Make Your Own History: Documenting Feminist and Queer Activism in the 21st Century

Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies

by Lyz Bly (editor), Kelly Wooten (editor)

Documenting Feminist Activism addresses the practical and theoretical challenges and advantages of researching, documenting, and archiving recent and contemporary activists in the feminist and queer movements. In the last few decades, the place and practice of activism has shifted from a physical "headquarters" where activists convene to plan and strategize, to the reality where planning happens at various desks and kitchen tables across the country (or world) and activists then convene at one site for an action (the prime example of this being the WTO protest in Seattle in 1999). So much of the work is taking place in the digital environment and/or within smaller do-it-yourself (DIY) and anarchist subcultures where ideas are often shared via zines and other ephemeral materials. The challenge of the archivist and the scholar, whose work is traditionally paper-based, is to keep up with the changing modes of communication of these individuals and organizations and to make sure these activists' work is not left out of the historical record. Activists, archivists, librarians, and scholars address the following issues and topics: the practical material challenges of documenting and archiving contemporary activism; theoretical perspectives and conversations; online communities and communications; "third wave" feminism/youth and queer cultures/subcultures; the move from paper to digital archives and documents; zines; and the work of activists who employ creative/artistic/cultural approaches to work for social justice.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Queer, History, LGBT, Activism, Gender and Sexuality

196 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2012

About the author

Feminist thug

Reviews

[Nicolas Lontel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ce recueil de court article sur la création d'archives et de documentations militantes, féministes, queer, etc. est vraiment incroyable et sa qualité exemplaire première et peut-être de vraiment donner le goût d'agir et d'archiver (déjà que je suis très sensibilisé· à ça et prend bien attention à ces questions, cet essai me donner juste envie de poursuivre encore plus loin ces efforts).

Beaucoup de choses sont couvertes dans cette anthologie, de la création d'espace pour les zines à des dépôts numériques et tous les problèmes qui peuvent venir avec, on parle autant d'outils, de lieux et d'organisations qui permettent le travail de documentation qu'on met de l'avant cette documentation et ces archives dans certains articles, ce qui permet de super découvertes!!!!

Court, super accessible, très bien vulgarisé, une véritable boîte à outil militante qui donne autant des clef de réflexion sur le financement, des pistes d'archivage, une histoire de bibliothèque, des réflexions sur la documentation et sa conservation et le besoin de créer et mettre de l'avant cette histoire. À mettre entre les mains de beaucoup d'activistes qui créent et leurs allié·es et dont le travail pourrait se perdre faute de n'avoir pas su reconnaître la valeur de leurs contributions.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Everything in this book is anti-copyrighted. You can repress it and give your friends copies, take out things you don't like, smear tahini all over it, wear its designs in corporate magazines, claim recipes you like as your own, replace my musical selections with contemporary Christian rock, lick the pictures, or even take an image out of it, screen it on t-shirts, and sell them on E-Bay for $21 (not that that has ever happened or anything). Seriously, fuck copyrights. This book is yours now. Do with it as thou wilt."

"The distinction between what the librarian cannot find, what the library does not have, and what does not exist is not important, since the end result--no material--is the same."