Assembling Archives/Archiving Assemblages: Power, Politics, and Protest in The Queer Feminist Archive/s

Abstract

Assembling Archives/Archiving Assemblages: Power, Politics, and Protest in The Queer Feminist Archive/s examines archives in, of, and as protest across the United States and Latin America. Drawing on research with community-based archives and activist collections, including the Lesbian Herstory Archives, Interference Archive, the Sexual Minorities Archives, el Museo del Estallido Social, el Archivo de la Memoria Trans, and Minnie Bruce Pratt’s Papers at Duke University, this project situates the relationship between archives and protest at the intersection of critical archival studies and social movement studies through assemblage thinking. I examine protest, power, and politics in ways that make ephemerality valuable, pose the archive as an actant, and challenge positivist approaches that view archives and protest as naturalized phenomena with easily demarcated boundaries.This dissertation takes the labor of archivists and informational professionals seriously as intellectual labor and bridges the divide between library and information science and critical theory. It treats “the archive” of critical theory and “archives” of archival studies as co-constitutive. I argue that the archive/s exist in an always becoming relationship marked by the slash (/) that signals their construction as simultaneously conceptual/material and ephemeral/embodied. This dissertation develops grounded ephemerality as an auto/ethnographic method that reads archival materials alongside embodied protest experiences and tethers ephemera to community and materiality. Using this approach, I examine archival cultural productions and the political effects of how ephemeral protest traces, such as street art, are activated. In doing so, I make ephemerality valuable to both archives and protest. Ultimately, this project brings together feminist, queer, and trans* (FQT) studies, critical archival studies, social movement studies, critical theory, and political theory to demonstrate how archives are worldmaking projects of protest, prefiguration, and care.