Thursday, February 3, 2022
12:00 – 1:00 p.m.
Online (via Zoom)
Registration is required. Please complete the form below.
Abstract
The Newberry Library’s Chicago Protest Collection is bright, glitzy and glittery; these materials shed, spread, and intermingle in the stacks. This talk explores the ‘leaky’ nature of feminist and queer protest ephemera by ‘following the glitter’ through the Newberry Library’s collection of 2017 Women’s March ephemera. Thinking alongside archival theorizing on the archival body, and feminist and queer studies of glitter as world-building, I trace and corral glitter across four distinct, but interpolated acts of records shaping that constitute the Newberry Library’s collection of protest materials: Initial inscription (glitter on the hands), collective constitution (glitter on the street), institutional archivalization (glitter on the floor), and artistic use (glitter in the air). In undertaking this analysis, I demonstrate how this bright and glittery archival body continually creates, sustains, obscures, and fabulates feminist and queer life worlds.
Bio
Jessica Lapp completed her PhD at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information in 2020. Her research conceptualizes feminist records creation, expanded notions of provenance and records attribution, and the creation and circulation of digital records of feminist organizing. Jessica has published her work in Archival Science, Information & Culture, and Australian Feminist Studies.
