Posters with Glitter Issues: Exploring Archival (W)holes at the Newberry Library

Abstract

This article explores the Newberry Library’s Chicago Protest Collection and its ‘posters with glitter issues’, that is, protest ephemera classified by conservation concern due to the amount of glitter and glue used in its construction. The Newberry’s collection of protest materials is a unique and at-times contradictory archival body. What allows these materials to hang together is their glitter proximity; how they shed, spread, accumulate, and intermingle in the stacks. Drawing from in-situ research at the Newberry, as well as interviews with Newberry archivists and an artist creating textiles in response to queer archival absence, this article ‘follows the glitter’ in order to position feminist and queer archival records as transgressive and leaky. Thinking alongside archival theorising on the archival body, and feminist and queer studies of glitter as world-building, I trace and corral glitter across four distinct but interpolated acts of records shaping that constitute the Newberry Library’s collection of protest materials: Initial inscription (glitter on the hands), collective constitution (glitter on the street), institutional archivalisation (glitter on the floor), and artistic use (glitter in the air). In undertaking this analysis, I demonstrate how this bright and glittery archival body continually creates, sustains, obscures, and fabulates feminist and queer life worlds.

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