Queering the Community Music Archive

ABSTRACT

Archiving has become an increasingly important practice in the preservation of feminist and queer histories. In this article, we pay specific attention to the emerging body of literature on feminist archives of popular music, many of which are community-based, DIY initiatives. These community-led archives aim to comprehensively collect the ephemeral, intangible heritage of feminist music cultures that have traditionally been excluded in popular music canons and marginalised by mainstream heritage institutions. The literature revealed that feminist music archives function as much more than spaces for preservation – they are affective as much as they are intellectual, and they are key sites for activism and community-building. These two themes – activism and affectivity – thread together the body of literature, providing both the driving force behind these DIY archives and their potentiality in the communities of interest they cater to. The community archivists accounted for in the literature have all engaged in practices of queering the community music archive; taking the mainstream heritage institution as a model and rebuilding it from the ground up, renegotiating its boundaries and notions of linear history, and reconfiguring its practices to account for lives lived in the margins of the mainstream.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Zelmarie Cantillon is a senior research assistant and sessional tutor in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Griffith University, Australia. Zelmarie’s current research analyses international resorts as distinct kinds of urban milieux. Her research interests include spatiality, tourism, heritage and popular culture.

Sarah Baker (corresponding author) is an associate professor of cultural sociology at Griffith University, Australia. Her books include Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries (Routledge 2011) and Teaching Youth Studies Through Popular Culture (ACYS 2014) and edited collections Redefining Mainstream Popular Music (Routledge 2013), Youth Cultures and Subcultures: Australian Perspectives (Ashgate 2015), and Preserving Popular Music Heritage: Do-It-Yourself, Do-It-Together (Routledge 2015).

Bob Buttigieg is a PhD student and research assistant in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Griffith University. Bob’s doctoral research explores the survival tactics of queer youth in the heterosexed public spaces of Australia’s Gold Coast.

Notes

1. Withers (2014, 691) points to punk as subset of a ‘malestream’, which may not be inclusive of women.

2. As Eichhorn (2013) herself pointed out, this is not necessarily always the case – community-based archives like the LHA have outlasted many institutional archives, partly due to the fact that their independence rendered them relatively unaffected by the neoliberal restructuring and funding cuts which caused so many other archives to collapse.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [grant number DP1300100317].