Feminist Archive Research Articles

Articulating and Defending our Vulnerabilities: Interrogations of the Feminist Archive

Articulating and Defending our Vulnerabilities: Interrogations of the Feminist Archive

Decolonizing Feminism in the #MeToo Era

This article explores what it means to decolonize feminism in the university today. Pushing against the idea that feminism in the university is disengaged from broader struggles, the article suggests a complex relationship between feminism as a knowledge project and as a political one. While feminism has had a long-standing decolonizing imperative within the university, equally challenging has been the decolonization of feminism. The #MeToo era has foregrounded the universalizing horizon of feminism, posing new challenges for this project. Arguing for a more complex understanding of generations and the politics of location in these debates, the article draws on a recent and not so recent feminist archive, such as the articulation of ideas of intersectionality and the ways in which multiple feminisms have been understood, in order to explore decolonizing feminism today.

Feminist Archives of Possibility

Feminist Archives of Possibility

Victorian Women’s Liberation and Lesbian Feminist Archives Inc

With this paper, I first of all acknowledge the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as the traditional owners of the land in Australia. I go on to mention early radical actions by lesbians and womyn, including setting up the Queen Victoria Women’s Hospital in 1896, and how lesbians and feminists in Victoria joined the worldwide Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) to fight for womyn’s rights from 1969 onwards. The paper explains why there was a need to set up a WLM Archives in the first place, the herstory of the Victorian Women’s Liberation and Lesbian Feminist Archives (VWLLFA) and the reasons for maintaining and adding to the collection into the new millennium.The Victorian Women’s Liberation and Lesbian Feminist Archives Inc was established in 1983 with the objective of collecting any and all of the material relating to the WLM in Victoria from 1969 onwards; to store, archive and preserve this material for posterity and make it accessible for research and other purposes.Now housed at the University of Melbourne Archives, the VWLLFA is a unique record of the enormous amount of political work lesbians and feminists in Victoria have done over the past 50 years.

Queer Rebellion in the Novels of Michelle Cliff: Intersectionality and Sexual Modernity by Kaisa Ilmonen

