The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order

Abstract

Kate Eichhorn’s The Archival Turn in Feminism examines the development of archives dedicated to feminist zine and Riot Grrrl cultures. The feminist archive, Eichhorn argues, is not merely about the past, but rather it is a significant “site and practice” that serves an authorizing function for “knowledge making, cultural production, and activism” in the present (3). Drawing on her own interviews with archivists and librarians Kelly Wooten, Lisa Darms, and Jenna Freedman, Eichhorn’s work extends feminist and queer scholarship (Cvetkovich’s 2003, Freeman’s 2010, and Hemmings’s 2011) on how we think and write about temporality and social movement histories. Although situated within the broader archival turn within humanities and social sciences scholarship, Eichhorn’s book focuses on university archives and collections, specifically Duke University’s Sallie Bingham Center, New York University’s Fales Library, and Barnard College’s zine library. The first chapter tells the story of two important precursors to these institutional feminist archives – the World Center for Women’s Archives (WCWA) and the International Archives for the Women’s Movement (IAV) – both launched in 1935. Critically responding to Susan Faludi’s (2010) infamous assertion that “feminism’s heritage is repeatedly hurled on the scrap heap” by each successive generation of feminists (40), Eichhorn argues that the notion of scrap heap might be repurposed to imagine the ways that the archive serves as both “a site of abjection [. . .] and a playground, a refuge, a scene of innovation, humor, hope, and longing” (29). The archive is thus a vital and active site integral to the feminist politics of the present.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.