#counter-archives

Conventional archives utilize temporality, spatialization, and racial privileging when exerting power and privilege over what is considered archivable. Syrus Marcus Ware explores “the erasure of racialized and indigenous histories from white trans archives, time lines, and cartographies of resistance” in his article “All Power to All People? Black LGBTTI2QQ Activism, Remembrance, and Archiving in Toronto” (p. 170). He discusses the importance of the documentary work done by folks within black queer and trans communities. The variety of skill sets and backgrounds used to approach this task ranges from artists and poets to activists and community mobilizers. Ware also notes that it is important to keep in mind that black queer subjects do not always or necessarily fit within the conceptualizations of white queer space and history and that there is an element of erasure when black histories are assumed to mimic white narratives. There is often a different timeline for racialized trans folks in terms of the typical white trans “progress narrative” because of differing access to the rights that are seemingly required to do so. Trans lives of colour in Westernized societies are more likely to be affected by multiple intersections of identity and systemic challenges that are inherent with racialization. The archives and histories of many queer and trans activists of colour are not fully accounted for in the same way as their white counterparts through conventional archiving practices as historical power dynamics shaped (and continue to shape) the ways people are literally fighting for physical safety and survival rather than having their activism documented.

Ware proposes that in beginning from and centering QTBIPOC (Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, Person of Colour) narratives, there is a new entry point and an interruption to the whitewashing of queer and trans historical accounts. This shift lends the ability to “[re]consider the past, presents, and futures” of racialized queer and trans communities, guiding prospective activism and offering meaningful ways of imagining collective futures. Who gets to tell histories shapes the futurity of marginalized communities, and especially racialized queer and trans narratives.

The customizability of an individual tumblr page creates almost innumerable ways for users to work with the platform as a tool for digital self-representation. This is also evident in the ways ephemeral aspects of art, fashion, and activist culture that are present on the platform have been utilized by individuals to build understandings of digital cultures of trans and queer communities, among various others like racialized and differently abled communities that may have less of a mainstream presence (especially in traditionally hegemonic archives) and the impacts of these cultural and community understandings both on and offline. 

In their article “Trans Media Moments: Tumblr, 2011-2013,” Marty Fink and Quinn Miller discuss some of the impacts of tumblr’s acquisition by Yahoo in 2013 and the ensuing shift in how non-cisheteronormative content was presented, namely through advertising and “cleaning up” the site’s more “adult” content which had previously been a substantive source of visual identity recognition in something of an anarchival venue for many queer and trans folks. As “a system of simultaneous consumption and production” (p.614), tumblr is still an outlet for creators who are finding ways to circumvent this censorship to share niche interests that can be searched for and shared. This commitment to queer and trans community building is continued in “peripheral forms of cultural production” through intertextual curation of individual tumblrs and collective reblogging to disseminate information that often feels essential in a communal context. 

These particular types of cultural production fit in with the counter-archiving practices I have been looking at in this project, creating a sense that, despite the transitory properties of the tumblr platform itself as it has changed ownership and user demographics as a result over the years, there is still immense value in using the site as a means to curate and share queer and trans community and cultural productions.

The tagging function on tumblr and other social media sites has made finding connections to other folks with shared identities and/or interests as simple as clicking on an appealing word or phrase. Many tumblr users employ tags to explore queer and trans identities in a variety of ways, from writing their own tags to poking through those used in posts shared and reblogged by others on the platform. Tagging is a great example of a method of community building that goes beyond what might be deemed archivable in a traditional sense. It’s a tool that could be considered counter-archival because tags are inherently unstable making them difficult to document consistently. They are initially attached to a post, but disappear when that post is reblogged, decreasing their spread and visibility unless the sharing user makes a point of re-including the original tags. Occasionally, however, tags are shared via a screenshot, which transforms them into a whole new type of content that provokes a kind of evolution to their original ephemerality. There’s an appeal to this impermanence that might be intriguing to users looking to find connections over the platform because of the ability to add an annotative or narrative reaction that allows for more specific self-expression than the “likes” and set number of emoji-reactions of Facebook or Instagram while not forcing a person to make this expression in a more concrete way like a comment that can easily be included when a post is shared.

The malleability of tags also fosters the ability to create meaningful connections between various aspects of identity, which in turn can help challenge dominant narratives about how queer and trans identities are typically portrayed. Without a built in group function on the site that allows users to claim membership through a particular social connection, tags also create a type of space for that. Many users will share a variety of identity labels in their posts from gender identity and/or sexual orientation to hobbies to mental health struggles to their favourite “ships” within any given fandom. Each of these types of tags creates a fuller sense of who a user might be through self-expression and this allows for more complexity in the connection and engagement between users who have some of the same things in common, especially when it comes to marginalized identities.

Conventional archives are not neutral containers of information. They are, more often than not, subject to hegemonic and colonial power structures that limit the ideas of what is considered “acceptable” culture and knowledge that can and ought to be preserved. Anarchiving and counter-archiving are avenues to explore ways of subverting and disrupting traditional or conventional archival practices in order to make tangible space for the “excess” that tends to be left out, and even promotes the question of what makes an archive in the first place. My aim for this project is to use the tumblr platform itself as a tool to dig into the concepts of anarchiving and counter-archives as methods that can further queer and trans cultural production while making meaningful connections to and between queer ephemeral experiences in the process.

Anarchiving is an active practice that emphasizes the affective aspects and material processes of production rather than focusing on static, standardized, and often institutionally propelled documentation, interpretation, preservation, research, and/or retrieval of data and objects that tend to be catalogued within conventional archives.

Counter-archives often go beyond the limitations of the selective practices of conventional archives by focusing more reciprocal and collaborative processes that are grounded in community building. There is an inherent notion of transformation in counter-archival practices because of the intentional inclusion of the uncapturable ephemeral and fleeting aspects that are typically left out of traditional archives, such as “affects, bodies, performances, and embodied events,” as noted by Springgay, A. Truman, and MacLean in their article Socially Engaged Art, Experimental Pedagogies, and Anarchiving as Research-Creation (citation included at the end of post).

We can jump from this article into some related work in audio format. As co-directors of the WalkingLab project and podcast, Stephanie Springgay and Sarah E. Truman look into various approaches to anarchiving and counter-archiving through movement. As discussed in WalkingLab’s fifth episode “Queer Walking Tours,” the generative nature of anarchiving creates space for the defamiliarization of assumptions about place-based research, identity, ableism, embodiment, and queerness, among many other things. In the third episode of the series “Walking as Counter-Archiving,” WalkingLab complicates common conventional archival concepts like chrononormativity (time as linear and chronological), historical concealment or erasure, and the often-ensuing damage-centred research that is used to explore race and racialization in archives constructed under white supremacist power structures.