings.[4] Two notable projects from these moments emerged, the World Center for Women's Archives (WCWA) in New York and the International Archives for the Women's Movement (IAV) in Amsterdam, both originating in 1935.[7]

The World Center for Women's Archives (WCWA) was launched in 1934 by Rosika Schwimmer, later joined by historian Mary Beard in effort to preserve the political work of first-wave feminism in the face of economic and political crisis following World War I.[8] The archive was established with the present in mind in addition to the past, with the initiative of including seminars and public lectures as part of it's programming alongside the collection and care of print records.[9] The WCWA project came to an end in 1939 due to a lack of resources in the face of World War II.[10] Following this print materials were either returned to their original owners or distributed to archives across the Northeast United States.

The International Archives for the Women's Movement (IAV) ran parallel to the WCWA in Amsterdam, with an emphasis on the role of the archive as a repository of documents and a producer of new knowledge. The German Security Police seized the IAV on June 12, 1940, removing all belongings of the organization as part of an effort to eliminate intellectual threat to the Nazi party. IAV materials only resurface in 1992 with the Osoboi Archive in Moscow and were repatriated to Holland, as part of the Aletta Institute for Women's History. In 2013 Aletta merged with the E-Quality Information Centre for Gender, Family and Diversity Issues to form the Atria Institute on Gender Equality and Women’s History.

These two collections informed the future of women's and feminist collections for decades to come, particularly their dedication for acting in the present.

1940's-1970's: "Traditional Collections"

Suzanne Hildenbrand refers to collections established before the 1970s as "traditional" as they were primarily concerned with the past and operated within standard archival practice of the time.[11]

1970's-1990's: Second-Wave Collections

Suzanne Hildenbrand describes a trend of collections emerging in the 1970's and 1980's which focused on "women's present", sharing WCWA's mandate. These collections provide documentation for social change rather than historical scholarship, fueled by a revitalized second-wave feminist movement. These organisations were sites of archivization, education, and community organizing, work that is continued today to varying extents. A list of noteworthy collections fitting this description includes the following:

Joan Nestle, Polly Thistlethwaite and others of the Herstory Lesbian Archives sorting files.

Early 1990's: Archival Turn

The "Archival Turn" refers to a major shift in archival studies and theory which took place around the early 1990's. Theorist Jacques Derrida, particularly his 1995 work Archive Fever[12] is commonly attributed as the initiator of the turn. This claim is disputed by contemporary scholars, who now understand the archival turn as a long-term and wide-arching event, merely described by Derrida.[13] The timing of the turn follows the digital turn, which describes a shift in technology and epistemology which introduces the Archive into everyday life[14], as well as introducing new levels of accessibility to information.

The turn marks the shift from the Archive as a destination for knowledge that is already produced[5], or a repository for documents[15], rather elevating the Archive to a new analytic status that is worthy of scrutiny on it's own, a subject of study.[13] The archive becomes a site where knowledge is created as much as stored.[16] Since the turn, the Archive has been studied and understood through a myriad of forms including as a theory, curatorial trope, poetic form, subject of inquiry, site of research and site of critical practice.[17] Archives are expanded from traditionally understood documents to being also being able to draw from memories, fiction, and private experiences.[3]

Through the Archival Turn, Feminists born past the 1960's no longer interact with the Archive as a barrier but instead as a practice that is central to knowledge making, cultural production, and activism.[18] For this generation the archive is employed as a tool of knowledge production and legitimization rather than a site where marginalized voices need to be recovered from.[18] Through these processes feminist archival practice is moved into the present as a way to engage with legacies and trauma that exist in contemporary moments.[19]

Modes of Contemporary Feminist Archival Practice

Conventional Archiving

Conventional Archives are those archives that exist within the context of large institutions, such as universities and libraries, and typically contain physical and digital records collected and cataloged according to standard archival practice. The Society of American Archivists, an authority in such practice defines "Archives" as:

Materials created or received by a person, family, or organization, public or private, in the conduct of their affairs and preserved because of the enduring value contained in the information they contain or as evidence of the functions and responsibilities of their creator, especially those materials maintained using the principles of provenance, original order, and collective control; permanent records.[20]

