What's a fonds?
The word "fonds" is used to describe most archival collections in Canada and also in many European and Latin American countries. Fonds simply means the documents in any media or format created or received by a person or an organization in the course of their personal or professional activities. For example, the "Yoko Ono fonds" would refer to the records created and received by Yoko Ono.
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Contact:Krisztina Laszlo
Rare Books and Special Collections
Irving K. Barber Learning Centre
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Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1
More about Rare Books and Special Collections
Introduction
Welcome!
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From the Queer Arts Festival fonds 2016 program "Stonewall was a Riot" Located in RBSC-ARC-1833-02-04 |
This research guide highlights local fonds and collections created by members of 2SLGBTQIA+ community and organizations, as well as the rare and historical 2SLGBTQIA+ material available at UBC. It also points to related regional, national, and international resources and archives. This guide highlights both print and archival materials, including historical and rare books; ephemera; letters, diaries, and other records; as well as artworks.
Feedback
This guide acknowledges the systemic biases and discrimination that 2SLGBTQIA+ communities and organizations have endured, which has historically led to the erasure of their stories from main stream narratives. Collaborating with other UBC libraries and research centres, Rare Books and Special Collections is committed to developing its 2SLGBTQIA+ collections in order to restore some of that history.
To offer feedback or provide us with resources that you think should be included in this guide, please contact us using this form or email Krisztina Laszlo, RBSC Archivist, at krisztina.laszlo@ubc.ca.
Likewise, if you have materials you would like us to consider for the development of this area, please get in touch with us via this form or by emailing Krisztina Laszlo, RBSC Archivist, at krisztina.laszlo@ubc.ca.
Collection Skews and Gaps
Systemic Biases and Prejudice
The library and archival materials at Rare Books and Special Collections reflect the history of British Columbia, including its history of colonization, patriarchy, homophobia, heteronormativity, and racism. The stories and materials that are considered for collection and preservation are shaped by the missions and values of the collecting institutions, which often mirror the missions and values of society at large at any given time. As a result, archives are subject to the same historical biases and omissions that have led to the marginalization of certain races, ethnicities, gender identities, religions, socio-economic statuses, and sexual orientations throughout time. Selecting, arranging, describing, and providing access to archival records is a substantial responsibility because it helps shape public memory based on what is chosen to be preserved and highlighted.
Here at RBSC, we recognize that such power must be wielded in an actively inclusive, feminist, queered, anti-racist, and de-colonial way in order to cease perpetuating systemic injustices. We are currently working toward the goal of increasing representation and balance in our collections so that our holdings will reflect the richness and truth of the human experience, free from the harmful limitations of prejudice.
Challenges of Identifying Relevant Fonds and Collections
British Columbia decriminalized same-sex relationships and activities on June 27, 1969; however, discrimination based on sexual orientation did not become illegal until 1992, and it was not until 2016 that BC Legislature passed a bill adding gender identity to protected class in the BC Human Rights Code. Given this history, it is not surprising that many of the creators of individual fonds' did not self-identify as a member of 2SLGBTQIA+ community. Most of what we've highlighted here are archival materials that have been self-identified as an 2SLGBTQIA+ organization or individual. However, we acknowledge that many more collections and fonds could potentially be related and relevant to the lives and experiences of 2SLGBTQIA+ individuals. A famous example of this is A. Alexis Alvey, whose sexuality has been discussed in academia in works such as Cameron Duder's Awfully devoted women : lesbian lives in Canada and Assembling a life: The (auto) biography of Alexis Amelia Alvey.
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From the Queer Arts Festival fonds 2017 program "UnSettled" Located in RBSC-ARC-1833-02-05 |
Intersectionality and Inclusivity in Archives
Intersectionality refers to a framework for understanding how different aspects of a person's social and political identity might lead to different experiences of oppression. White privilege means more visibility which leads to the false perception of whiteness as normative and central to queer experience. Male privilege and patriarchy in our society brings more spotlight for the gay male experience over those of women. Until very recently, the array of other queer experiences besides being gay and/or lesbian have often been overshadowed and even erased. Concepts such as bisexual erasure, for example, have just barely started to be discussed outside of bi+ and pansexual communities. These privileges among the 2SLGBTQIA+ communities, individuals, and organizations often dictate whose stories receive the most visibility, which is evident in archival holdings. At RBSC we acknowledge these gaps in our collections and are committed to work towards creating a more inclusive space in which all members of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community can be represented.
