See a Problem?
Then, there are artists like Zoe Beloff, who create imagined archives with found materials of various origins. But of course, despite all these interventions, there are actual people working in archives as archivists and researchers, and this is something that needs to stay at the forefront.
Recently, more and more archivists have started to sign their finding aids. First, I think it is too soon to say whether or not the recent recession in the US and the activism it eventually gave rise too had a specific impact on feminist activism.
- The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order?
- The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order.
- SOULSPEAK: VOLUME I!
In Canada, many feminist presses and journals relied on government funding. By the mid s, most of these organizations had lost their funding, making it difficult to persist. More broadly, across North America, feminist small presses, like all small presses, struggled to respond to a changing book market. Small presses, including the feminist and lesbian small presses established in the s, were part of a publishing network that included independent bookstores.
In the increasingly profit-driven book industry that developed in the s, both these publishers and these small distributors and retailers suffered. I would also say that many feminist scholars of my generation have actively pursued positions outside Gender Studies precisely because feminist scholarship, at least in some institutional contexts, continues to be marginalized. Of course, this was the case for many women writers, but feminist publishing in the s and s also included many other voices, and they certainly were not all academics or professional writers.
Years ago, I met a woman who told me about running away from home in the s at the age of 14 or She ended up at a lesbian feminist commune where she was trained to operate a printing press. Reaching an audience with shared political goals was often more important for these women than reaching a mass audience. The presses were about making books, but they were also structures that held communities together and sometimes tore them apart.
There was a lot of politics and emotion and sweat equity involved in these initiatives. Neoliberalism made this sort of utopian and mostly, unprofitable work more difficult. These distinctions may not be important to scholars, but they are important to professionals in the field because books and one-of-a-kind documents are housed in different types of collections and are subject to different types of classification than books.
Most obviously, because libraries and archives impact knowledge production in different ways, researchers need to understand and appreciate this in order to enter these worlds as investigators. Crowdfunding only works to the extent that you have access to a community with money that is willing to support your cause. Radical politics and marginal cultural practices have historically been a hard sell and of course, marginalized communities rarely have a lot of money.
Dykes have historically had very little financial capital, with the exception of a few mythic anonymous spinsters I have yet to meet one , but despite this marginal economic position, between and , the Lesbian Herstory Archives saved enough money to buy a brownstone in Brooklyn. The women at the LHA were arguably crowdsourcing and crowdfunding decades before Indiegogo. I think it is important to recognize that while concepts like crowdfunding may appear new, their roots can often be found in pre-digital radical communities of practice. Some of these materials I collected in the context of earlier research projects.
- The archival turn in feminism : outrage in order | EIGE!
- Samenvatting.
- Interview with Kate Eichhorn, Author of The Archival Turn in Feminism;
Eventually, I came to appreciate that I was amassing a sort of history of feminist and queer print culture from the mid 20th century onwards, and as a result, I started to actively fill in the gaps by acquiring specific items and collections. But at some point, it seemed like a shame to have this sitting in my home. The opportunity to leave Toronto, where most people have a lot of personal space and storage, for New York, made relocating all these materials urgent.
The York University Archive and Special Collections agreed to take the materials in , and I am happy to have them housed at a university known for its commitment to queer and gender studies research. I know that I am not a historian. But I am an archaeologist and genealogist in the Foucauldian sense. But I also think about myself as an ethnographer.
In this Book
I bring all of this to bear on my research in archives and textual communities. In the world of library science, cataloging is integral, but it is something few readers, even few scholars, have given much thought to.
When a book arrives in a library, it is given subject headings these headings have been approved by the Library of Congress. Sometimes, librarians also enter item-level descriptions for specific books and documents. As readers, we rely on these headings and descriptions to access books. If you look more carefully, hundreds of these items are zines not books, and they are housed in the Columbia University Library system, so you know they are at Barnard.
KATE EICHHORN, The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order | Sheffield | Archivaria
I suggest here that this has more potential for social change than digitization of individual documents, because rendering a document visible in a meta-catalog means that that single document now has the potential to become visible in a myriad of different contexts. By contrast, one can digitize a document and make it available online, but as we all know, if the document is not properly tagged, it will never be retrieved, no one will see it.
I agree that that is a provocative statement, but by the time I completed my book this is the conclusion I had reached. One of the surprising and perhaps, depressing conclusions I reached while working on this book was that private universities, especially universities we might consider more established or elite, also appear to be more amendable to accepting large activist collections. The reason is simple. They have the money and resources to process and promote these collections. I was entirely unaware of this history when I started writing the book, but yes, what I discovered was a repeated history of accumulation, collapse, dispersal and redeployment.
For permissions, please e-mail: You do not currently have access to this article. You could not be signed in.
Sign In Forgot password? Don't have an account? Sign in via your Institution Sign in. Purchase Subscription prices and ordering Short-term Access To purchase short term access, please sign in to your Oxford Academic account above. This article is also available for rental through DeepDyve. Email alerts New issue alert.
Interview with Kate Eichhorn, Author of The Archival Turn in Feminism
Receive exclusive offers and updates from Oxford Academic. Related articles in Google Scholar. Citing articles via Google Scholar. Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements.