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Sign, Storage, Transmission
Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies
For decades, lesbian feminists across the United States and Canada have created information to build movements and survive in a world that doesn't want them. In Information Activism Cait McKinney traces how these women developed communication networks, databases, and digital archives that formed the foundation for their work. Often learning on the fly and using everything from index cards to computers, these activists brought people and their visions of justice together to organize, store, and provide access to information. Focusing on the transition from paper to digital-based archival techniques from the 1970s to the present, McKinney shows how media technologies animate the collective and unspectacular labor that sustains social movements, including their antiracist and trans-inclusive endeavors. By bringing sexuality studies to bear on media history, McKinney demonstrates how groups with precarious access to control over information create their own innovative and resourceful techniques for generating and sharing knowledge.
312 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2020
19 people are currently reading
661 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
January 16, 2024
this is actually the best book written at the exact intersection of all of my interests. archiving dyke history continues to feed my soul in every possible way.
July 14, 2025
excellent
c’est tellement ultra niche comme lecture, mais c’est exactement le genre de travail de recherche qui me passionne
c’est tellement ultra niche comme lecture, mais c’est exactement le genre de travail de recherche qui me passionne
February 12, 2022
Gay Dykes on Acid-Free Paper
Lesbian feminists invented the Internet, and they did it without the help of a computer. This is the surprising finding that comes out of the book Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies, published by Duke University Press in 2020. As the author Cait McKinney immediately makes it clear, the Internet that lesbians built was not composed of URL, HTML, and IP servers: it was an assemblage of print newsletters, paper index cards, telephone hotlines, paper-based community archives, and early digital technologies such as electronic mailing lists and computer databases. What made these early media technologies “lesbian” is that they formed the information infrastructure of a social movement that Cait McKinney describes as “information activism” and that was oriented toward the needs and aspirations of lesbian women in North America during the 1980s and 1990s. And what makes Cait McKinney’s book a “queer history” is that she brings feminism and queer studies to bear on a media history of US lesbian-feminist information activism based on archival research, oral interviews, and participant observation through volunteering in the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York. Information activism took many forms: sorting index cards, putting mailing labels on newsletters, answering the telephone every time it rings, converting old archives into digital format… All these activities may not sound glamorous, but they were part of the everyday politics of “being lesbian” and “doing feminism.”
The Internet that women built
Recently the role of women in the development of information technology and the Internet has attracted a great deal of attention. Thanks in part to the effort of popular author Walter Isaacson, the names of Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, Jean Jennings, and Jennifer Doudna have become more familiar to modern readers, and their enduring legacy may have contributed to attract more young women into computer science. Even so, computing remains a heavily male-dominated field, and the industry’s openness to “the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes” (to quote from a famous Apple commercial) is mostly limited to the masculine part of mankind. It therefore bears reminding that the Internet revolution was brought forth by information activists of all stripes and colors, not just white cis males from California. The “misfits” lauded by Steve Jobs may also have included dykes, stone butches, high femmes, riot grrrls, and lavender women as well as trans and nonbinary subjects. Besides, as feminist critique has pointed out, the concept of the “Internet revolution” or the “information superhighway” are masculinist notions that need to be reexamined. There is a gender bias in popular accounts of technology development and innovation that tends to exclude the contribution of certain agents, especially queer subjects and women of color. Technologies are gendered, and they also exhibit heteronormative and white biases. To fix this problem, much more is needed than writing more inclusive histories of innovation and exposing occupational sexism in the technology industry.
