Unghosting Apparitional Lesbian History
work in progress
This project traces Bonnie Johnson, a sister/outsider to borrow Audre Lorde’s term. Although Bonnie Johnson, I eventually learn, held an MA in women’s history from Sarah Lawrence College, her contribution to black feminist thought is largely relegated to quoting her participation in one pivotal publication, "Black Women on Black Women Writers."
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As Gloria T. Hull said of Lorde, black feminists live "on that line between the either/or and both/and" the very metaphor invoked by Johnson along with her co-author Camille Bristow in “Both And” given at the 1979 conference, The Second Sex Thirty Years Later,Leaving behind, or rather looking behind this well known work, I trace Johnson using the digital means made possible by the internet-as-archive. Along the way I hit many dead ends revealing the power dynamics at work in even the most open and seemingly unlimited archive.
Johnson came to stand for the countless women who published articles many in women’s liberation periodicals that have since disappeared into the archives and have not been digitized, that academics still use in their work, but about whom almost nothing is known. This disappearance of these women bothers me, to no end really, as women’s history set out to “write women back into history” but on a larger, historiographical level, and this is the thesis of my book, it erases the contexts of the production of early feminist theory and writing by removing traces of the women who did not become full time academics.
>In particularly I run up against the politics of what precisely gets prioritized for digitization. As Cheryl Clarke notes "independent women’s presses and journals” gave “ expression to the multiracial and multicultural feminist movement.” While individual articles have made their way as footnotes of the “academic colony,” the journals themselves are often accessible only within university archives.
In the process now of over 6 months of tracing Bonnie Johnson, I’ve come to understand this project, which I describe as an “unghosting” of an “apparition”, in several ways. The first concerns the politics of digitization, access, and archival silences,while the other concerns the dynamics of histories, specifically the politics of exclusion, or where the processes of remembering and forgetting intersect with the radically democratizing promises of “every (wo)man her own historian” held out by the internet. In large part my thinking her has been influenced by Clare Hemmings recent work Why Stories Matter, which analyzes the narratives of feminism over the past three decades. Hemmings argues that feminist scholarship itself has erased that which it claims to value most, the voices of the marginal. Although Hemmings focuses on gender and cultural studies, I found her methodology and conclusions quite provocative when also applied to history. How I wondered could I avoid perpetuating these erasures, or ghostings as I came to think of them?
Johnson came to stand for the countless women who published articles many in women’s liberation periodicals that have since disappeared into the archives and have not been digitized, that academics still use in their work, but about whom almost nothing is known. This disappearance of these women bothers me, to no end really, as women’s history set out to “write women back into history” but on a larger, historiographical level, and this is the thesis of my book, it erases the contexts of the production of early feminist theory and writing by removing traces of the women who did not become full time academics.
>In particularly I run up against the politics of what precisely gets prioritized for digitization. As Cheryl Clarke notes "independent women’s presses and journals” gave “ expression to the multiracial and multicultural feminist movement.” While individual articles have made their way as footnotes of the “academic colony,” the journals themselves are often accessible only within university archives.
In the process now of over 6 months of tracing Bonnie Johnson, I’ve come to understand this project, which I describe as an “unghosting” of an “apparition”, in several ways. The first concerns the politics of digitization, access, and archival silences,while the other concerns the dynamics of histories, specifically the politics of exclusion, or where the processes of remembering and forgetting intersect with the radically democratizing promises of “every (wo)man her own historian” held out by the internet. In large part my thinking her has been influenced by Clare Hemmings recent work Why Stories Matter, which analyzes the narratives of feminism over the past three decades. Hemmings argues that feminist scholarship itself has erased that which it claims to value most, the voices of the marginal. Although Hemmings focuses on gender and cultural studies, I found her methodology and conclusions quite provocative when also applied to history. How I wondered could I avoid perpetuating these erasures, or ghostings as I came to think of them?
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