A Reading Companion to Archiving the '80s

Collections like my mother’s are not uncommon among the Chicanas with whom I have been conducting oral histories since 2009. In fact, they are a regular feature of their domestic space, much in the way that altares might have been for their mothers and grandmothers a generation before. More than simply archives, these collections suggest modes of critical documentation and memory that bridge multiple polarities. Constituted through both practice and theory, they are intensely personal but also invested in collective transformation. While they carefully document the past, they are also deeply engaged with the present and even the future. And while they represent the traces of a particular intellectual and political development, they are also an active and disruptive space of collective remembrance and identity formation. If my years of labor in the libraries, offices, and garages of Chicana feminists have taught me anything, it is that these practices of collecting and remembrance are a central feature of Chicana feminist thought, and yet they remain largely unexplored in the historiography of the social movement era.

Dear Students, I would say, people who imagine change are of divided mind. Since there is no leader, no credentialing authority, no gatekeeper to say “No entry here; you’re not a real feminist,” fortunately and unfortunately, feminism can’t maintain a fixed stance and must always struggle for always-­shifting affiliations and aesthetics. So— criticize away. Feminists need and will always have agonistic relationships not only with the world but among themselves. Don’t swamp with paralyzing doubt what might be your small piece of the larger, evolving project. Feminism is a sensibility, subject to constant revision, but very portable. Even as you change, you can take it with you.

Scholars most often cite articles from feminist newsletters because of the topics they explore, so these traces of the production process—of those laboring bodies—effectively become silenced. We are likely to read around, over, and through them and not to read them as content.

In [second-wave feminist periodicals], a piece about a local film festival could appear next to an announcement about an upcoming election and in the same issue as a page full of poetry, a graphic of a woman with her fist raised in a Black Power salute, and an editorial requesting help putting out the newsletter. Therefore, my analysis considers text and imagery along with the other items on each page and the rest of the issue in which the article appears. Yet discourses outside a particular article or image shape its meaning: a single issue is in conversation with previous issues and anticipates future ones, and other feminist media and mainstream media also come into play.

As studies of U.S. feminism show, location matters. The content of a periodical depended on the women who worked on it, their priorities, and the interests of their readers as well as their budget, printing options, and the labor women contributed. Local politics shaped what would be included in the pages of an issue; local resources shaped what could be included. Theories developed and transformed in conversation with a place's history, geography, demographics, communication networks, and economy, and these factors manifested in relation to the coalitions and factions that formed among and within activist groups.

Studying the feminist movement in smaller cities and cities outside the Northeast not only fills in gaps in the historiography but also allows us to complicate dominant narratives, honor the decentralization or feminist practices, and analyze the relationship between a social movement’s structure and the construction of its collective identity.

I've come to feel that the political work of grrrl zines is more subtle and differently resistant than my earlier line of questioning allowed me to see. What I'm interested in now are these new modes of doing politics, these micropolitical pedagogies that operate in the fissures and forgotten places, that offer dreams on display, that provoke outrage, that invite all kinds of emulation. Viewing grrrl zines in this way not only makes their interventions more visible and valuable but also gives a framework for evaluating the larger world of third wave feminism. These zines become case studies that materialize the arguments that third wave scholars and girls' studies scholars have been making—arguments about girls' and women's agency and about what it means to resist in the current cultural moment.

But there is no reason to believe that xerography will entirely vanish. It will persist as a signifier of a specific style, attitude, and politics that changed how we lived, created, connected, and organized ourselves in public spaces in the late twentieth century. And if xerography mattered because it was a medium through which we imagined how to create new types of publics, counterpublics, cities, and communities, perhaps it is entirely appropriate that its legacy will never take the form of a set of artifacts confined to a glass vitrine in a museum.

Copy machines, in this sense, not only helped to forge social bonds but also arguably changed who could be an active participant in the making of culture. After all, as long as the city was a bulletin board and the bulletin board was everywhere, in a sense we were all living in our communication platform. We walked through it, were influenced by its aesthetic, and of course, as my own archival research for this chapter reminded me, we took it mostly for granted too—that is, until downtowns regained their status as sites of economic interest and the aesthetics and content of xeroxed posters began to come under attack.

Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic demand from most vital areas of our lives other than sex. And the lack of concern for the erotic root and satisfactions of our work is felt in our disaffection from so much of what we do. For instance, how often do we truly love our work even at its most difficult?

In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art. In other words, a strange action: I do not stop imitating myself, and because of this, each time I am (or let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture (comparable to certain nightmares). In terms of image-repertoire, the Photograph (the one I intend) represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter."

Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.

Each photograph is read as the private appearance of its referent: the age of Photography corresponds precisely to the explosion of the private into the public, or rather into the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumed as such, publicly (the incessant aggressions of the Press against the privacy of stars and the growing difficulties of legislation to govern them testify to this movement).

Consider the United States, where everything is transformed into images: only images exist and are produced and are consumed. An extreme example: go into a New York porn shop; here you will not find vice, but only its tableaux vivants (from which Mapplethorpe has so lucidly derived certain of his photographs); it is as if the anonymous individual (never an actor) who gets himself tied up and beaten conceives of his pleasure only if this pleasure joins the stereotyped (worn-out) image of the sado-masochist: pleasure passes through the image: here is the great mutation.

To write directly and overtly as a woman, out of a woman’s body and experience, to take women’s existence seriously as theme and source for art, was something I had been hungering to do, needing to do, all my writing life.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist’s relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist’s concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle, and the artist must choose between politics—here defined as earth-bound factionalism, corrupt power struggles—and art, which exists on some transcendent plane.

If touching the past once felt impossible for feminists or conversely at odds with more immediate political concerns, for women born during and after the rise of the second wave feminist movement both touching history and being engaged in its making have become part and parcel of what it means to be an engaged feminist activist, cultural worker, or scholar in the present.