The lesbian volunteers whose activities are chronicled in Information Activism did not really invent the Internet. They did something much more purposeful: they set out to create a world bearable and a life worth living for lesbian women in North America. They did this work within conditions of exclusion from access to reliable information about lesbian life and from the margins of social structures and even mainstream feminism. Confronted with discrimination, isolation, and invisibility, they decided to build an information infrastructure of their own, one connection at a time. Creating alternative communication channels responded to conditions in which many women lacked access to other lesbians and were desperate to find connection. Sometimes, the sole purpose of maintaining this information infrastructure was to show lesbian women that they were not alone. There was another person to talk to at the other end of the help line at the New York Lesbian Switchboard ; other researchers subscribing to the newsletter Matrices were doing stuff in a field marginalized within academic studies ; documents stored at the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York City bore the testimony of queer lives whose memorialization was a source of inspiration for modern generations. In some cases, just knowing the information was “out there” was enough to go on living with a renewed purpose. In other instances, women engaged in long “rap sessions” discussing feminist politics over the phone, started collaborative research projects that led to the emergence of a full-fledge discipline of queer studies, or found companionship and accomplishment in their volunteering projects. Information makes promises and fulfills aspirations that are much greater than “finding things out.”
A Chatroom of One’s Own
Networks have need critical to the construction of feminist histories. Cait McKinney examines several cases of networked communication initiatives that predate the emergence of online media: the publication of the newsletter Matrices designed for sharing information and resources with anyone doing research related to lesbian feminism; the New York Lesbian Switchboard connecting callers to a source of information and advice; the Lesbian Herstory Archives’ collection of print documents and audio tapes; the patient collection of indexes and bibliographies that made lesbian feminist essays and periodicals searchable and actionable. The technologies used in these pre-digital enterprises now seem antique: typewriters, photocopiers, landline telephones, letter mail, stacks of papers, cardboards, index cards, and face-to-face interactions. But the results were far-reaching and futuristic. They laid the ground on which a lesbian-feminist movement could expand and self-organize. Information and communication networks allowed dispersed researchers to connect with each other, share information, and do lesbian research within unsupportive and sometimes openly hostile research environments. Women living in rural areas or isolated places were encouraged to become active nodes of the network by taking pictures, gathering newspaper clips, and audio-recording interviews to document events taking place in their geographic area. The Matrices newsletter facilitated historical research through the creation of a supportive information infrastructure ; it also allowed for the nationwide expansion of a social movement originally concentrated in New York; and it convinced dispersed readers that lesbian lives mattered and were worth documenting. Key initiatives grew out of the network, such as the volume Black Lesbians: An Annotated Bibliography compiled by JR Roberts to counter the invisibility of women of color in mainstream lesbian feminism. In the 1990s, many print newsletters lost relevance a web browsing developed and academic listservs became key networks for sharing information. Matrices stopped publishing in 1996, replaced ostensibly by commercial enterprises such as Google, Amazon, and digital publishing tools. But online communication does not present as much of a turning point as a continuation of networked modes of organization for feminist social movements.
Another example of continuity between analog and digital modes of communication is the lesbian telephone hotline staffed by volunteers in New York City that answered to every call with a listening ear and a range of helpful tips and advice. Like newsletters, telephone hotlines connected lesbians at a distance using information. For the historian, they are harder to document: volunteers were anonymous and cannot be traced back, and all that remains of the long nights spent answering the phone are the call logs recording every conversations with a few notes and doodles scribbled in the margin. The logs suggest that many callers expressed despair, loneliness, or confusion; but others called for help finding something fun to do that night, for precise information about support groups or community resources, or just to talk and “rap” about gender issues. Even before the appearance of mailing lists and online forums, the need to have a chatroom of one’s own was clearly felt and answered. McKinney also uses the log archives as entries to thinking about feminist research methods, multimedia practices, care provision, and affective labor involved in lesbian telephone hotlines. She reminds readers that feminist activism involved less acknowledged dynamics such as boredom, repetition, isolation, and burnout. What makes a telephone hotline “lesbian feminist” is the self-definition and principles under which the switchboard operated. Volunteers were recruited from within the lesbian community and bisexual women were tacitly kept out, while the policy toward trans women and gender nonconforming persons was left undefined, although their needs were also addressed on an ad hoc basis. These remarks remind us that terminology, such as the moniker “gay and lesbian” as opposed to the more contemporary “LGBTQI+”, are historical constructions that cast aside or rigidify some categories as much as they include or deconstruct others.