Reviewed by: Queer Rebellion in the Novels of Michelle Cliff: Intersectionality and Sexual Modernity by Kaisa Ilmonen Mary Zaborskis ILMONEN, KAISA. Queer Rebellion in the Novels of Michelle Cliff: Intersectionality and Sexual Modernity. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017. 272 pp. £61.99 hardcover. Kaisa Ilmonen's recent monograph explores "textual rebellion" (3) in Michelle Cliff's three major novels, Abeng (1985), No Telephone to Heaven (1987), and Free Enterprise (1993). Ilmonen reads these three texts as a quasi-trilogy, arguing that reading Free Enterprise "in a continuum" (4) with the previous two enables her to trace "an evolving line regarding the construction of identity" (4) for queer diasporic women of color operating within and/or bearing the legacies of colonization. Drawing on women of color feminism, queer studies, postcolonial theory, cultural studies, and Caribbean scholarship, Ilmonen demonstrates how Cliff is part of a genealogy of queer women of color whose texts feature journeys to "feel at home" (3) when home as a literal place and an affective site has been compromised. Attempts to find home reveal home is not entirely geographical, but can be temporal, linguistic, relational, and bodily. Ilmonen argues that Cliff has "been read too narrowly" (245) and mines her texts for their representations of racialized sexuality, alternative kinship, and home-making practices among diasporic women. These representations are part of the "textual rebellion" she identifies as "creating a liberatory poetics" (16) for the girls and women of the novels. "Textual rebellion" names a range of strategies Cliff's novels employ in order to counter colonial, heteropatriarchal paradigms that delimit Caribbean subjectivities, epistemologies, and futures. Textual rebellion materializes in narration, narrative structure, language, characters that break with gender and sexual norms, and speech acts. The omniscient narrator of Abeng who teaches Jamaican history, the "nonlinearity" (59) of No Telephone to Heaven, and the "feminist archive" (67) of "forgotten…abolitionist women" (67) in Free Enterprise are all examples of textual rebellion in Cliff's oeuvre. Ilmonen pays special attention to the women who populate the novels and particularly to the "othermothers" (174), women who surround the texts' protagonists and model resistance against heteronormative mandates of motherhood. Textual rebellion enables representations that rebel against both the colonial authority and the white mythologies that erase Caribbean histories. In this way, Ilmonen makes the case for a mimetic relationship between the texts' formal features and their political aims. She names these formal features as creating "counter-stories" (32), "counter-discourse[s]" (120), "counter-narrative[s]" (128), "counter-myths" (129), and a "counter-mythos" (135). Ilmonen importantly notes that these multiple types [End Page 307] of counterforces aren't merely "opposition[al]" (243) but instead disrupt totalizing narratives of colonization that attempt to structure marginalized persons' realities. Ilmonen examines how Cliff's novels reveal the centrality of sexuality to colonization and how gender expression and sexual desire can counter these colonizing forces. In this way, the body and its relations are sites of decolonization in the texts; Ilmonen thus reads queerness as one route toward decolonization. Cliff's textual rebellions are queer rebellions because they break norms that colonization renders natural and stable. Ilmonen identifies queerness in Cliff's novels as "something which is inappropriate, questionable, other, and strange" (41). However, she also calls her own reading practice "queer" (41). Ilmonen invokes David Bell and Gill Valentine to think of "queer reading as 'daring epistemological guerrilla warfare' which is an act of 'intervention, contestation, resistance, subversion, interrogation'" (42). The metaphorical invocation of guerrilla warfare to describe queer interpretation resonates with Ilmonen's reading of Clare Savage's literal participation in guerrilla warfare in No Telephone to Heaven. The guerrilla group that Clare joins models alternative kinship, "confront[s] the 'fake archaelogy' of Jamaican history" (101), and is a "site of radical agency for Clare" (64). In these ways, the guerrilla group is queer because they break with norms regarding heteronormative families and colonial versions of history. While Clare dies fighting, Ilmonen queerly reads her death as subversive because it ultimately returns her to "the Jamaican ancestral home" and "free[s]" her "from all language" (142). This tension between liberation and violence reveals that queer is not always inflected with a...

Remediating disability activism in the lesbian feminist archive

This article argues that U.S.-based lesbian feminist cultural work of the 1980s constitutes a generative – but underutilized – archive for scholarship on the intersection of feminist, queer and disability studies. Specifically, this article uses a May 1981 special issue of the feminist newspaper off our backs (oob) on ‘Women With Disabilities’ to historicize the emergence of a network of lesbian feminist disability activists. Tucked between the pages of this special issue of oob are, for example, Connie Panzarino’s vision for a non-monogamous community of disabled women and a reproduction of Tee Corinne’s solarized photograph of a woman in a wheelchair with her able-bodied lover. In exploring a small and largely forgotten network of lesbian disability activists, this article reads their cultural work as world making projects that model a mode of activist praxis and theory writing for the present moment.

‘Civil disobedience’ in the archive: documenting women’s activism and experience through the Sheffield Feminist Archive

The study investigated what motivates feminist activists to engage in archiving and memory collecting activity, such as oral history projects, and what form such activity takes, including the extent to which they collaborate with formal archives. A case study of a feminist archiving project was undertaken: the Sheffield Feminist Archive project. Qualitative, semi-structured interviews with the five most active members of the project were conducted. The participants in this study saw their activity as a part of their feminist activism. They were motivated by a desire to increase the presence of women and feminists in the archival record. They hoped that the material they collected would help to change the way the public see women, feminism and gender relations. They chose to collaborate with a formal archive, Sheffield Archives, from the start of their archiving activity. They felt that this brought benefits to the project which enabled them to meet their aims. These included status and public identity, visibility and archival expertise. Despite their limited time, the participants saw themselves as having an active and multifaceted role in the collaboration including being a link with the feminist community, collecting material for the archive, publicizing the archive and challenging archival practice.