Conventional archival practice has been criticized for the privileging of physical materiality as historical source above all else,[21] the notion of the archive as a complete source of knowledge,[21] and the lack of personal narrative[22] among other criticisms. A critique of contemporary feminist archival collections is that although these archives can collect "low culture", the process of collection renders it "high".[23]

Although restrictive in these ways, conventional archives can serve as an authorizing structure for feminist histories, a method to legitimize feminist voices in the public sphere.[24] Conventional archival methods can also be modified in service of feminist, post-colonial, and queer ideologies. Several examples of this kind of conventional, institutionally approved archiving which continues to serve a Feminist present occur at the zine collections at Duke University's Sallie Bingham Center for Women's history and culture, the Riot Grrrl Collection at NYU's Fales Library and Special Collections, and the Barnard Zine Library.

Digital Archiving

Digital technologies act as conditioning contexts for our understanding of history and historicity in the twenty-first century[25], and as such the Feminist-centered archive is affected.

The digital has been considered to bring the past into the present and interrupt the linear narrative histories which have been created largely through a male, white, and Western understanding of events.[26]. The move to digital also subverts the historical and archival professions which have been largely male dominated until relatively recently.[26] The introduction of the digital into modern lives has seen the "memory boom"; a rapid increase in self-documenting practices.[27] Through these practices, people that would not consider themselves archivists are enabled to be "miniarchivists" in an information management society.[28] The digitized historical condition allows for increased contact and accessibility to different historical times and marginalized peoples within those times.

The digitization of physical files can also work to provide universal access to information that would not be otherwise accessible to the public, allowing the work of feminist archivists to be propagated outside of official institutions. Through this work, the past and present of feminism coexists within a close proximity of online space allowing contemporary feminists access to the histories that precede them.[29]

Drawbacks of digital archiving, particularly the self-documenting nature is fragility in it's tendency to update, migrate, disappear, as well as the compression of images and audio files.[26]

Alternative Reading of Pre-Existing Archival Sources

A key influence in contemporary feminist archival practice is the creative and critical reading of institutionally situated archives "against the grain" of the priorities and perceptions of those who wrote them. [30] The high culture of conventional archiving can be read "upside-down" in methods documented by a number of scholars.[30]

Anjali Arondekar's "Radical Interpretive" approach Acknowledges the incomplete nature and political underpinnings of archives by encouraging the reader to detach themselves from the official claims of the archive. Through radical interpretation documents written by those who hold power remain as the representative of this group rather than the entity (eg. nation) as a whole.[31]

Eve Sedgewick's "Reparative Reading" approach counters the "paranoid" approach to reading which dominates and controls established fields. By focusing on what knowledge can do rather than what it is, one can recover and assemble objects independently of outside structures, aiding the "inchoate self".[32]

Heather Love's "Reading Backwards" method allows the reader to find texts which create emotional resonance towards the isolated, queer subject. This method circumvents ideas of linear historical narratives, allowing historians to interact with pre-gay liberation figures as meaningful examples of queer subjectivity.[33]

Metaphorical Archiving

The concept of the Archive existing beyond the means of a digital or physical collection has come to surface within the past decade, and has been motivated by subjects marginalized within institutional archives, particularly taken up by the queer, post-colonial feminist movement.[34] These metaphorical archives redefine what historical evidence can be and how it can be utilized while exposing the limitations of the physical archive.[34] Metaphorical archiving acknowledges the personal perspectives of the author and enables the use of personal experience and artifacts as evidence, mirroring the feminist sentiment of "the personal is political".[21]

Scholars have utilized the metaphorical archive in a myriad of examples:

  • Antoinette Burton introduces the concept of the home and private domestic experiences and memories as an archive[35], expanding her definition as broad, fragmentary and incomplete.
  • Gayatri Gopinath uses bodies and "queer spectorial spaces" as alternative texts which contribute to a "queer diasporic archive"[36], which includes communities that do not leave textual archives.
  • Judith Halberstan discusses the "Brandon Archive", positioning the aftermath of Brandon Teena's murder as a transgender archive of "emotion and trauma", allowing a queerly gendered narrative to emerge from the evidence that remains.[37]
  • Halberstan also names a "queer sub-cultural archive" that can record the subterranean scenes, night clubs, and feelting trends which constitute queer sub-cultures. They argue that queer lives can only be effectively archived in a theoretical sense, for the archive to become a "floating signifier for the kinds of lives implied" by paper documentation.[38]
  • Cvetkovich advocates for the book-as-archive, positioning the book as the most effective vessel in communicating unspeakable and unrepresentable trauma, particularily in comparison to the conventional archive. She terms this kind of practice as "an archive of feelings".[39]

Non-exhaustive list of Digital and Publicly Accessible Feminist Archives

The following is a list of feminist-centered archives and collections which are available to the public through digital form.