A feminist mode of network thinking
Network thinking has been a feature of feminist activism and knowledge production since before the consumer Internet. “Improving (lesbian) lives with information” could be the motto of a behemoth social media company catering to a niche market; it was always the principle under which lesbian activists operated. The feminist movement produced original ideas about communication, access to information, capacity building, and the power of alternative structures for organizing people and ideas. Lesbian feminists also offered pre-digital feminist critiques of networks as egalitarian ideals that can conceal functional hierarchies and threaten the privacy of participants. Computer networks were dreamt and imagined before they were invented and built. The librarians and volunteers who collected the Lesbian Periodicals Index were imagining computer databases and electronic indexing while shuffling paper cards into shoeboxes ; the Lesbian Herstory Archives’ project leaders were figuring putting all their resources online before they had the equipment and manpower to convert documents into digital format. They were also early adopters of information technology, manifesting a can-do attitude and a hands-on sensibility familiar to feminist activism—and more generally to “women’s work.” McKinnon characterizes as “capable amateurism” a fearless approach to learning and implementing new media technologies; a gendered belief in the capacity of amateurs to work hard and acquire new skills; and a willingness to experiment, improvize, and figure things out on the fly. Lesbian feminism is also informed by values of non-hierarchy, direct participation by members, and an investment in decentralized processes.
Today these values are reflected in many internet communities. A good-enough approach (“rough consensus”), a culture of sharing (“copyleft”), and collectively organized work (“open source”) as well as political militancy (“Anonymous”) characterize segments of the computer industry as much as they are part of the lesbian-feminist heritage. One may even see in the Slow Web movement echoes of the politics of nonadoption and digital hesitancy that was developed by some activist groups surveyed by the author. Beyond lesbian history, these activists have much to teach all of us about why, when, and for whom information comes to matter. The lesbian feminist imagination allows us to envisage a world brought together by connection, care, and “sisterhood” that earlier feminist networks originally articulated and that worldwide Internet connectivity now makes potentially real. A lesbian-feminist approach also reminds us that networks make equalitarian promises that conceal the power structures, protocols, and control mechanisms they actually exert. Computer databases and search engines are not neutral; they determine what is thinkable and sayable through filtering access to information and indexing resources into categories and keywords. These are deeply political choices, and the way decision-making processes and governance bodies are structured matters a great deal. If we want to keep a free and open Internet and uphold the principle of net neutrality, perhaps we should learn from a history of information networks written through older forms of feminist print culture.
Lesbianism is so twentieth century
But does the lesbian past still talk to our queer age? As a self-described “masculine, nonbinary person,” Cait McKinney is ambivalent about the category of lesbianism. She originally assumed that “lesbian” as a specific term of self-identification was historically dated and situated in a period of late twentieth-century militancy, and she was surprised to learn that the term was still popular among a younger generation of queer-identified activists. Young volunteers at the Lesbian Herstory Archives articulate deep attachment to lesbian history and subcultures, and the snippets of information and pictures that the center posts on Instagram are instantly popular. Some business ventures exploit the revival in lesbian-feminist militancy heritage, selling T-shirts, collectable items, and other paraphernalia bearing slogans and pictures from the seventies and eighties. McKinney also thinks lesbianism, while providing a big tent for women with nonconforming gender identities, also had exclusionary effects as many lesbian-feminists were historically hostile to trans women and indifferent to women of color. As a matter of fact, lesbianism meant much more than women having sex with women. Likewise, the erotic exceeds what is commonly understood as sensuous, sexually appealing, and emotionally gratifying acts. Eroticism can be described as a communication practice, and information activism is definitely part of it. Reading archives against the grain (or along the archival grain, as Laura Stoller invites us to do) also refers to the grain of one’s skin, and the archival touch implies an embodied experience laden with sensory perceptions and affects. Libriarianship and archivism are professions that have been historically attractive to women, including persons attracted to same-sex relations, and they have often served as erotic projections of male—and sometimes female—desire. There is something queer about manipulating acid-free paper, and Information Activism consciously addresses how librarians and archivists cope with the affective and intimate impacts of accumulated print media.
