Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Commons^™

What Is A Lesbian Document? Platforming Archival Description, Documents, And History In Sweden, Rachel Pierce

Proceedings from the Document Academy

As Joanna Drucker (2014) convincingly argues, “Most information visualizations are acts of interpretation masquerading as presentation" (p. 10). This article investigates the visuality and built-in argumentations of the Alvin interface for digitized Swedish cultural heritage, focusing on how the platform defines a document and the effects this definition has on the accessibility and interconnectedness of documents related to lesbian and feminist histories. This paper addresses how (failed) systematization and an emphasis on large quantities of documents and metadata breathes new life into outdated historiographies and renders documents and information related to feminist and lesbian histories and connections between these histories …

Without Permanence: Mapping Multi-Genre, Cross-Disciplinary Frameworks For Trans* Studies, Jesse Jack

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project takes a cross-disciplinary and multi-genre approach to Transgender (Trans*) Studies to proliferate diverse and ambiguously-gendered representations of trans* experiences across time. It identifies the emergence of rhetorical intertextuality in recent trans* literatures as a discursive response to the biopolitical regulation and erasure of ambiguously-gendered, trans* experiences. It identifies the intersecting influences of twentieth- and twenty-first-century medical paradigms, surveillance apparatuses, popular trans* autobiographies, and archives in representing and exceptionalizing certain trans* experiences over others. In contrast, this project engages in a close reading of Pajtim Statovci’s Crossing (2016) and Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl …

Queering The Ear: Podcast Aesthetics And The Embodied Archive In S-Town, Kira Schukar

English Honors Projects

Despite podcasts’ rising popularity over the last twenty years, literary scholars are only beginning to focus on their affective potential as multimedia texts. In this thesis, I argue that even mainstream podcasts are productively intertwined with queer theories and aesthetics of belonging. Using the 2017 podcast S-Town as my case study, I examine the aural aesthetics of queer failure, temporality, archives, embodiment, and desire as key elements in this complex medium. Putting these theories and aesthetics into practice, I describe my process of research-creation and present a podcast I made about my road trip to Woodstock, Alabama, S-Town’s place …

Archiving Feminist Truth In Trump’S Wake Of Lies, Julie Shayne

Humboldt Journal of Social Relations

This article is about an assignment I do in one of my Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies social movement classes. I revised the assignment the first time teaching the class after Trump lost the 2020 election. For the assignment, students work in groups to research local feminist and gender justice organizations and deposit all of their original materials – recordings, photos, flyers, etc. – into a digital, open access archive I co-created several years ago with librarians and staff on my campus. In 2021 I had my students do the “post-Trump” edition where they researched local organizations about how their …

Vhs Archives, Committed Media Praxis, And ‘Queer Cinema', Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

Committed media praxis is a doing as much as it is a knowing. Queerness is a manner of being as much as it is a politics, theory, or set of modish objects. This chapter about topics that are also processes—queer, media praxis, cinema—performs these across two acts: “Part 1: A Hesitant or Maybe Just Slightly Defiant Preamble,” is a creative unfolding, in the body of the text and as much so in its footnotes, of the author’s “queer feminist media praxis”: “Part 2: VHS Archives” is a demonstration of VHS Archives, a multi-sited, many-yeared project in experimental pedagogy, web-based archival …

The Queer Omaha Archives: The First 5 Years, Amy C. Schindler

Criss Library Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Kick-off LGBTQ+ History Month by learning more about Nebraska’s LGBTQ+ history and how archivists and librarians are preserving and sharing the past today. Presentation for the NCompass Live, a program of the Nebraska Library Commission. The Queer Omaha Archives in UNO Libraries’ Archives and Special Collections launched in 2016 as the first dedicated LGBTQ+ archival and book collection in Nebraska. In the collecting initiative’s first 5 years it has grown to over 80 cubic feet and 3 GB of personal papers and organizational records, 50 oral history interviews, and 3,000 books. In this session, you will be introduced to some …

Erotic Fever In The Arquives: Imagining A Queer Porn Paradise In Cait Mckinney And Hazel Meyer’S Exhibition Tape Condition: Degraded, Genevieve Flavelle

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Focusing on Cait McKinney and Hazel Meyer’s site-specific exhibition Tape Condition: degraded (2016) at the ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ+ Archives, this paper explores reparative and desire-driven approaches for working with partial and missing histories within archives. Focusing specifically on artists working as archivists, I consider how the limitations of evidence-based histories can be addressed through creative practice. The essay unfolds in two parts. The first examines a selection of objects from the exhibition to draw out the historical context of The ArQuives, grounding my analysis of the conditions that have created and perpetuated specific archival gaps; in this case, pornography made …