General Collections

Specialized Collections

Digitized Journals

References

  1. Eichhorn 2013, p.31
  2. Ashton, Jenna (2017). "Feminist Archiving [a manifesto continued]: Skilling for Activism and Organising". Australian Feminist Studies. 32: 126–149.
  3. 3.0 3.1 Burton, Antoinette M. (2003). Dwelling in The Archive. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 144.
  4. 4.0 4.1 Hildenbrand, Suzanne (1986). Women’s Collections: Libraries, Archives and Consciousness. New York: Haworth Press.
  5. 5.0 5.1 Eichhorn, Kate (2013). The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. p. 3. ISBN 1439909512.
  6. Eichhorn 2013, p.32.
  7. Eichhorn 2013, p.32.
  8. Eichhorn 2013, p.33.
  9. Eichhorn 2013, p.36.
  10. Eichhorn 2014, p.39.
  11. Hildenbrand, Suzanne (1986). Women's collections: libraries, archives, and consciousness. Haworth Press.
  12. Derrida, Jacques (1995). Archive fever: A Freudian impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  13. 13.0 13.1 Stoler, Ann Laura (2010). Along the archival grain: Epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense. Princeton: Princeton University Press. p. 44. ISBN 140083547X.
  14. Eichhorn, Kate (Spring 2008). "Archival genres: gathering texts and reading spaces" (PDF). Invisible Culture. 12: 1–10.
  15. Eichhorn 2013, p. 2.
  16. SOURCE
  17. Eichhorn 2013, p. 4.
  18. 18.0 18.1 Eichhorn 2013, p. 3.
  19. Eichhorn 2013, p.5.
  20. "Archives". Society of American Archivists. Retrieved November 25, 2018.
  21. 21.0 21.1 21.2 Cooper 2016, p.451.
  22. Kempadoo, Roshini (2008). "Amendments: A fictional re-imagining of the Trinidad archive". Journal of Media Practice. 9: 87.
  23. Halberstam, Judith (2011). The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. p. 20.
  24. Eichhorn 2013, p.15.
  25. Withers, Deborah (2015). Feminism, Digital Culture and the Politics of Transmission: Theory, Practice and Cultural Heritage. Rowman & Littlefield International. p. 126.
  26. 26.0 26.1 26.2 Withers 2015, p.127
  27. Garde-Hansen, Joanne; Hoskins, Andrew; Reading, Anna (2009). Save as... digital memories. Springer.
  28. Parikka, Jussi (2012). "Archival Media Theory: An Introduction to Wolfgang Ernst's Media Archaeology". Digital Memory and the Archive: Wolfgang Ernst. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 1–2.
  29. Samer, Roxanne (2014). "Revising 're-vision': Documenting 1970s feminisms and the queer potentiality of digital feminist archives". Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology. 5.
  30. 30.0 30.1 Stoler 2010, p.46-47.
  31. Arondekar, Anjali (2005). "Without a Trace: Sexuality and the Colonial Archive". Journal of the History of Sexuality. 14: 15–19.
  32. Sedgeick, Eve (2003). Touching Feeling: Affect, Performativity, Pedagogy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
  33. Love, Heather (2008). Feeling Backward: The Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  34. 34.0 34.1 Cooper, Danielle (2016). "Imagining Something Else Entirely: Metaphorical Archives in Feminist Theory". Women's Studies. 45:5: 450.
  35. Burton, Antoinette M. (2003). Dwelling in The Archive. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  36. Gopinath, Gayatri (2005). Impossible desires: Queer diasporas and South Asian public cultures. Duke University Press.
  37. Halberstam, Judith (2005). In a queer time and place: Transgender bodies, subcultural lives. New York, NY: NYU Press. pp. 23–24.
  38. Halberstan 2005, p.161-169.
  39. Cvetkovich, Ann (2003). An archive of feelings: Trauma, sexuality, and lesbian public cultures. Duke University Press. pp. 7-10.