I recently
co-edited the anthology Make Your Own
History: Documenting Feminist and Queer Activism in the 21st Century (Litwin
Books, 2012), with Lyz Bly, an instructor of gender studies and history at Case
Western Reserve and Cleveland State Universities, who earned her doctorate in
American History from Case Western Reserve University in 2010.
I started
thinking about this book three years ago in 2009 when Emily Drabinski, the
editor for the Litwin Books Series on Gender and Sexuality in Information
Studies, emailed me out of the blue and asked if I would be interested in
writing a book about zines after being referred to me by Jenna Freedman, the zine
librarian at Barnard. My initial reaction was no, thanks, but then I realized
this was a great opportunity to further explore some questions I had been
asking about how to document the modern feminist movement beyond zines. I also
knew that I wanted to explore these ideas from a variety of perspectives, and
to produce a volume that was accessible to a variety of audiences—not just
librarians, archivists and academics. To this end, I invited Lyz Bly, who I
knew through her time at the Sallie Bingham Center as a Mary Lily Travel Grant
recipient when she was researching the zine collections for her dissertation Generation X and the Invention of the Third
Feminist Wave.
Once we
started exploring this topic, we realized it was hard to address without
including pieces about queer activism and second wave feminism due to the
intersectionality and fluid nature of feminism. I hope this book will highlight
the Bingham Center’s leadership in documenting the modern feminist movement,
but also share the other work being done at other institutions and encourage
other archivists and activists to participate in this process since these
movements are far too big for just a handful of archives to document.
Make Your
Own History addresses the practical and theoretical challenges and advantages
of researching, documenting, and archiving recent and contemporary activists in
the feminist and queer movements. Chapter topics include zines, documenting the
LGBT community, the future of collecting electronic and online records, and how
the women of the Second Wave continue to contribute to the feminist movement.
Janice
Radway, Walter Dill Scott Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern
University and professor emerita of Literature and History at Duke University, recommends
that this collection “should be read by librarians, archivists, and book historians everywhere
who are thinking critically about how best to preserve and study the record of
lives lived outside and beyond the limits of the conventional.”
Read more
about this book in an interview with Michele Burger on her blog “The Practice
of Creativity”: http://micheleberger.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/archives-as-activism-documenting-feminist-and-queer-activism-interview-with-author-kelly-wooten/
Post
submitted by Kelly Wooten, Research Services and Collection Development
Librarian for the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke
University’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and
Librarian for Sexuality Studies for Perkins Library.
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