Note on Terminology
Importance of Terminology
Words are not just simply words; they hold power and can have a lasting impact. The terminology used in the past to describe the 2SLGBTQIA+ community were inappropriate, exclusionary, and hurtful; unfortunately, as an archive that holds relics of the past, outdated terminology from previous generations may be present in the records. Oftentimes, archives will also use the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), which is a controlled vocabulary thesaurus that describes the primary subject matter of the literary work. LCSH is slow to update terminology in comparison with how quickly society changes, therefore some terms that would not be acceptable in today's language are still present as subject headings, but do not represent how UBC or RBSC view the 2SLGBTQIA+ community. Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, the 2SLGBTQIA+ community itself has created new terms that are more appropriate to describe and accurately represent the diversity of sexual and gender identities. Erin Baucom, from their article, “An Exploration into Archival Descriptions of LGBTQ Materials” (2018), notes that:
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| From the Queer Arts Festival fonds
2016 program "Stonewall was a Riot" Located in RBSC-ARC-1833-02-04 |
“Terminology is a crucial aspect of identity formation and affirmation. The language chosen by society to categorize parts of identity, positive and negative, have an impact on how individuals construct and internalize their own identities. In the past, the number of terms for sexual and gender identities were limited, and only a small percentage were socially acceptable. All of these socially acceptable terms describe the sexuality and genders with which a majority of society identified: heterosexual, male, and female. […] The more diverse and accepted language available to individuals when they are constructing their identities, the more likely they will accept their gender and sexual identities in a positive manner. It is crucial to the continued wellbeing of individuals to be able to see the social majority use and accept these identifiers. […] Archives play a role in this continual process of identity formation and acceptance because archives hold and preserve some of the primary source materials that help elucidate the history of the LGBTQ community. Being able to access this history helps combat feelings of isolation and contests negative perceptions and misrepresentations of the LGBTQ community,” (p. 66).
At RBSC, we actively weigh whether the efficiency or preservation of context from re-using or not remediating problematic and potentially offensive description is worth the impact it may have on users encountering that description. When processing new collections, we will occasionally re-use language provided by creators or former owners of the collection, either because it provides important context about the materials or because it is a way to make the collections available for research use more quickly. We also clearly indicate (through use of quotation marks, notes, or other explanation) what language comes from an external source or is legacy/older description, and which was written by RBSC staff. When written by us, in most cases, we use positive space terminology recommended by the UBC Equity & Inclusion Office.
Additional Resources for 2SLGBTQIA+ Terminology and Vocabulary
The Homosaurus is an international linked data vocabulary of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) terms. This vocabulary is intended to function as a companion to broad subject term vocabularies, such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings. Libraries, archives, museums, and other institutions are encouraged to use the Homosaurus to support LGBTQ research by enhancing the discoverability of their LGBTQ resources.
GLBT Controlled Vocabularies and Classification Schemes
The Rainbow Round Table (RRT) of the American Library Association (ALA) is committed to serving the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, pansexual, genderqueer, queer, intersex, agender, asexual, and ally (LGBTQIA+) professional communities and population at large. The RRT provides its members, other ALA divisions, affiliates, round tables, offices, committees, and the library and information science field as a whole with a forum for discussion and an environment for education and learning about the needs of the LGBTQIA+ professional communities and population at large.
