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For decades, lesbian feminists across the United States and Canada have created information to build movements and survive in a world that doesn't want them. In
Information Activism Cait McKinney traces how these women developed communication networks, databases, and digital archives that formed the foundation for their work. Often learning on the fly and using everything from index cards to computers, these activists brought people and their visions of justice together to organize, store, and provide access to information. Focusing on the transition from paper to digital-based archival techniques from the 1970s to the present, McKinney shows how media technologies animate the collective and unspectacular labor that sustains social movements, including their antiracist and trans-inclusive endeavors. By bringing sexuality studies to bear on media history, McKinney demonstrates how groups with precarious access to control over information create their own innovative and resourceful techniques for generating and sharing knowledge.
List of contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. The Internet That Lesbians Built: Newsletter Networks 33
2. Calling to Talk and Listening Well: Information as Care at Telephone Hotlines 67
3. The Indexers: Dreaming of Computers while Shuffling Paper Cards 105
4. Feminist Digitization Practices at the Lesbian Herstory Archives 153
Epilogue. Doing Lesbian Feminism in an Age of Information Abundance 205
Notes 217
Bibliography 261
Index 281
About the author
Cait McKinney is Assistant Professor of Communication at Simon Fraser University and coeditor of
Inside Killjoy's Kastle: Dykey Ghosts, Feminist Monsters, and Other Lesbian Hauntings.
Summary
Cait McKinney traces how lesbian feminist activists in the United States and Canada between the 1970s and the present developed communication networks, databases, and digital archives to use as a foundation for their feminist, antiracist, and trans-inclusive work.
