Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies

"INFORMATION ACTIVISM surveys the media produced by lesbian feminist archivists, librarians, historians, and hotline workers over the past 50 years, showing how volunteer-driven activist information projects formed the basis for queer digital media practices today. Recognizing a gap in the resources available to queer women and in how institutional libraries and archives represented lesbian history, these women decided to generate and index the information themselves. Cait McKinney considers how these information activists prioritized feminist theory and politics in their work, seeking to create media that were accessible, collaborative, and grassroots. McKinney also looks at the evolution of lesbian feminist information projects from the 1970s to the present, charting media formats and distribution methods as they moved from paper-based methods to computerized and other new digital technologies, while the language used to categorize and tag information also changed to become more trans-inclusive. The book first looks at lesbian newsletters and periodicals that proliferated from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s to produce networks of lesbian feminist information infrastructure. These newsletters-such as Matrices, Network News, Grapevine, and Telewoman-included grassroots materials like hotline numbers, calendars of events, overviews of new primary source materials for researchers, book announcements and reviews, as well as fundraising appeals. Next, McKinney considers the call logs and archived records of New York's Lesbian Switchboard and Toronto's Lesbian Phone Line, which attest to the intense emotional tone and economies of care involved in the hotlines. The third chapter turns to paper card indexes created in the 1980s, including "The Lesbian Periodicals Index" and "Black Lesbians: An Annotated Bibliography," as a form of media that allowed lesbian feminists to deliberately construct and narrate lesbian history in their own language, while making lesbian information coherent and intelligible for both insiders and outsiders. Finally, McKinney examines how the often-improvised digitization practices employed at the Lesbian Herstory Archives challenge and enrich understandings of technological values like access, usability, engagement, and preservation. Volunteer archivists work to digitize spoken word tapes, photographs, and the catalog itself in a way that honors lesbian history but also allows for evolving language, especially around trans masculinity. INFORMATION ACTIVISM will interest queer media workers, librarians, and archivists, as well as scholars in media and technology studies, communication studies, queer and gender studies, and women's history"--
Cait McKinney traces how lesbian feminist activists in the United States and Canada between the 1970s and the present developed communication networks, databases, and digital archives to use as a foundation for their feminist, antiracist, and trans-inclusive work.
For decades, lesbian feminists across the United States and Canada have created information to build movements and survive in a world that doesn't want them. In Information Activism Cait McKinney traces how these women developed communication networks, databases, and digital archives that formed the foundation for their work. Often learning on the fly and using everything from index cards to computers, these activists brought people and their visions of justice together to organize, store, and provide access to information. Focusing on the transition from paper to digital-based archival techniques from the 1970s to the present, McKinney shows how media technologies animate the collective and unspectacular labor that sustains social movements, including their antiracist and trans-inclusive endeavors. By bringing sexuality studies to bear on media history, McKinney demonstrates how groups with precarious access to control over information create their own innovative and resourceful techniques for generating and sharing knowledge.