“Nothing much was lost”: exploring feminist process as records creation

Abstract

Exploring the challenges and opportunities inherent in the act of “doing feminist archiving,” this paper considers how archival materials have been accumulated and used in two distinct contexts: Alternative Toronto, a digital archive in Toronto, Ontario and the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance (ALFA) Archives at the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture located in the Rubenstein Library at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Although very different in form, scope and capacity, these archives both demonstrate tensions between archiving the self and archiving the collective, navigating blurred distinctions between creating a record and creating an archive and incorporating feminist process as archival practice. I illustrate these tensions in order to demonstrate how traditional understandings of provenance become challenged by the vast array of social, cultural and political entanglements that influence, shape and constrain feminist archiving efforts.