Affect and the feminist archive

Written by Kat Schuetz, MSc Applied Gender Studies, with an introduction by Professor Karen Boyle

Students on our Feminisms: Continuity & Change class, part of the Strathclyde MSc in Applied Gender Studies, have been working with archival materials in Glasgow Women’s Library this semester. Exploring topics including second-wave feminist activism in Scotland, feminist publishing, fashion, and education, students are asked to write an assessed blog about the materials they have found in the library – and beyond – and to reflect on the contemporary significance of historical artefacts and debates. Over the next few weeks we’ll be sharing a selection of these blogs, with permission, to give you a flavour of the work our students have been doing and hopefully encourage you to discover GWL’s collections for yourselves.  First up, Kat Schuetz describes the powerful affective charge of encountering feminist history in the archives. 

 ‘In the archive, carefully catalogued objects and manuscripts can be rediscovered, touched, sorted, and transcribed by researchers: most significantly, they are experienced in their materiality, a process which carries with it a particular emotional charge’.[1]

Reading through the women’s liberation journals at the Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL) I frequently found myself moved simply by the materiality of the objects in front of us. As the quote above shows, going through archival materials is already a haptic process, and being made aware of the fragility of some documents by our professor increased my attention to the way I was touching the material: carefully turning pages, sometimes leaning in to visually grasp faded writing. Finding handwritten contributions especially heightened the tangibility of these materials. Even if these pieces were re-printed and duplicated, they made me acutely aware of the process of writing and creating such journals, as well as of the women who contributed to them. The women, before only a vague, disembodied second-wave feminist entity, were brought to life, embodied and personalised for me. A quickly written ‘not to be read by men’ on some journals’ covers conjures up the hand of the women who added them there, the women who were contributing to a feminist community with their journals and inviting me, a fellow woman, into this community. To me, this is the ‘emotional charge’: a cross-temporal connection that inspires empowerment, hope, and activism.[2] 

Note on cover of women's liberation newsletters:

Glasgow Women’s Library archive

This affective reaction goes beyond handwritten contributions. Take for example the piece ‘a treadmill disguised as a merry-go-round’ in Shrew, a newsletter by the London Women's Liberation Workshop. In haptically engaging with this typed source, I think not only about my touch of the paper, but also imagine the woman on the typewriter writing this piece, maybe by herself or maybe in a room with other activists. I think about how each metal letter hammer hits the page, accompanied by a clacking noise (and I am reminded of my childhood, writing on a typewriter gifted by my grandfather). 

 

‘a treadmill disguised as a merry-go-round’, Shrew 3.2 (1971), pages 1 and 3: 

Glasgow Women’s Library archive

Here, we can still find embodiment, personality and emotionality - despite the text being typed rather than in someone’s personal handwriting. For instance, the second paragraph includes the typo ‘probaby’ – did this sneak in in the passion of writing? Was the author blasé about the tidiness of the piece and instead focused on the power of the message? Was there a hectic atmosphere at the place of writing or time pressure to conclude the piece? The colloquial language further allows us to connect to the anger that must have inspired this text. Instances like ‘We’re not stupid?’ or ‘Okay, we all, men and women … [my own emphasis]’ appear almost like a feminist rant, not written thoughtlessly, but certainly passionately. Accompanying the text is an illustration of a women’s heavily made-up face with the satirical headline ‘Look NATURAL!’, inviting us once again to think of the hand of the feminist putting the pen to paper, leaving a mark of her personal artistic style on the page for future feminist generations to see.

‘Look NATURAL’, Shrew 3.2 (1971): 

Glasgow Women’s Library archive

 Feminist academics Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway and Sarah Randles argue that archival objects situate us temporarily by involving us in a present moment, engaging us in objects from a past and alluding to future goals, while also ‘locat[ing] us within networks of relationships’.[3] In the archive we can ‘see and literally touch [our] own history’[4] in haptic encounters that produce affect, ‘a force that creates a relation between a body and the world’.[5] For me, this affect consisted of an emotional awareness of my temporarily situated self, connecting myself to a feminist past and entering into the ‘networks of relationships’ of cross-temporal feminist collectivity.[6] In reading the women’s contributions in the women’s liberation journals, we become witnesses to their passions, angers, concerns transmitted in their handwritings, texts and drawings which make us aware of our own embodied situatedness and connections to the feminist world.

I end this entry by borrowing Sara Ahmed’s phrase that we are ‘moved to become feminists’. For Ahmed, the word ‘feminist’ produces hope and energy and feminist movement happens at multiple levels.[7] I experienced being ‘moved’ emotionally (as in ‘being moved to tears’) by the feeling of connection to feminists before me. Diving into the tangible materials in the GWL archives allowed me, through touch and affect, to feel the energy described by Ahmed and to create a cross-generational ‘we’, ‘that hopeful signifier of a feminist collectivity’ empowered with the ability to change the status quo.[8]

Click here to read Kat Schuetz’s second blog, which discusses the contemporary resonances of Naomi Wolf’s 1991 book, The Beauty Myth.

Notes

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[1] Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway, and Sarah Randles, Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions through

History (Oxford University Press: Oxford Scholarship Online, 2018) 17.

[2] Downes, Holloway, Randles, 17.

[3] Downes, Holloway, Randles, 15.

[4] Marika Cifor, “Affecting relations: introducing affect theory to archival discourse”, Archival Science: International Journal on Recorded Information, 16.1 (2016) 15.

[5] Cifor, 8.

[6] Downes, Holloway, Randles, 15.

[7] Ahmed, 1.

[8] Ahmed, 2.