Further Discussions on Archival Practices Regarding to LGBTQIA2S+ Collections
To watch:
To read:
- Be/longing in the archival body: eros and the “Endearing” value of material lives. | Lee, J.A. | Arch Sci 16, 33–51 (2016).This paper explores the nature of the archival body and the ways in which it is temporally situated and yet also always in motion. Applying transdisciplinary logics, it argues that the affective nature of archival productions follows the machinations of metamorphoses and (un)becoming. Using two queer/ed and transgender archives as sites of inquiry, the paper explores the erotic and affective nature of accessing the archival body in its multimodal forms. Although touching, smelling and stroking what remains of distinct material lives might elucidate arousal and certain other affective and haptic responses within the visitor to the archives, the records themselves hold and cradle their creators and their storytelling techniques along with their relationships to longing for and belonging in the archival body of knowledge. This approach suggests that understanding of the record and its affects can be enriched by temporal perspectives that acknowledge distinct and diverse temporalities and promote generative understandings of potentially meaningful progressions of time and everyday rhythms embodied within archival materials.
- False promise and new hope: dead perpetrators, imagined documents and emergent archival evidence | Gilliland, AJ, & Caswell, M. (2016) | UCLAThis paper argues that the roles of individual and collective imaginings about the absent or unattainable archive and its contents should be explicitly acknowledged in both archival theory and practice. The authors propose two new terms: impossible archival imaginaries and imagined records. These concepts offer important affective counterbalances and sometimes resistance to dominant legal, bureaucratic, historical and forensic notions of evidence that so often fall short in explaining the capacity of records and archives to motivate, inspire, anger and traumatize. The paper begins with a reflection on how imagined records have surfaced in our own work related to human rights. It then reviews some of the ways in which the concept of the imaginary has been understood by scholarship in other fields. It considers how such interpretations might contribute epistemologically to the phenomenon of impossible archival imaginaries; and it provides examples of what we argue are impossible archival imaginaries at work. The paper moves on to examine specific cases and 'archival stories' involving imagined records and contemplate how they can function societally in ways similar to actual records because of the weight of their absence or because of their aspirational nature. Drawing upon threads that run through these cases, the authors propose definitions of both phenomena that not only augment the current descriptive, analytical and explicatory armaments of archival theory and practice but also open up the possibility of “returning” them (Ketelaar 2015a) as theoretical contributions to the fields from which the cases were drawn.
- From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives | Caswell, Michelle, and Marika Cifor (2016) | Archivaria 81 (May), 23-43Much recent discussion about social justice in archival studies has assumed a legalistic, rights-based framework to delineate the role of records, archives, and archivists in both the violation of human rights and in holding individuals and governments accountable for basic human rights, such as the right to life, privacy, and freedom of expression. Yet decades of feminist scholarship have called into question the universality of a rights-based framework, arguing instead that an ethics of care is a more inclusive and apt model for envisioning and enacting a more just society. This article proposes a shift in the theoretical model used by archivists and archival studies scholars to address social justice concerns – from that based on individual rights to a model based on feminist ethics.
- Presence, Absence, and Victoria's Hair: Examining Affect and Embodiment in Trans Archives | Cifor, Marika |TSQ 1 November 2015; 2 (4): 645–649An affective archival encounter with a hair likely belonging to Victoria Schneider, a trans woman, sex worker, and activist, prompts the author's exploration of affect and embodiment in trans archives. This artifact animates how archives can value trans bodies in their centrality, affect, and power by embracing bodily traces, making visible what is absent, and giving due consideration to capturing bodily experience.
- A Queer/ed Archival Methodology: Archival Bodies as Nomadic Subjects | Jamie Ann. Lee | Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies1, no.2(2017)This article highlights the particular - embodied - ways in which the human record can be collected, organized, and preserved. Engaging both archival and queer theories, the understanding of body-as-archives and archives-as-body is instantiated in the oral history record from one genderqueer poet. This poet's narration can be understood as a nomadic one of multiplicities, undoings, and metamorphoses. The far-reaching possibilities of the ongoing histories of the simultaneous becoming and unbecoming - archived (un)becomings - are at play and embodied throughout this archived oral history. The archives can produce a dizzying effect through which, it can be argued, archivists can resist the urge to settle, to neatly organize, and to contain the archival records to consider new ways to understand and represent the dynamic (un)becomings. Through the interpretive frame of the nomadic, the archives can be understood as a site of (un)becomings and as a space that can hold moving living histories.