The Australian Women’s Archives Project: Creating and Co-curating Community Feminist Archives in a Post-custodial Age

ABSTRACTThe Australian Women’s Archives Project (AWAP) was established in 2000 by the National Foundation for Australian Women (NFAW) as a response to the mounting problem of what to do with Australian women’s records in a digital and post-custodial age. This article traces the AWAP’s development within the changing context of archival science over that period. Using the insights of feminist archival theory it explores how a feminist approach to archival practice can inform thinking about how to manage community archives, empowering those who create them to participate in societal memory with their own voice and values. It shows how the AWAP is a fledgling example of where distinctions between archivist, records creator, subject and user are blurred in the quest for a space that facilitates co-creation of archival infrastructure.

Archiving the Other or Reading Online Photography as Queer Ephemera

ABSTRACTDigital spaces have opened up new arenas in which to explore the emotions and ephemera of queer life. Building on the work of queer archivists, this article looks at how the online environments might allow us to build accessible queer, feminist archives of emotion and ephemera. I examine three photo essays – Meg Allen’s Butch, Maika Elan’s The Pink Choice and Christa Holka’s I Was There – in order to explore the role of the digital and visual in capturing queer moments and also to understand the importance of nostalgia and community for recording the important histories of queer women’s lives.

Queering the Community Music Archive

ABSTRACTArchiving has become an increasingly important practice in the preservation of feminist and queer histories. In this article, we pay specific attention to the emerging body of literature on feminist archives of popular music, many of which are community-based, DIY initiatives. These community-led archives aim to comprehensively collect the ephemeral, intangible heritage of feminist music cultures that have traditionally been excluded in popular music canons and marginalised by mainstream heritage institutions. The literature revealed that feminist music archives function as much more than spaces for preservation – they are affective as much as they are intellectual, and they are key sites for activism and community-building. These two themes – activism and affectivity – thread together the body of literature, providing both the driving force behind these DIY archives and their potentiality in the communities of interest they cater to. The community archivists accounted for in the literature have all engaged in practices of queering the community music archive; taking the mainstream heritage institution as a model and rebuilding it from the ground up, renegotiating its boundaries and notions of linear history, and reconfiguring its practices to account for lives lived in the margins of the mainstream.