Lesbian feminists invented the Internet, and they did it without the help of a computer. This is the surprising finding that comes out of the book Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies, published by Duke University Press in 2020. As the author Cait McKinney immediately makes it clear, the Internet that lesbians built was not composed of URL, HTML, and IP servers: it was an assemblage of print newsletters, paper index cards, telephone hotlines, paper-based community archives, and early digital technologies such as electronic mailing lists and computer databases. What made these early media technologies “lesbian” is that they formed the information infrastructure of a social movement that Cait McKinney describes as “information activism” and that was oriented toward the needs and aspirations of lesbian women in North America during the 1980s and 1990s. And what makes Cait McKinney’s book a “queer history” is that she brings feminism and queer studies to bear on a media history of US lesbian-feminist information activism based on archival research, oral interviews, and participant observation through volunteering in the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York. Information activism took many forms: sorting index cards, putting mailing labels on newsletters, answering the telephone every time it rings, converting old archives into digital format… All these activities may not sound glamorous, but they were part of the everyday politics of “being lesbian” and “doing feminism.”
The Internet that women built
Recently the role of women in the development of information technology and the Internet has attracted a great deal of attention. Thanks in part to the effort of popular author Walter Isaacson, the names of Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, Jean Jennings, and Jennifer Doudna have become more familiar to modern readers, and their enduring legacy may have contributed to attract more young women into computer science. Even so, computing remains a heavily male-dominated field, and the industry’s openness to “the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes” (to quote from a famous Apple commercial) is mostly limited to the masculine part of mankind. It therefore bears reminding that the Internet revolution was brought forth by information activists of all stripes and colors, not just white cis males from California. The “misfits” lauded by Steve Jobs may also have included dykes, stone butches, high femmes, riot grrrls, and lavender women as well as trans and nonbinary subjects. Besides, as feminist critique has pointed out, the concept of the “Internet revolution” or the “information superhighway” are masculinist notions that need to be reexamined. There is a gender bias in popular accounts of technology development and innovation that tends to exclude the contribution of certain agents, especially queer subjects and women of color. Technologies are gendered, and they also exhibit heteronormative and white biases. To fix this problem, much more is needed than writing more inclusive histories of innovation and exposing occupational sexism in the technology industry.
The lesbian volunteers whose activities are chronicled in Information Activism did not really invent the Internet. They did something much more purposeful: they set out to create a world bearable and a life worth living for lesbian women in North America. They did this work within conditions of exclusion from access to reliable information about lesbian life and from the margins of social structures and even mainstream feminism. Confronted with discrimination, isolation, and invisibility, they decided to build an information infrastructure of their own, one connection at a time. Creating alternative communication channels responded to conditions in which many women lacked access to other lesbians and were desperate to find connection. Sometimes, the sole purpose of maintaining this information infrastructure was to show lesbian women that they were not alone. There was another person to talk to at the other end of the help line at the New York Lesbian Switchboard ; other researchers subscribing to the newsletter Matrices were doing stuff in a field marginalized within academic studies ; documents stored at the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York City bore the testimony of queer lives whose memorialization was a source of inspiration for modern generations. In some cases, just knowing the information was “out there” was enough to go on living with a renewed purpose. In other instances, women engaged in long “rap sessions” discussing feminist politics over the phone, started collaborative research projects that led to the emergence of a full-fledge discipline of queer studies, or found companionship and accomplishment in their volunteering projects. Information makes promises and fulfills aspirations that are much greater than “finding things out.”
