The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order

199 Pages·2013·0.92 MB·English

by  Kate Eichhorn

The Archival Turn in Feminism

The Archival Turn
in Feminism
Outrage in Order
kate eichhorn
Temple University Press
philadelphia
Temple University Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122
www.temple.edu/tempress
Copyright © 2013 by Temple University
All rights reserved
Published 2013
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Eichhorn, Kate, 1971–
The archival turn in feminism : outrage in order / Kate Eichhorn.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4399-0951-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4399-0953-9 (e-book)
1. Feminism—North America—History—20th century. 2. Zines—
Publishing—North America—History—20th century. 3. History—Sources.
I. Title.
HQ1121.E33 2013
305.42097—dc23
2013006604
The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992
Printed in the United States of America
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a
collaborative publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham
University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University
Press, and the University of Virginia Press. The Initiative is
supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more
information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction 1
1 The “Scrap Heap” Reconsidered: Selected Archives
of Feminist Archiving 25
2 Archival Regeneration: The Zine Collections
at the Sallie Bingham Center 55
3 Redefining a Movement: The Riot Grrrl Collection
at Fales Library and Special Collections 85
4 Radical Catalogers and Accidental Archivists:
The Barnard Zine Library 123
Conclusion 155
Notes 161
Works Cited 179
Index 185

Preface
In the early to mid 1990s, as many established feminist institu-
tions were falling into decline, girls and young women across
North America started to plot a new revolution. Armed with lit-
tle more than scissors, glue, and stolen time on copy machines,
they made zines an integral part of their movement. Valuing
expediency over posterity, however, their hastily produced pub-
lications rarely pointed beyond the moment of production—the
temporality of girl zines was the present. By extension, nothing
about these publications necessarily pointed to the archive.
Centered around the category of girl, itself temporally bound,
rather than the more enduring category of woman, the temporal
orientation of zines permeated feminist activism and cultural
production in the 1990s—a point emphatically expressed by the
title of Bikini Kill’s self-produced 1991 cassette release, “Revolu-
tion Grrrl Style Now.” If a previous generation of feminists had
funneled their energy into permanently changing the status of
women through the entrenchment of new laws and institutional
policies, in the 1990s a younger generation of feminists often
appeared to be more interested in the political efficacy of tac-
tics, which are by definition effective only to the extent that they
viii / preface
remain fleeting. In this context the annual march and monthly
newspaper started to give way to more ephemeral interventions
from the flash mob to the zine. Although the performance and
affect of an annual protest or flash mob frequently do overlap,
just as the content and aesthetic of a monthly newspaper and
zine often share more rather than less in common, their promise
is different. If the former promises to return until proven irrel-
evant (as demonstrated through events such as International
Women’s Day and Take Back the Night marches), the latter
makes no such guarantee—its power to bring about change is
located in, rather than despite, its unpredictability.
Thus, rather than build institutional bases from which to
restructure the social world, feminist activism in the 1990s was
about making do in a world where it had grown increasingly
difficult to ignore precariousness, even the precarious nature of
past political victories. After all, in contrast to a generation of
women who came to feminism in the late 1960s to early 1970s,
girls and young women in the early 1990s were both the inheri-
tors of a myriad of feminist political gains and institutions and
the inheritors of a movement suddenly in decline. Riot Grrrl
and, more broadly, third wave feminism appeared just as many
second wave feminist institutions, especially those in the culture
sector, including feminist presses, publications, record labels,
and bookstores, were beginning to come apart, owing to both
the internal pressures of volunteer burn-out and infighting and
the declining external funding for explicitly feminist endeavors.
Being a young feminist in the early 1990s—the era of Naomi
Wolf’s Backlash not Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood is Powerful—
meant being always already aware of the fact that political gains,
even those that appear most entrenched, can never be taken for
granted.
Throughout the 1990s, differing temporal identifications and
orientations would also surface as a major source of tension
within the feminist movement. The “generational debates” that
reached their peak around the turn of the new millennium were
often rooted in accusations: older feminists dismissed younger