Callaloo: A Forum for Academics and Creative Writers

Callaloo: A Forum for Academics and Creative Writers* Margo Natalie Crawford (bio), Vievee Francis (bio), Joshua Bennett (bio), Dagmawi Woubshet (bio), and Jeremy M. Clark (bio) Brent Hayes Edwards was also a presenter on this panel. He provided Callaloo with an essay version of his remarks (see pgs. 67–71 in this issue). CRAWFORD: I am Margo Crawford and I am at Cornell University. I’m going to start today with a real focus on Charles Rowell’s interviews. When I think about the tremendous work that you have done, Charles Rowell, with Callaloo, I think we need an entire book or more than one book that puts together the interviews. The interviews set me in motion. The interviews made me understand the connection between the academic and the creative. Charles Rowell’s interviews break the boundaries between the creative and the critical. I want to start today with two moments (in two of his interviews) when the practice of a black feminist archive emerges in the interviews. For example, when he is interviewing Octavia Butler, and he asks, “Will you talk about what it was like for you in the early days as opposed to present times? You, a Black woman, writing science fiction?” Another example (in another interview of Butler) is the moment when he takes us to an interiority of black feminist praxis, and asks, “Will you allow me to enter the privacy of your writing space and stand over your shoulder while you’re working and observe the process while you work?” Think about such humility. We hear, “Will you allow me?” I think of those tremendously interesting moments when Charles Rowell’s interviews become so much more than just the standard interviews. We see all of the creative and critical energy coming together. His editing of Callaloo as this thriving and prominent journal continues to gather the most innovative, diasporic literature is indeed that zone that Fred Moten describes as “frames cutting frames” without any settlement. As Fred Moten teaches us, they keep cutting. Rowell’s 1974 interview of Larry Neal was the gem that sparked my first engagements with Neal’s dual position as theorist and poet. And today, I want to use—in these fifteen minutes I have—Larry Neal’s Hoodoo Hollerin’ Beebop Ghosts of 1974 as a means of opening up the Callaloo hoodoo hollerin’ beebop practice of creating liminal spaces, where the creative and the critical become what Larry Neal in his afterword to Black Fire considers the post-double consciousness state of decolonizing the mind. Larry Neal’s worrying of the lines—thank you, Cheryl Wall—takes the form in his visually experimental essay “Some Reflections on the Black Aesthetic” of intersecting rows and columns, instead of [End Page 54] the typical paragraph structure. The layering and crossing of lines in “Some Reflections” create a visual and verbal sense of depth. As Neal the poet meets Neal the critic in this manifesto, it is clear that he is using lines and layers to dramatize the title of his poetry volume, Black Boogaloo. In Charles Rowell’s interview of Neal, Rowell asks, “What do you mean by ‘Black Boogaloo’? I know Boogaloo to be a dance. You also use the adjective, black, before it. Boogaloo suggests something black or something related to Black people.” [Laughter] As this interview becomes the co-creation of Boogaloo, Larry Neal hears the redundancy in “Black Boogaloo.” I think Charles Rowell teaches him. [Laughter] Neal tells Rowell, “Maybe I should’ve just called it Boogaloo, it’s superfluous.” [Laughter] “It’s superfluous to put black on Boogaloo.” Like this interview, Callaloo has always been that space of co-creation of the creative and the critical. Neal saw Hoodoo Hollerin’ Bebop Ghosts after Black Boogaloo as the letting go of the superfluous, as a move to Boogaloo that did not have to announce itself as black. Neal argues in his afterword to the 1968 foundational Black Arts anthology, Black Fire, that the Black Arts Movement is a conscious move past the trauma of double consciousness. Larry Neal insists, “Most contemporary black writers of the last few years, the literature of the young, has been aimed at...

Gallot Fanny, 2015, En découdre. Comment les ouvrières ont révolutionné le travail et la société , Paris, La Découverte, 288 p.

Gallot Fanny, 2015, En decoudre. Comment les ouvrieres ont revolutionne le travail et la societe [Raring for a fight: How women factory workers revolutionized work and society in France], Paris, La Decouverte, 288 p.This work, which the author derived from her doctoral thesis, focuses on women factory workers hired in the late 1960s at a time when the French economy was still growing; many were laid off early in the 2000s, a time of de-industrialization and factory closures. Fanny Gallot's undertaking is ambitious: to reconstitute the contours of an entire generation of women workers using a socio-historical approach that is both cross-sectional and dynamic. Cross-sectional in that the analysis is not restricted to the factory world but extends to the continuous balancing act women had to perform between work and family life; dynamic in that studying a generation is a means not only of measuring changes in female factory work organization but also of tracking the experiences and demands of women working in conditions that grew constantly harsher over the period.Gallot draws primarily on an in-depth study of two companies: Chantelle, a maker of women's lingerie, and Moulinex, a home appliance manufacturer. The companies were distinct not just in terms of business sector and products but also the profile of their women workers. At Moulinex they were from rural farms in Lower Normandy, whereas at Chantelle, whose main factory was in the industrial region of Nantes, more were of working-class origin. Another major difference: whereas the Chantelle workforce was exclusively female, at Moulinex it was mixed. But despite the heterogeneity of these women's living, working and action conditions, the book is concerned to portray a shared experience, the collective culture of women factory workers. Hired as very young unskilled workers, these women aged together in the factory and experienced the same life events at the same ages. Their long careers at a single company ultimately created a feeling of attachment to the factory and its products. Strong ties were also created, though they do not seem to have withstood the shock of factory closures and restructuration very well.The materials used to study Moulinex and Chantelle (and a few other companies mentioned occasionally, such as Lejaby [another women's lingerie manufacturer]) are extremely varied. They include written sources (ministerial, company and union archives; feminist archives; women workers' own written accounts); oral sources (interviews with workers, some conducted by the author herself) and audio-visual sources (documentaries and fiction films). While events are viewed primarily through the women's eyes, source diversity enables the author to apprehend changes in public policy, management stances and union debates on female employment, as well as the difficult encounter between the feminist movement and women factory workers.Gallot combines analysis of class and gender positions. In the course of the twelve chapters, each focused on a different theme, she probes the social and gender-based divisions operative not only in factory work itself but also in union activism and the family sphere. She thus brings to light the range of constraints these women had to cope with: their confinement to relatively low-skilled, lowpaid jobs despite policies for promoting occupational equality; the devaluing of their skills, considered natural and remunerated less than men's; increasingly harsh working conditions, including work pace acceleration, permanent production uncertainties, paternalism and/or the rigidity of an almost exclusively male hierarchy; the physical discomfort that comes of performing the same movements and assuming the same positions all day long; sexual harassment by male superiors, considered an ordinary occurrence; the daily strain of organizing and doing both housework and paid work; the impediment to mobilizing represented by having a new house and a mortgage to pay off; possibly having a husband who did not look kindly on an activist wife who was spending less and less time at home, spoke out in public in some cases, and who kept company with other men when occupying factories. …