A Chatroom of One’s Own
Networks have need critical to the construction of feminist histories. Cait McKinney examines several cases of networked communication initiatives that predate the emergence of online media: the publication of the newsletter Matrices designed for sharing information and resources with anyone doing research related to lesbian feminism; the New York Lesbian Switchboard connecting callers to a source of information and advice; the Lesbian Herstory Archives’ collection of print documents and audio tapes; the patient collection of indexes and bibliographies that made lesbian feminist essays and periodicals searchable and actionable. The technologies used in these pre-digital enterprises now seem antique: typewriters, photocopiers, landline telephones, letter mail, stacks of papers, cardboards, index cards, and face-to-face interactions. But the results were far-reaching and futuristic. They laid the ground on which a lesbian-feminist movement could expand and self-organize. Information and communication networks allowed dispersed researchers to connect with each other, share information, and do lesbian research within unsupportive and sometimes openly hostile research environments. Women living in rural areas or isolated places were encouraged to become active nodes of the network by taking pictures, gathering newspaper clips, and audio-recording interviews to document events taking place in their geographic area. The Matrices newsletter facilitated historical research through the creation of a supportive information infrastructure ; it also allowed for the nationwide expansion of a social movement originally concentrated in New York; and it convinced dispersed readers that lesbian lives mattered and were worth documenting. Key initiatives grew out of the network, such as the volume Black Lesbians: An Annotated Bibliography compiled by JR Roberts to counter the invisibility of women of color in mainstream lesbian feminism. In the 1990s, many print newsletters lost relevance a web browsing developed and academic listservs became key networks for sharing information. Matrices stopped publishing in 1996, replaced ostensibly by commercial enterprises such as Google, Amazon, and digital publishing tools. But online communication does not present as much of a turning point as a continuation of networked modes of organization for feminist social movements.
Another example of continuity between analog and digital modes of communication is the lesbian telephone hotline staffed by volunteers in New York City that answered to every call with a listening ear and a range of helpful tips and advice. Like newsletters, telephone hotlines connected lesbians at a distance using information. For the historian, they are harder to document: volunteers were anonymous and cannot be traced back, and all that remains of the long nights spent answering the phone are the call logs recording every conversations with a few notes and doodles scribbled in the margin. The logs suggest that many callers expressed despair, loneliness, or confusion; but others called for help finding something fun to do that night, for precise information about support groups or community resources, or just to talk and “rap” about gender issues. Even before the appearance of mailing lists and online forums, the need to have a chatroom of one’s own was clearly felt and answered. McKinney also uses the log archives as entries to thinking about feminist research methods, multimedia practices, care provision, and affective labor involved in lesbian telephone hotlines. She reminds readers that feminist activism involved less acknowledged dynamics such as boredom, repetition, isolation, and burnout. What makes a telephone hotline “lesbian feminist” is the self-definition and principles under which the switchboard operated. Volunteers were recruited from within the lesbian community and bisexual women were tacitly kept out, while the policy toward trans women and gender nonconforming persons was left undefined, although their needs were also addressed on an ad hoc basis. These remarks remind us that terminology, such as the moniker “gay and lesbian” as opposed to the more contemporary “LGBTQI+”, are historical constructions that cast aside or rigidify some categories as much as they include or deconstruct others.
A feminist mode of network thinking
Network thinking has been a feature of feminist activism and knowledge production since before the consumer Internet. “Improving (lesbian) lives with information” could be the motto of a behemoth social media company catering to a niche market; it was always the principle under which lesbian activists operated. The feminist movement produced original ideas about communication, access to information, capacity building, and the power of alternative structures for organizing people and ideas. Lesbian feminists also offered pre-digital feminist critiques of networks as egalitarian ideals that can conceal functional hierarchies and threaten the privacy of participants. Computer networks were dreamt and imagined before they were invented and built. The librarians and volunteers who collected the Lesbian Periodicals Index were imagining computer databases and electronic indexing while shuffling paper cards into shoeboxes ; the Lesbian Herstory Archives’ project leaders were figuring putting all their resources online before they had the equipment and manpower to convert documents into digital format. They were also early adopters of information technology, manifesting a can-do attitude and a hands-on sensibility familiar to feminist activism—and more generally to “women’s work.” McKinnon characterizes as “capable amateurism” a fearless approach to learning and implementing new media technologies; a gendered belief in the capacity of amateurs to work hard and acquire new skills; and a willingness to experiment, improvize, and figure things out on the fly. Lesbian feminism is also informed by values of non-hierarchy, direct participation by members, and an investment in decentralized processes.
