With June fast approaching, librarians may have LGBTQ+ programming and special collections in mind for Pride month celebrations. While this seasonal spotlight is important, librarians and archivists have an opportunity in curating collections of queer media and artifacts that can contribute to LGBTQ+ community building year-round.
Especially given the recent onslaught of legislation in the United States targeting trans youth and LGBTQ+ education, archives and special collections that highlight the queer community’s enduring presence are essential.
Drawing from the work of queer theorists, librarians, and archivists, what follows are three primary considerations for curating a queer archive or library collection.
What Does a Queer Approach Mean?
“Queer” is, undoubtedly, a tricky term with a complex history. It’s used here in two ways: first, as an umbrella term for all gender, sexual, and romantic minorities (sometimes referred to as GSRM); second, in the sense of queer theory, as in that which resists and challenges the mainstream, the hegemonic, and the heteronormative.
To take a queer approach to curating a collection is a bit oxymoronic because a key tenet of queer theory is resistance to categories and the power structures that create them. How then does one curate a collection of queer artifacts that works as an archive of queer history without limiting “queerness” as clearly definable and containable?
Librarians and archivists will do well to draw on seminal queer theorists Charles Morris and K. J. Rawson and their work on “queering archives.” Morris and Rawson acknowledge that archives of queer materials are “bodies of evidence,” but emphasize that this evidence does not serve to crystallize a monolithic queer identity, especially one that can be defined from outside the community. Instead, the evidence “constitutes an intervention against (hetero/homo) normativity’s retrospective governance and discipline” by asserting that “queers have been here.”
To curate a library collection of LGBTQ+ media or artifacts from a queer approach means to bring the pieces in question together not in an attempt to nail down a definitive portrait of queerness, and certainly not to pathologize queerness as “other,” but instead to show the community’s constant evolution and continuing legacy.
A truly queer archive pushes back against the institutional power to create and maintain categories in the first place.
How Can Digitization Affect Representation?
“Representation matters” has become a catchphrase in the push to see more LGBTQ+ stories in books and films, and it can often feel like reaching the widest possible audience should be the ultimate goal. The ability to offer queer media online and to digitize LGBTQ+ artifacts to share in online collections sounds good because digital access generally means vastly increased access. However, it is prudent to consider how digitizing archival materials can be both useful and potentially harmful, especially for marginalized and oppressed groups of people.
At the University of North Texas, special collections librarians Jaimi Parker and Morgan Gieringer take special care to make artifacts searchable through accurate metadata, so that the connection to physical artifacts is not entirely lost, even in an online archive. Parker and Gieringer have found that “As part of a community built archive, artifacts within LGBTQ collections have a particularly personal significance, especially with respect to artifacts connected with community members who died of HIV/AIDS. Artifacts also have potent emotional significance as symbols of activism and public displays of identity.”
For archivists and librarians creating online queer collections, it’s essential that artifacts’ metadata reference the artifacts themselves, not just the photograph of the artifact available online. With accurate metadata, those searching through the online archive will be guided to the physical objects themselves, which are essential to the community’s history.
T. L. Cowan and Jasmine Rault, who co-founded the online archive Cabaret Commons (https://cabaretcommons.org/), have written extensively about the ethics of digitization of and access to queer media. Cowan explains that to move the queer media she works with online to the Cabaret Commons “is to move the people in them from a cabaret scene in which their presentation, aesthetics, and resourcefulness is valued as fabulous, into an online context that potentially exposes them to the general public, to whom our genders, bodies, aesthetics, and desires are regularly understood as abnormal, deviant, dangerous.”
This is not to say that librarians and archivists should shy away from digitizing queer collections for wide online audiences, but rather that they must consider who will benefit from the collection’s presence and potential dissemination online, and how digitization affects the relationship between the viewer and the artifact.
How Can an Archive Help My Community?
Most essential to curating a queer archive is maintaining the primary goal of serving the queer community. Cowan calls the work of creating and maintaining queer archives “care-full work” in that she and her colleagues “hope to conscientiously, deliberately, meaningfully move away from the paternalistic and often non-consensual imposition of ‘help’ in a settler-colonial context, and how this care has shaped research and archive cultures and economies.”
To the extent that it’s possible, queer people should always be directly involved in the creation of queer archives, so that the work is done for the community by the community.
Institutions housing archives of LGBTQ+ materials should consider making their collections open access so that those who would most benefit from the archive are not excluded from it (especially when the archive holds the artifacts of people historically marginalized by institutions of power).
Although this and the other suggestions posed in this article are geared specifically toward queer archives, archivists and librarians can take queer methodologies into consideration for any archive that seeks to serve its most democratic purpose: to connect artifacts with the people whose histories they tell, and with the people who seek to share and preserve those histories.
References
Cowan, T.L. “Don’t you know that digitization is not enough? Digitization is not enough! Building Accountable Archives and the Digital Dilemma of the Cabaret Commons.” In Moving Archives, edited by Linda M. Morra, not paginated. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2020. Ebook.
Morris, Charles E. and K. J. Rawson. “Queer Archives/Archival Queers.” In Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric, edited by Michelle Ballif, 74-89. Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013.
Parker, Jaimi, and Morgan Gieringer. “Collection and Digitization of Artifacts in the University of North Texas LGBTQ Archive.” Journal of Archival Organization 16, no. 2/3 (2019): 109–25. doi:10.1080/15332748.2019.1679012.