Overview

In the 1990s, a generation of women born during the rise of the second wave feminist movement plotted a revolution. These young activists funneled their outrage and energy into creating music, and zines using salvaged audio equipment and stolen time on copy machines. By 2000, the cultural artifacts of this movement had started to migrate from basements and storage units to community and university archives, establishing new sites of storytelling and political activism. The Archival Turn in Feminism chronicles these important cultural artifacts and their collection, cataloging, preservation, and distribution. Cultural studies scholar Kate Eichhorn examines institutions such as the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University, The Riot Grrrl Collection at New York University, and the Barnard Zine Library. She also profiles the archivists who have assembled these significant feminist collections. Eichhorn shows why young feminist activists, cultural producers, and scholars embraced the archive, and how they used it to stage political alliances across eras and generations. A volume in the American Literatures Initiative

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9781439909515

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Reviews

Eichhorn has produced an original and incisive addition to the increasingly lively and crowded international debate around archives, feminism and activism... Her book is a particularly welcome intervention into current debates inasmuch as she is prepared to move well beyond those nostalgic, over-simplified and unreflective gestures towards 'recovering' and 'memorializing' feminist cultural heritage in order to engage in a seriously nuanced discussion of what it means to put 'outrage in order' or to see the cultural products of resistance movements transferred into formal spaces of preservation and - more often than not - into academic institutions marked by money, power and privilege... [A]n intelligently written history of a moment in feminist activism and an equally compelling interrogation of the conditions that ultimately shape one's capacity to think in historical terms about feminism as a movement. - Australian Feminist Studies

Author Information

Kate Eichhorn is Assistant Professor of Culture and Media Studies at The New School.

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