Ann Cvetkovich
Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of English and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin

Ordinary Lesbians and Special Collections: The June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives at UCLA

Wednesday, February 3rd
Cypress Room, Faculty Center
4 to 5:30pm
Reception to Follow

What happens when a grassroots lesbian feminist archive finds its way to the special collections of a major university research library?  Does it lose its counterarchival aura, or can it carry its powers of critical intervention into new spaces?  This talk explores these questions through the case of the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives, which have recently been housed and catalogued at UCLA.  It will focus in particular on how the self-archiving practices of “ordinary lesbians” make available the lives of those who may not be publicly recognized but whom the archive can make valuable.  And it will explore this case history within the broader context of her research on queer archival politics, which includes the models provided by artists whose creative approaches to the archives are simultaneously critical and transformative.

Ann Cvetkovich is Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of English and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.  She is the author of Mixed Feelings:  Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (Rutgers, 1992); An Archive of Feelings:  Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Duke, 2003); and Depression:  A Public Feeling (Duke, 2012). She is writing a book about the current state of LGBTQ archives and the creative use of them by artists to produce counterarchives and interventions in public history.