reflection journal

Song of the reflection: “Pieces” by Robber Robber
I know… I’m choosing to forget
Caught me stewing in the sound of it, not knowing what it meant…

Key terms that I did not know:

• Appraisal: The process of deciding what should be included in the archive
  • Key figure in theory of appraisal: Sir Hilary Jenkinson. Produced second major treatise on archival theory and practice. Jenkinson believed archivist’s role was to preserve documents as “impartial evidence,” without archivist interference/personal judgement. Instead, he suggested that record creators should be the sole decision makers on what to keep/discard. Jenkinsonian approach to appraisal contributed to obfuscation/destruction of evidence, which we can hardly call impartiality (Cook, pp. 22-25).
• Provenance: I knew this term in the art historical sense, it is somewhat similar in the archival sense. It takes into consideration “the contextual circumstances of record creation” (Cook, p. 31).
  • Canadian approach - Focus on the organic context of the purpose of record keeping, the state/citizen interactions with records, and the forms/structures/data/purpose that caused them to be created (Cook, p. 32)
  • Key figure in reinvigoration of provenance: Tom Nesmith: provenance as “the evidential context which gave them [records] birth” → led to further Canadian research on document creators, administration of documents, forms/functions of documents, characteristics of documents, etc.
• “Total archives” : “the integration of the official role of archives as guardians of their sponsors’ continuing corporate requirements for recorded evidence of their transactions and the cultural role of archives as preservers of societal memory and historical identity, in both cases encompassing all media” (Cook, p. 34).
  • I like this definition because it seems to capture the tension between the power that is held by records, the knowledge-power that is produced by the archive, the value of records as documents/archives as institutions in historical/social remembering. I’m not sure “total archives” fully captures the intentional silencing/forgetting of what is excluded from the archive, but that is a question for class.

Are archives innocent? Even in Terry Cook’s historiography of the archive, which asks, “Upon which basis, reflecting what shifting values, have archivists decided who should be admitted into their houses of memory, and who excluded?” I’m also considering who Cook leaves out, overlooks, ignores. Archival history is an apparatus and institution of the state which has transformed and been legitimized as a place for social/collective memory, identity, and culture documentation. While Cook acknowledges that archival theory has gone beyond this and pushed society and academia to expect more of the archives, as more than a repository of records without interference, the exact methodology for doing so is left out.

In “Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory,” Schwartz and Cook interrogate the formula of “archives as institutions” and “documents as records” in producing what we know as “the archive,” demonstrating that both institutions and the individual documents that reside within those institutions tell stories about the context in which information was produced, what information was meant to be captured or silenced, and how that information is turned into knowledge - through the way it’s recorded, stored, processed, appraised, documented, and described. Much like the medico-professionalization of gynecology and childbirth in my discipline systemically wiped out feminine knowledge of bodies, the professionalization of the archive wiped out certain ways of knowing and recording “in favor of national politics, administration, diplomacy, war, and the experiences of men in power” (p. 16).

The archives are also sites of panoptic surveillance, discipline, and control through the knowledge-power they hold. Ketelaar (2002) identifies this by examining the very architecture and ‘performance’ (to borrow from Terri Kapsalis, I’m currently reading Public Privates: Performing Gynecology from Both Ends of the Speculum) of the archive – the very nature of their privacy, the process of requesting a visit, the donning of the white gloves, the elevated seat of the archivist–they police the researcher, the knowledge-seeker in their very rules and regulations, from stepping out of line-by touching too much, staying too long, or maybe even, questioning too deeply, wondering about that which is not there.

The delicate balance of seeking the gaps, silences, and missing voices without fetishizing that which is missing - we could call upon Haraway’s situated knowledge for a guide on how to do so - is something that Schwartz and Cook do not lay out in their brief introduction to the creation of “modern memory.” Ketelaar writes, “That is why it is so difficult to keep the right balance between, on the one hand, the requirement to destroy personal data when they have served their primary purpose, including that of serving the legal rights of the data subjects, and, on the other hand, the possibility that the files might get a new meaning and purpose in the future” (p. 229). I think this again speaks to Haraway’s situated knowledge–the illusion of objectivity, of one truth, of one proper way of knowing, is a “god trick.” Perhaps doing archival work is about studying that which is problematic, contested, absent, partial, all while taking responsibility for the ways knowledge is documented, administered, organized, and produced within archives as holders of documents and institutions of knowledge-production themselves. Maybe I’m just reiterating what all of these readings have been saying. I hope I’m understanding, even if just a little.

Final Project Thoughts

In Xenofeminism by Helen Hester, the Del-Em is presented as the quintessential xenofeminist technology - a DIY tool that sought to “seize the means of technology” to assert agency over one’s body, to advocate for more patient-focused medical care, and to end the gatekeeping of medical knowledge by making users active participants in their own care inside of informal support networks.