Archives Of “Sexual Deviance”: Recovering The Queer Prisoner, Vic Overdorf

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Queer federal prisoners are a population often inaccessible to queer memory due to the strong institutional barriers that separate these individuals from life outside of prison walls. This paper asks: how can we employ feminist methodologies in the recovery of queer voices from federal prison archives? By documenting perceived deviance and perversions, carceral institutions in the 1930s-1950s built a case to justify their use of discursive and physical violence against queer bodies. This paper argues that carceral archives serve as norming mechanisms, creating barriers between normal and abnormal, heterosexual and homosexual. To counter this norming, Ann Laura Stoler (2002) provides …

I Hate The Archives: A Queer Lesbian Meditation, Helis Sikk

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Questioning the neutrality of archives is nothing new as feminist scholars have been doing it since the 1970s. More recently, queer theorists have pushed the subjectivity of the archive even further by emphasizing the importance of desire and pleasure as its central tenants. The archive in these discussions is sometimes a metaphor for a variety of experiences and at other times a brick-and-mortar physical space. Yet, there has been a lack of focus on the relationships between these two approaches. Similarly, there has not been enough discussion on how to challenge the exclusivity of the archive in our everyday praxis …

Clark University Lgbtq+ History, Robert D. Tobin, Toni Armstrong, Arai Long, Griffin Minigiello, Students Of "Sexuality And Textuality", Spring 2018, Students Of "Sexuality And Human Rights", Fall 2018, Students Of "Sexuality And Textuality", Spring 2019

Publications

Robert Deam Tobin, editor in chief
Toni Armstrong and Arai Long, co-editors
Additional research provided by Griffin Minigello

and the students of:
"Sexuality and Textuality", Spring 2018
"Sexuality and Human Rights", Fall 2018
"Sexuality and Textuality", Spring 2019

A collaborative research-based catalog by Robert Tobin and his students. This work reports on and narrativizes Clark University's LGBTQ+ history beginning with the Clark Gay Alliance in the mid 1970s, one of the earliest gay student organizations in the country. The vast majority of research for this work comes from materials in Goddard Library's Archives and Special Collections.

Show Us Your Omaha: Combating Lgbtq+ Archival Silences, Angela J. Kroeger, Yumi Ohira, Amy Schindler

Criss Library Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

The University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) Libraries offers a variety of unique and specialized collections in the Archives & Special Collections (ASC) for UNO and Omaha community members. In 2015, ASC began planning for preserving and providing access to Omaha’s LGBTQ+ history through the Queer Omaha Archives. Archival silences were defined by archivist Rodney Carter as the manifestation of the actions of the powerful in denying the marginalized access to archives with further definition by archivists and researchers expanding this definition. The UNO Libraries has invested in developing digital engagement as a strategic priority through building infrastructure and expanding …

The Queer Omaha Archives, Amy Schindler

Criss Library Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

The Queer Omaha Archives, in Criss Library Archives & Special Collections at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, preserves and provides access to the history of LGBTQIA+ life in the region. The archives collects, preserves, and makes available to the public material documenting the diverse people and organizations of the greater Omaha region and their experiences and work. In this session, we’ll share how this new community collecting initiative was begun and how the library is extending existing and establishing new relationships with campus and community members to preserve the region’s LGBTQIA+ history and make it available for use.

Archiving The '80s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture, Margaret A. Galvan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Archiving the '80s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture locates a shared genealogy of feminism and queer theory in the visual culture of 1980s American feminism. Gathering primary sources from grant-funded research in a dozen archives, I analyze an array of image-text media of women, ranging from well known creators like Gloria Anzaldúa, Alison Bechdel, and Nan Goldin, to little known ones like Roberta Gregory and Lee Marrs. In each chapter, I examine how each woman develops movement politics in her visual production, and I study the reception of their works in their communities of influence. Through studying hybrid visual …

Treasure Hunt Without A Map: Archival Research At The University Of Pennsylvania, Meghan Strong

English Independent Study Projects

Under the supervision of Meredith Goldsmith in the English Department, I spent this semester developing archival research projects for lower level students in the humanities. My project corresponded with the aims of the Council for Undergraduate Research, which works to develop undergraduate research skills throughout the disciplines. The Kislak Center is a nearby resource that has the potential to provide students with opportunities to develop crucial research skills while discovering little pieces of history that are hidden away in the archives. The final exercises presented here focus on the subjects of Walt Whitman, Marian Anderson, and Michel de Montaigne.

Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants: Reflections From A Young Scholar, Taylor Black

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

Back in November 2005, I was working on a paper for Ros Petchetsky's "Body Politics" class at Hunter College and I found myself running into all sorts of problems in accessing information about queer political movements and the discourses surrounding them. In a frenzied moment, I emailed Paisley Currah, and he was kind enough to offer his time as well as CLAGS's materials for my research.

To Tell The Truth: The Lesbian Herstory Archives: Chronicling A People And Fighting Invisibility Since 1974, Polly Thistlethwaite

Publications and Research

A portrait of the Lesbian Herstory Archives by a volunteer, describing the archive in its original home in Joan Nestle's Upper West Side New York City apartment that she shared with Mabel Hampton. Originally published in Out/Week Magazine.