In this post, guest blogger Zelmarie Cantillon provides an overview of a book by Kate Eichorn called 'The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order'. The principal focus of this book is the archiving of artefacts, particularly zines, related to the hardcore/punk music culture of Riot Grrrl.
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Archives of popular music heritage collect not only audio
recordings, but related artefacts including posters, flyers, magazine clippings,
photographs, fanzines and other ephemera. Zines were of particular importance
to Riot Grrrl, a hardcore/punk music culture and pioneering third wave feminist
movement in North America during the 1990s. In her book, Eichhorn explores how the
significance of Riot Grrrl zines to feminist scholarship and activism has lead
to the establishment and growth of several feminist collection and archives,
including The Zine Collections at the Sallie Bingham Center, The Riot Grrrl Collection at Fales Library and Special Collections, and the Barnard College Zine Library.
DIY methods of cultural production have long been integral to feminist
activism. During the 1960s to 1980s, second wave feminists established their publishing movement in
resistance to the capitalist, patriarchal mainstream publishing industry. As
these initiatives declined due to neoliberal restructuring in the 1990s, a
younger generation of feminists had to find different means for self-publishing
that were quick, cheap and independent. With the rise of Riot Grrrl, and
subsequently third wave feminism, women developed a new form of feminist
cultural production – creating, disseminating
and collecting zines.
Due in part to their DIY nature, zines were initially not considered
by older feminists as legitimate or valuable. The younger generation were also
frequently portrayed as disinterested in feminist histories and concerned only
with ephemeral, fleeting tactics and engagements. These assumptions obscure the
ways in which contemporary feminists are invested in the past and the future,
as demonstrated by their practices of collecting and archiving. Indeed,
Eichhorn asserts that archives have become central
to feminist cultural production, activism and knowledge-making.
The ‘archival turn’ refers to the increasing popularity of archival
practices for women born during and after second wave feminism. Archives
function as an ‘authorizing apparatus’, working to legitimise feminist voices,
histories, knowledges and forms of cultural production which may otherwise be
disregarded or marginalised, such as zines and Riot Grrrl. Archives can also be
sites for activism and political intervention – drawing on Foucault’s concept
of genealogy, Eichhorn points to how an examination of the the past can disrupt
and destabilise seemingly ‘natural’ social conditions and structures in the
present.
Driven by an ‘archival impulse’, third wave feminists have been
collecting not only their own generation’s documents, but also those from past movements.
That is, through archiving, the younger generation are engaging with feminism’s
‘scrap heap’ – the marginalised stories, forgotten documents or ‘failed’
movements. As Eichhorn puts it, documents and subjects have ‘afterlives’ – they
can be important not only for what they achieve (or fail to achieve) at their
time of creation, but for how they may be used as a resource for thinking and
action later on. Archives, as accumulations of bits from the scrap heap, are
spaces which elucidate the connections and commonalities among feminists and
movements from different generations. In this way, the archive can undo rigid
generational logics, promote new narratives of feminism and cultivate
intergenerational alliances.
As Eichhorn’s case studies highlight, featuring older artefacts
alongside the Riot Grrrl materials can expand their meaning and authorise them
through contexualisation. For example, Sarah Dyer chose to donate her large
collection of zines to the Sallie Bingham Center (a research center housed in
Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book, Manuscript and Special
Collections Library) partly because she wanted the collection to be situated
among diverse women’s histories, rather than in an archive focused on any one
particular ideology or movement. In the case of The Riot Grrrl Collection at New York University’s Fales Library and
Special Collections, zines are positioned among other artistic and cultural
artefacts which legitimises them and connects them to a broader avant-garde
movement in North America.
Eichhorn’s book demonstrates that feminist
archives are simultaneously oriented to the past, present and future. They
function to legitimise and authorise feminist histories while also promoting
and developing contemporary feminist movements. Thus, they are not simply
spaces for preservation and memorialisation, but for education, collaboration
and activism.
Reference:
Eichhorn, Kate 2013, The
Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order, Temple University Press,
Philadelphia.