Postmaternal, Postwork and the Maternal Death Drive

ABSTRACTThe term ‘postmaternal’ has recently emerged as a way to articulate the effects of neoliberalism on the public devaluing of caring labour [Stephens, Julie. 2011. Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory, and Care. New York: Columbia University Press]. This term suggests a valorisation of values associated with care and mothering that have traditionally been gendered and rely on a heterosexist matrix for their intelligibility. Marxist feminist writers during the 1970s struggled with the question of the particular form of care that reproduction entails, and this feminist archive has been recently extended to a discussion of ‘post-work’ [Weeks, Kathi. 2011. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke], in which calls for the valuing of unpaid work as a viable form of labour have been reanimated. In this article I examine the relation between these two analytic categories – ‘postmaternal’ and ‘postwork’. Both categories require that we re-think some of the most trenchant issues in feminist thought – the sexual division of labour, the place of ‘reproduction’ in psychic and social life, and the possibilities for a new feminist commons.

Ephemeral Feminist Histories and the Politics of Transmission within Digital Culture

ABSTRACTThis article uses the work of Bernard Stiegler to understand how widespread digitisation has influenced the transmission of ephemeral and marginalised feminist histories and archives, using as a case study my experience of creating a low-budget feminist digital archive in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Women's Liberation Music Archive (WLMA). I explore how the WLMA benefitted from unique transmission conditions enabled by digitisation, namely widened access to recorded matter that had become inoperable within feminist communities, technically, socially and culturally. I then go on to examine two areas that pose both threats and possibilities for the sustainability of digital archives in the long term. The first issue relates to the position of low-financed digital archives within the volatile dynamics of change that propel the innovation-driven market economy. The second relates to metadata and how digital technologies present an opportunity to re-think the terms of categorisation used to describe information within networks of association and reference. Finally, I argue that acquiring the technical skills to take care of digital information will perform a key role ensuring digital archives can survive in the long term.

An archival feminist pedagogy: unlearning and objects as affective knowledge companions

This paper is based on workshops conducted with students at Bristol University with some of the materials from the Feminist Archive South. We explore how the sensory wonder of the archives enriched and reshaped the practice of feminist pedagogy especially with regard to the interface between ontology and epistemology. We argue that the feminist archive is an important resource which incites us to shift our focus on the process of knowledge production as stories encountered in the archive can challenge the authority and coherence of dominant feminist stories. This can produce feelings of disorientation which act as important moments through which different kinds of feminist knowledge can emerge. Our approach places feelings at the centre of encounters with knowledge because of the mutual entanglement of thinking and feeling rendered salient in the feminist archive. Finally, these processes facilitate different kinds of student–teacher collaboration, with students positioned as co-researchers working to document and interpret the feelings, knowledge and transformations that emerge from the encounter-with the feminist archive. The objects we encountered worked as knowledge companions to stimulate collaborative (un)learning and to produce unique forms of affective knowledge.

