The Provenance of Protest: Conceptualizing Records Creation in Archives of Feminist Materials

Archives of feminist materials are unique material and affective assemblages that represent, condition, and constrain the lives and experiences of those who identify as feminist. Occupying a distinct corner of the community archiving universe, feminist archival projects have been taken up intellectually by scholars located in both archival studies and feminist cultural studies, offering an opportunity for conceptually rich cross-disciplinary insights. Simultaneously memory and aspiration, the feminist archive is a site of knowledge generation, meaning making, political organizing, public history, collectivity, speculation, and desire. Despite a fascination with feminist archival practice across both archival studies and cultural studies disciplines, the acts of archival creation that constitute these materials and sites remain, for the most part, undertheorized. This dissertation studies the acts of archival creation occurring in aggregations of feminist materials in order to better explicate and understand how feminist movement materials are generated, used, preserved, and re-activated over time. Focusing on five archives in the United States and Canada ranging from the institutional to the community-run, I weave together the acts of creation identified through site specific examples and interviews with archivists, volunteers, and archival collaborators, in order to demonstrate how feminist archival materials push archival creatorship, and traditional understandings of provenance, to their theoretical limits. I argue for understanding creation in archives of feminist materials as an iterative and ‘heavy’ feminist process; as digitally attenuated and fabulatory; and as marked by boundary breaching, presence and absence. In doing so, I question, challenge and explicate what it means to ‘do feminist archiving,’ while at the same time, suggesting that a feminist orientation towards archival practice has the ability to elaborate the core principles of the archival field to better enunciate the complexity of records creation.

Department dc:contributor.department

Information Studies

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Lapp, Jessica Margaret

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• MacNeil, Heather M.

• Archival Studies
• Feminist Archiving
• Provenance Theory
• Records Creation

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/103124

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/103124