Posters with Glitter Issues: Exploring Archival (W)holes at the Newberry Library

ABSTRACT

This article explores the Newberry Library’s Chicago Protest Collection and its ‘posters with glitter issues’, that is, protest ephemera classified by conservation concern due to the amount of glitter and glue used in its construction. The Newberry’s collection of protest materials is a unique and at-times contradictory archival body. What allows these materials to hang together is their glitter proximity; how they shed, spread, accumulate, and intermingle in the stacks. Drawing from in-situ research at the Newberry, as well as interviews with Newberry archivists and an artist creating textiles in response to queer archival absence, this article ‘follows the glitter’ in order to position feminist and queer archival records as transgressive and leaky. Thinking alongside archival theorising 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 archivalisation (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.

KEYWORDS:

• Women’s March
• feminist archiving
• feminist records
• glitter
• protest ephemera
• archival wholes

Acknowledgements

I want to gratefully acknowledge the generosity and support of Newberry Library archivists Catherine Grandgeorge and Alison Hinderliter. The time and energy they afforded me when I visited the Newberry to spend time with the Chicago Protest Collection was substantial, and I am endlessly thankful for their patience and insights. I also want to thank H. Melt for their willingness to talk with me about their artistic practice and archival process; these generative discussions set me on the glitter path. Finally, I want to acknowledge the peer reviewers for their insightful comments and revisions, this work is the stronger for it. This article is an abbreviated and adapted version of the fourth chapter of my doctoral dissertation, ‘The Provenance of Protest: Conceptualising Records Creation in Archives of Feminist Materials’ (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2020). I am grateful for the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For more information see Quillan (2018) ‘Some churches add glitter to the gray on Ash Wednesday to show unity with LGBT community’.

2 In her piece ‘Why I’m Skipping the Women’s March on Washington’ Jamilah Lemiux expresses the lack of sisterhood during the 2016 Presidential Election stating that it ‘never felt more real for me than it did when I learned that 53 per cent of White female voters cast a ballot for a man whose bigotry was, perhaps, his greatest selling point’ (2017).

3 University of Toronto Research Ethics Board (REB) approval was granted for the interviews with Catherine Grandgeorge and H. Melt referenced in this article. As part of the consent process, both interviewees were offered an opportunity to review and revise the interview portions of this manuscript.

4 It is important to note that when I encountered the Chicago Protest Collection it was an un-processed collection. Thus, the ordering systems I encountered in the stacks building were a mid-processing order, not a final order. Catherine Grandgeorge has noted that in all likelihood the order she initially established by event and by record-type will inform formal processing, however, ordering will likely shift and change through the process of establishing a final arrangement.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes on contributors

Jessica M Lapp

Jessica Lapp is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia’s School of Information. She earned her PhD in Information Studies from the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto in 2020. Her research considers the nature of feminist records creation, archival provenance, and the creation, maintenance, and use of digital surrogate records. Her work has been published in Archival Science and Information & Culture.