Hester, and M. Murphy in Seizing the Means of Reproduction, document the development of the Del-Em and its spread across biopolitical borders (and actually, did not move from the West elsewhere, but instead, came from the so-called Communist east to the imperial West). The expectation was that the Del-Em would circulate outside of medical institutions to become an at-home method for menstrual care and an alternative approach to abortions (although it was not always marketed this way). To interact with what Hester calls the mesopolitical - hyperlocal, individually embodied interventions designed with scalability in mind to overthrow state power.

I’m curious about how the Del-Em traveled - the individuals (Rothman and Downer) who ‘created’ it, adapted from a clipping from a Chinese nursing journal - to feminist self-help collectives in Los Angeles and beyond - to Bangladesh [write more about that here]. How did this information travel, what imagery was used to communicate the use of the tool, and how is that informed by the design of the tool - as a DIY, individually embodied technology with transbiopolitical implications? Obviously this needs a lot of work, but it’s a good starting point!!!!!

Song of the reflection: “Living Museum” by The Shyness Clinic
we've got to resituate our history
we've got to resituate our fantasy

This morning (monday, september 14) I met up with my former neighbor Star, with whom I reconnected after I saw they were teaching a class on digital zine making at School for Poetic Computation. I wanted to talk to Star about digital archives and digital zinemaking in the context of this class and my final project. Star’s thesis project during their MS program was called “Fugitive Digital Archives” - they essentially built a digital archive using a Raspberry Pi (a small low-cost computer) that participants could access using their smartphones to either record memories in the archive or to access the archive and view its contents. Star is interested in digital security in the context of digital archivemaking - how we protect our memories and our designs from being scraped from the internet and harvested for content or profit.

Although it increasingly seems like feminist periodicals will be the medium I’ll research for my final project in this class, I’m very drawn to low-tech, web1 ephemera. I’m a child of Tumblr and currently working on several projects in Neocities (as evidenced by this journal). I think my core question at this phase in the research process is: how did the Del-Em, as a material artifact, represent the politicization of bodies and care as technoscientific and biopolitical projects of the feminist movement in the 1970s? If we analyze the Del-Em as a tool of the “obstetric institution,” we see that the emancipatory potential for reproductive technology, even DIY technology, is almost unimaginable outside of institutions, and hence is endlessly entangled with racism, colonialism, gender roles and the hegemony of the nuclear family. These institutions are believed to be inevitable and permanent, and through the archive, we can observe these objects and the practices that surrounded their use as manifestations of the imperial, political economy of the time that ultimately sought to control populations and reproduction (Murphy, 2012; van der Waal 2024). The Del-Em is a material artifact of collective care, but one that was deeply imbued with a concern for controlling “life” as an object of feminist attention.

I’m also interested in mapping these “mesh networks” of collective care, which are, to my knowledge, having a bit of a contemporary resurgence. During my conversation with Star, I stopped, and asked, “wait, am I the opp for surveilling these networks that are doing their best to avoid surveillance?” And then we laughed, because, that’s the damn question! In seeking the potential silences in the archive about how information traveled, am I exposing that which is meant to be kept underground? Or am I highlighting the history and potential value of a material artifact and theory of knowledge production and circulation that might be increasingly important post-Dobbs, under privatized healthcare and the medical-industrial complex, under gynecological violence, under a rapidly increasing media cycle and infrastructure where slow media, low-tech options for self-care that aren’t connected to the internet might become increasingly valuable should we face dire circumstances in the future?

I have also been struggling with the tension between researching feminist self-help groups, which were known to center the perspectives of white, Western, upper class women and the legacy of the material artifacts and care networks they made visible or popularized that ultimately have their roots in technologies that did not originate in the West and modes of relating in Black, queer, and indigenous reproductive justice practices. Is that part of the archival work, to make that history explicit? Not to discover it, but to map the connections that have been made invisible? How to do that without disrupting fugitivity? I hope that in documenting my theoretical struggle, I will look back on these journals and see the process of working through complex issues.

This evening (monday, september 14), while reading chapter 2 of Silencing the Past, I was struck by the section on silences within silences - that even within the vast historical silencing of the narrative of Sans Souci in the history and legacy of the Haitian Revolution, there are plenty of microsilences, or retrospective assertions of significance that create additional silences within silent narratives. I was reminded while reading this of Audra Simpson’s piece “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship.” In this piece, Simpson discusses the ways refusal to speak interrupts ahistorical narratives. In not speaking, in not naming it automatically interrupts the process of colonial memory and asks - for whom does this remembering benefit? For whom does this documentation, recall, notation, empower? There is a clear element of refusal in the Haitian vs. non-Haitian narrative of Sans Souci.

Citations

Murphy, M. (2012). Seizing the means of reproduction: Entanglements of feminism, health, and technoscience. Duke University Press.

Trouillot, M.-R. (1995). Silencing the past: Power and the production of history. Beacon Press.

van der Waal, R. (2024). Undercommoning anthrogenesis: Abolitionist care for reproductive justice. Social Text, 42(2), 1–24.