Archives of Women's Media

Against the grain of the traditional archive conceived of as the locus of (masculine/patriarchal) authority, women's archives remain a powerful tool for displacing and decentering authoritative discourses. This entry engages with physical and online spaces for archiving, mediating, and commemorating women's media. It critically retraces the historical emergence and endurance of women's archives and surveys some of the main women's archives and libraries, from tangible to digital, online environments. How are feminist activist practices materialized and articulated in media objects and ephemera (such as fanzines and pamphlets)? How do these primarily ephemeral objects get collected, archived, and curated? What happens when women's alternative media become institutionalized, entering a form of official and corporate culture? What kind of memory work takes place? This entry pays attention to the often precarious conditions of existence/survival of women's archives and to the enduring relationship that they bear to contemporary feminist practices. It engages with the centrality of materiality and material autonomy for the articulation and production of feminist identities and sensibilities in—and beyond—the male-biased corporate media industry.