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• 1 2021-11-17T03:39:23-08:00 Our Project as Feminist Praxis 32 plain 2023-08-05T14:58:37-07:00

  Our Scalar project, collaboratively composed by student-authors in our course and showcased in this webtext as an example of feminist recovery work in Scalar, aligns with other feminist digital database projects from scholars in both rhetoric and literary studies in its investment in recovery, its utilization of digital tools to support this effort, and its utilization of the classroom as a crucial space for engaging and supporting recovery work (see Gaul, 2010; Hayden, 2017; Fancher, Kirsch, and Williams, 2010; Graban, 2013). Speaking to the scholarly context of feminist rhetorical recovery, our goal throughout our digital anthologization process was to create our an(ti)thology as not just what Sarah Noble Frank calls a "constative" articulation of feminist representational possibilities but also a "performative" institution of those possible representations. That is, we sought to feature not a rhetorical history as such, but an interactive engagement with the process of recovery and historiography that moves towards what Frank calls feminist historiography as if.  Drawing only from the holdings of our own Archives and Special Collections, we tried to enact such a performative representation of feminist literary and cultural history by drawing from a purposely circumscribed set of texts to make a sort of literary-critical an(ti)thology that draws attention to its choices and its positionality and makes our own process and reflections a key element of the anthology itself (Kirsch and Royster, 2010). 
  
  One complication to this was our recognition that centering a historically exclusionary institution and its archives is problematic in the ways it can contribute to the silences and erasures of women, people of color, and other marginalized communities. After all, as Saidiya Hartman (2018) has asserted, “the archive is inseparable from the play of power” that has authorized exclusion, dispossession, murder (p. 11). On the other hand, our attempts to face those silences and erasures head-on helped us to activate some of the insights of critical archives studies and Black digital humanities by not simply annexing stories and texts as “data” to contribute to our own project, or “eavesdropping” on stories not our own, but instead providing an opportunity to think more carefully about the stakes of inclusion and exclusion in both archives and recovery projects that use them (Johnson, 2018; García, 2018). Indeed, as Hartman (2008) insists, “The necessity of trying to represent what we cannot, rather than leading to pessimism or despair, must be embraced as the impossibility that conditions our knowledge of the past and animates our desire for a liberated future” (p. 13).

  We used the affordances of digital curation to work towards this goal. Using a digital platform to enact this project, we hoped to contribute to a process of recovery as enacted and actively engaged by a community within and outside the field, building a diverse community of writers that could move in the direction of humanity and liberation. That included our authors, our audiences, and ourselves, each of whom we sought to engage and embody through our work. For example, Almjeld et al. (2016) define “voice” as “expressing linguistic identity and the performative power of language” and allude to rhetorician Gloria Anzaldúa’s work towards challenging dichotomies and exploring the interconnections between “body and intellect, language, and identity.”  By locating both our voices as feminist rhetoricians and those of writers that we choose to recover, we exhibit Almjeld et al.’s (2016) call for feminist rhetoric. Indeed, the design of this project tapped into nearly every feminist value identified by Almjeld et al. (2016), using the flexible multimodal infrastructure of the Scalar platform to foreground our own embodied practices as feminist historiographers in a way that gave voice and validated each contributors’ experiences and positionality in the act of recovery, as well as to highlight the specificity of experience represented by the women we anthologized. We intended these design, narrative, and navigation choices to challenge systems of power conveyed by traditional anthologization practices, empowering other diverse feminist recovery projects that might pursue similar aims. 
  
  For example, the following image shows a screenshot of an excerpt from Phillis Wheatley's section in our project. On this page, titled "Wheatley and her Experience Being Brought to the Colonies," the authors explore and cite John Wheatley's "Some Accounts."
  
  Because we were not able to interact with any of the archival materials in person during the COVID pandemic, we found that using such a digital platform was especially essential to this work. This platform allowed for a sense of what Janine Solberg (2012) calls “virtual proximity”, or “the sense of virtual ‘nearness’ to sources or ideas — particularly as that nearness is enabled by organization, search, and retrieval technologies" (p. 68). We found, in line with Enoch and Bassette, that “A sense of virtual proximity thus creates new opportunities for strategic contemplation, as it occasions feminist historiographers to meditate on the ways digital searching aggregates materials, brings disparate information together, and prompts connections we may not have made before" (p. 641). Engaging an archival recovery project in the context of a global pandemic brought this concept to life for us. We saw how virtual proximity helped us transcend time-space and see ourselves as connected to our authors and to one another, and to do so in ways that did not erase our distance or difference either. This was particularly enabled by the Scalar platform, which offered visualization options that encouraged us to include additional metadata related to the location and time of our authors' productions and our own recovery work in order to utilize that additional functionality of the platform. By encouraging attention to space and time in its visualizations, discussions of our own physical and temporal location became an active part of what we considered about our positionality as authors and editors, informing our scholarly approaches and insights.

  By producing our an(ti)thology, we created the possibility for others to experience a "virtual proximity" to these authors and writings by increasing "the potential to find or encounter a source through the use of finding aids, search technologies, metadata, and similar mechanisms," making them more visible and therefore more "proximate" (Solberg, 2012, p. 68). This ability to highlight and extend networks of participation and interconnection between and among diverse and distanced feminists is a crucial affordance of platforms like Scalar for feminist recovery projects. 
   

  Click on the link to view the full project, “Opening Up Space: A Lovely Technofeminist Opportunity”, which is available in its entirety, or continue to the next section of this webtext, where we discuss the composing process as a feminist praxis in Scalar.