- The role of archives in the perception of self | Judith Etherton Borough (2006) | Journal of the Society of Archivists, 27:2, 227-246A sense of belonging and a sense of place are two important components of a person's sound mental health. Some people embarking on family research may only be looking for a leisure activity but many others are compelled by a strong need to make sense of a disrupted life. Archivists, in any kind of repository, may well find themselves as the first point of contact dealing with individuals affected, even damaged to some degree, by their historic circumstances. The objectives of this article are to seek to dispel the idea that family history is purely a leisure pursuit, to show the necessity for an improved interaction between health professionals and archivists, and to indicate areas requiring development within the archive profession.
- Whose memories, whose archives? Independent community archives, autonomy and the mainstream | Flinn, A., Stevens, M., & Shepherd, E. (2009) | Archival Science, 9, 71-86Over the last three or four decades in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, an enormous variety of grassroots projects and initiatives have sprung up dedicated to recording and preserving the memories and histories of different communities, often under-voiced and under-represented within the mainstream heritage. The impetus for such projects arose from a range of motivations but in general all were responding to the desire to document, record and preserve the identity and history of their own locality and community.
Documenting Rebellions : a study of four lesbian and gay archives in queer times by ISBN: 9781634000918Publication Date: 2019-11-01"Documenting Rebellions is a study of four archives that were constituted with a common desire to preserve the memory and evidence of lesbian and gay people. They are The Lesbian Herstory Archives (New York), The ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives (Los Angeles), the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives (West Hollywood), and the ArQuives: Canada's LGBTQ2+ Archives (Toronto). Using a narrative approach that draws from first-person accounts and archival research, each chapter tells a story about how these organizations came to exist, who has supported them over time, and how they have survived for more than forty years."
Producing the Archival Body by ISBN: 9780367182199Publication Date: 2021Producing the Archival Body draws on theoretical and practical research conducted within US and Canadian archives, along with critical and cultural theory, to examine the everyday lived experiences of archivists and records creators that are often overlooked during archival and media production. Expanding on the author’s previous work, which engaged archival and queer theories to develop the Queer/ed Archival Methodology that intervenes in traditional archival practices, the book invites readers interested in humanistic inquiry to re-consider how archives are defined, understood, deployed, and accessed to produce subjects
To listen:
Organizing Ideas Podcast | Allison Jones & Karen Ng
A podcast hosted by two UBC iSchool grads, Allison Jones and former RBSC student librarian Karen Ng, where they take a closer look at the relationships between organizing information and community organizing. They talk to information professionals, activists, and other insightful folks who have thoughts about what we mean when we say, “knowledge is power.” Because libraries and archives are never neutral.
--Ep 8 – Queer and Radical Knowledge Organization with Avi Grundner: a talk about queer and radical knowledge organization and the power of seeing yourself represented in these systems.
--Ep 11 – Trans Inclusivity in Libraries and Research with Shelby Miller: a conversation about working at VPL as a non-binary trans employee, what’s wrong with the liberal utopian idea of intellectual freedom, and her thesis project on the information seeking habits of transgender individuals.
--Ep 31 – Library Power Structures with Baharak Yousefi about power, intersectionality, and anti-oppression stance in libraries.
More resources:
Two-Spirit Archives: Conversation with Albert McLeod
Albert McLeod speaks to a group of visitors at the Two-Spirit Archives. Photo credit: Lauren Bosc
Two-Spirited People of Manitoba Inc.
The Two-Spirited People of Manitoba began in 1986 in Winnipeg. A group of concerned community members came together to support each other and plan community events. The became a non-profit organization in September 2007. As a community-based organization, they focused on helping Indigenous LGBTQ/Two-Spirit people improve their lives. They provide awareness workshops, advocate to prevent homophobia and transphobia, and organize community events.