History, Activism, Erasure: Archival Paradox as Institutional Practice

Authors

Sarah H. Salter, Texas A&M University-Corpus ChristiFollow

Abstract

This essay connects the reparative assemblages of queer archiving practice to growing conversations in university studies. Tracing the fraught legal history of Penn State University’s first “Homophile” association in the 1970s, this essay theorizes how university records—and the processes of recording they index—participate in the creation of institutional identity and help establish institutional relations with their communities. Ultimately, it suggests that archivists and librarians act as mediators, unintentionally or purposefully, of the relations between vulnerable communities and the structures of power in which they are embedded.

Recommended Citation

Salter, Sarah H.. 2021. "History, Activism, Erasure: Archival Paradox as Institutional Practice." Journal of Feminist Scholarship 19 (Fall): 24-41. 10.23860/jfs.2021.19.03.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.