The Archival Turn in Feminism The Archival Turn in Feminism Outrage in Order kate eichhorn Temple University Press philadelphia Temple University Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122 www.temple.edu/tempress Copyright © 2013 by Temple University All rights reserved Published 2013 library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Eichhorn, Kate, 1971– The archival turn in feminism : outrage in order / Kate Eichhorn. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4399-0951-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4399-0953-9 (e-book) 1. Feminism—North America—History—20th century. 2. Zines— Publishing—North America—History—20th century. 3. History—Sources. I. Title. HQ1121.E33 2013 305.42097—dc23 2013006604 The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992 Printed in the United States of America 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org. Contents Preface vii Introduction 1 1 The “Scrap Heap” Reconsidered: Selected Archives of Feminist Archiving 25 2 Archival Regeneration: The Zine Collections at the Sallie Bingham Center 55 3 Redefining a Movement: The Riot Grrrl Collection at Fales Library and Special Collections 85 4 Radical Catalogers and Accidental Archivists: The Barnard Zine Library 123 Conclusion 155 Notes 161 Works Cited 179 Index 185 Preface In the early to mid 1990s, as many established feminist institu- tions were falling into decline, girls and young women across North America started to plot a new revolution. Armed with lit- tle more than scissors, glue, and stolen time on copy machines, they made zines an integral part of their movement. Valuing expediency over posterity, however, their hastily produced pub- lications rarely pointed beyond the moment of production—the temporality of girl zines was the present. By extension, nothing about these publications necessarily pointed to the archive. Centered around the category of girl, itself temporally bound, rather than the more enduring category of woman, the temporal orientation of zines permeated feminist activism and cultural production in the 1990s—a point emphatically expressed by the title of Bikini Kill’s self-produced 1991 cassette release, “Revolu- tion Grrrl Style Now.” If a previous generation of feminists had funneled their energy into permanently changing the status of women through the entrenchment of new laws and institutional policies, in the 1990s a younger generation of feminists often appeared to be more interested in the political efficacy of tac- tics, which are by definition effective only to the extent that they viii / preface remain fleeting. In this context the annual march and monthly newspaper started to give way to more ephemeral interventions from the flash mob to the zine. Although the performance and affect of an annual protest or flash mob frequently do overlap, just as the content and aesthetic of a monthly newspaper and zine often share more rather than less in common, their promise is different. If the former promises to return until proven irrel- evant (as demonstrated through events such as International Women’s Day and Take Back the Night marches), the latter makes no such guarantee—its power to bring about change is located in, rather than despite, its unpredictability. Thus, rather than build institutional bases from which to restructure the social world, feminist activism in the 1990s was about making do in a world where it had grown increasingly difficult to ignore precariousness, even the precarious nature of past political victories. After all, in contrast to a generation of women who came to feminism in the late 1960s to early 1970s, girls and young women in the early 1990s were both the inheri- tors of a myriad of feminist political gains and institutions and the inheritors of a movement suddenly in decline. Riot Grrrl and, more broadly, third wave feminism appeared just as many second wave feminist institutions, especially those in the culture sector, including feminist presses, publications, record labels, and bookstores, were beginning to come apart, owing to both the internal pressures of volunteer burn-out and infighting and the declining external funding for explicitly feminist endeavors. Being a young feminist in the early 1990s—the era of Naomi Wolf’s Backlash not Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood is Powerful— meant being always already aware of the fact that political gains, even those that appear most entrenched, can never be taken for granted. Throughout the 1990s, differing temporal identifications and orientations would also surface as a major source of tension within the feminist movement. The “generational debates” that reached their peak around the turn of the new millennium were often rooted in accusations: older feminists dismissed younger