Tangents (of Desire)

Does current scholarship shun or embrace what seems aleatory or “beside the point” in early modern prose, especially those elements that could be said to convey affect, tone, emotion, desire? What does it do with lyric’s indeterminate rhetoricity? Through the figure of touch and the contingencies of the tangent, this paper explores textual instances in early modern Continental literature where reading poses problems of interpretation that cannot be resolved into determinate meaning and that raise the question of how to “read” what moderns call “desire,” especially queer desire, in early modern poetry and prose. François Rabelais’s inscription of woman as writing, the tortuous fashioning of the lyric “I” as it travels between Petrarch and Louise Labé, and the sparing narrative of Marguerite de Navarre bear fragmentary traces of what moderns might call a queer feminist archive, and yet none yield positive (or empirical) “knowledge” about gendered and sexual practices and subjectivities. Rather, they inscribe modalities of desire that challenge scholars of sexuality to attend to the excess and indeterminacy that eludes efforts to capture and “represent” objects of knowledge, whether “early” or “modern.”

Speculative Before the Turn: Reintroducing Feminist Materialist Performativity

This is a moment for new conversations and new synergies. While a wealth of contemporary speculative materialisms is currently circulating in academia, art and activism, in this article we focus upon a few ethico-political stakes in the different, loosely affiliated conceptions of ontologies of immanence. More specifically, we are concerned here with the very meaning of speculation itself after the many new headings of immanent ontologies, such as object-oriented ontology (OOO), speculative realism or the (feminist) new materialisms. Our concern is a feminist concern, as some of the immanent ontologies seem to actively connect with the varied feminist archive of speculative thought while others seem to actively disconnect from the very same archive. What does this imply for the feminist scholar who is in want of tools for navigating the contemporary landscape of ontologies of immanence? Here, we highlight some important overlapping as well as poignant clashes between various feminist materialist genealogies and OOO/speculative realism. In our discussion we underline the importance of situatedness and context, relationality and affinity—and the possibility for rewiring relations—amid a plethora of lively historiographies and emergent post-disciplinary movements and world-makings.

Revising ‘Re-vision’: Documenting 1970s Feminisms and the Queer Potentiality of Digital Feminist Archives

Revising ‘Re-vision’: Documenting 1970s Feminisms and the Queer Potentiality of Digital Feminist Archives

Archiving the feminist self: reflections on the personal papers of Merle Thornton

Over the last couple of decades, the modern Australian women’s movement has been the subject of history, which includes the creation of feminist archives in various locations This essay analyses one particular collection – the personal papers of the feminist activist, Merle Thornton – as an account of the making and meaning of a feminist archive. I wish to explore the ways in which the feminist subject impacts on the archive. Accordingly, I analyse the archival process, as well as the contents of Thornton’s personal papers. What emerge are the difficulties of negotiating the public–private divide for this feminist activist.

The Geopolitics of the Cold War and Narratives of Inclusion: Excavating a Feminist Archive. By Kelly Coogan-Gehr. New York: Macmillan, 2011.A Community of Disagreement: Feminism in the University. By Danielle Bouchard. New York: Lang, 2012.Object Lessons. By Robyn Wiegman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.

The Geopolitics of the Cold War and Narratives of Inclusion: Excavating a Feminist Archive. By Kelly Coogan-Gehr. New York: Macmillan, 2011.A Community of Disagreement: Feminism in the University. By Danielle Bouchard. New York: Lang, 2012.Object Lessons. By Robyn Wiegman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.