Today these values are reflected in many internet communities. A good-enough approach (“rough consensus”), a culture of sharing (“copyleft”), and collectively organized work (“open source”) as well as political militancy (“Anonymous”) characterize segments of the computer industry as much as they are part of the lesbian-feminist heritage. One may even see in the Slow Web movement echoes of the politics of nonadoption and digital hesitancy that was developed by some activist groups surveyed by the author. Beyond lesbian history, these activists have much to teach all of us about why, when, and for whom information comes to matter. The lesbian feminist imagination allows us to envisage a world brought together by connection, care, and “sisterhood” that earlier feminist networks originally articulated and that worldwide Internet connectivity now makes potentially real. A lesbian-feminist approach also reminds us that networks make equalitarian promises that conceal the power structures, protocols, and control mechanisms they actually exert. Computer databases and search engines are not neutral; they determine what is thinkable and sayable through filtering access to information and indexing resources into categories and keywords. These are deeply political choices, and the way decision-making processes and governance bodies are structured matters a great deal. If we want to keep a free and open Internet and uphold the principle of net neutrality, perhaps we should learn from a history of information networks written through older forms of feminist print culture.
Lesbianism is so twentieth century
But does the lesbian past still talk to our queer age? As a self-described “masculine, nonbinary person,” Cait McKinney is ambivalent about the category of lesbianism. She originally assumed that “lesbian” as a specific term of self-identification was historically dated and situated in a period of late twentieth-century militancy, and she was surprised to learn that the term was still popular among a younger generation of queer-identified activists. Young volunteers at the Lesbian Herstory Archives articulate deep attachment to lesbian history and subcultures, and the snippets of information and pictures that the center posts on Instagram are instantly popular. Some business ventures exploit the revival in lesbian-feminist militancy heritage, selling T-shirts, collectable items, and other paraphernalia bearing slogans and pictures from the seventies and eighties. McKinney also thinks lesbianism, while providing a big tent for women with nonconforming gender identities, also had exclusionary effects as many lesbian-feminists were historically hostile to trans women and indifferent to women of color. As a matter of fact, lesbianism meant much more than women having sex with women. Likewise, the erotic exceeds what is commonly understood as sensuous, sexually appealing, and emotionally gratifying acts. Eroticism can be described as a communication practice, and information activism is definitely part of it. Reading archives against the grain (or along the archival grain, as Laura Stoller invites us to do) also refers to the grain of one’s skin, and the archival touch implies an embodied experience laden with sensory perceptions and affects. Libriarianship and archivism are professions that have been historically attractive to women, including persons attracted to same-sex relations, and they have often served as erotic projections of male—and sometimes female—desire. There is something queer about manipulating acid-free paper, and Information Activism consciously addresses how librarians and archivists cope with the affective and intimate impacts of accumulated print media.
August 11, 2023
An interesting read, but ultimately too theory/philosophy-focused to be a great fit for me. Also the history of lesbian feminism is just so very white. And this is acknowledged/critiqued by the community, but idk just makes it harder sometimes to care about the history. I did have a great time perusing the forest of endnotes and citations - very cool to get a glimpse of the work that contemporary queer theorists are up to
July 24, 2023
i felt every emotion reading this. a really good look at some dykes missed in other lesbian history books.
August 10, 2022
A wonderful read into the history of lesbian media technologies, including hotlines, newsletters, and indexes, as well as a fun look at the Lesbian Herstory Archives. I was really looking forward to this read and it didn’t disappoint!
July 22, 2025
Certainly recommend it, might be alone in wishing it was slightly more theory heavy (it sometimes pointed to ideas rather than fully exploring them) but a phenomenal overview of queer media technologies, gave me much to think about!
November 2, 2024
really excellent, thoughtful, generative
gave me 600 ideas for projects I want to be doing and reminded me to slow down in doing them
gave me 600 ideas for projects I want to be doing and reminded me to slow down in doing them
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews