The Archival Turn in Feminism Outrage in Order

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 institutions 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 publications 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 inheritors 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 endeav- ors. Being a young feminist in the early 1990s—the era of Susan Faludi’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 preface / ix feminists as politically naïve and thereby either unaware of the need for long-term institutional change or oblivious to their histories of struggle; younger feminists complained that the so-called “second wavers” were simply “behind the times.” This book is not an attempt to rehash the generational debates that plagued the feminist movement in the 1990s (these debates have already received adequate attention elsewhere), but I am con- cerned with what these debates obscured—namely, the extent to which feminists born since the late 1960s were and continue to be invested in both the future and the past, albeit not in a way that easily grafts onto a previous generation’s investments in futurity or history. As explored in detail throughout this book, by 2000, the documentary traces of early to mid 1990s feminisms, including the zines that played an essential role in the spread of Riot Grrrl, had begun to migrate from basements, closets, and filing cabi- nets to community-based collections and established university archives across North America. As it turned out, despite the seemingly ephemeral nature of Riot Grrrl—a movement defined by an explosive repertoire of gestures, styles, performances, ral- lying cries, and anonymous confessions reproduced on copy machines—it was also a movement that had been collecting, preserving, and preparing itself for the archive all along. More surprising, when revisiting the documentary traces of 1990s feminism in archives and special collections, it is apparent that, beyond collecting the documentary traces of their own history, younger feminists (some no longer all that young) were also gathering up traces of feminist activism and cultural production from the 1970s and 1980s. To the extent that this is a book about archives, it is also a book about the feminist movement and, more notably, what has become of the movement during the past two decades. Because this is a book about the feminist movement (specifically, the feminist movement in North American since the 1990s), its timing has ironically been called into question. Some of my closest readers—trusted colleagues and friends x / preface who all identify as feminists—have worried that this may not be the “right time” to publish, as they sheepishly put it, “such a feminist book.” As we all apparently know, even those of us who are engaged in scholarship and teaching that is labeled “feminist,” feminism is neither a great way to market a cur- rent book nor a subject upon which one can safely wage a case for tenure. When telling colleagues that I was working on a book about feminist archives and special collections, rather than something a bit more seemingly contemporary—let’s say, queer archives or activist archives—I admit to feeling at times like a traitor, but to whom or what? To my politics? T0 my time? As I argue throughout this book, however, it is important to consider the political efficacy of being in time differently, that is, being temporally dispersed across different eras and generations. Indeed, this is precisely why the archival turn in contemporary feminism is as much about shoring up a younger generation’s legacy and honoring elders as it is about imagining and working to build possible worlds in the present and for the future. * * * Like archives and collections of all kinds, book-length projects, which invariably unfold over several years, collect a myriad of ideas, voices, and perspectives along the way, many unanticipated at the moment of the project’s inception. This book is no excep- tion. My earliest articulations of this book proposed to trace the migration of feminist zines into community-based collections and university libraries and archives. Six years later, my focus has both broadened to include feminist documents in general and narrowed to focus more exclusively on university libraries and archives. The change in scope reflects the fact that during the course of researching this book, I learned about other projects focusing specifically on feminist zines, including Alison Piep- meier’s Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism (2009) and Janice Radway’s ongoing research on the “afterlives” of girl zines, and about the development of collections of related materials, preface / xi which include but are by no means exclusively focused on zines, such as the Riot Grrrl Collection at Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University (now the focus of chapter 3). This book has also benefited from the insights, encourage- ment, and support of many colleagues and interlocutors. For providing funding at the onset of this project, I thank the Fac- ulty of Arts at Ryerson University where I taught from 2003 to 2008. For providing the working conditions that made writing this book possible, I thank my colleagues in the Culture and Media Studies and Gender Studies programs at The New School and extend a special thanks to Dominic Pettman and Ann Sni- tow.

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