Overview

For decades, lesbian feminists across the United States and Canada have created information to build movements and survive in a world that doesn't want them. In Information Activism Cait McKinney traces how these women developed communication networks, databases, and digital archives that formed the foundation for their work. Often learning on the fly and using everything from index cards to computers, these activists brought people and their visions of justice together to organize, store, and provide access to information. Focusing on the transition from paper to digital-based archival techniques from the 1970s to the present, McKinney shows how media technologies animate the collective and unspectacular labor that sustains social movements, including their antiracist and trans-inclusive endeavors. By bringing sexuality studies to bear on media history, McKinney demonstrates how groups with precarious access to control over information create their own innovative and resourceful techniques for generating and sharing knowledge.

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9781478008286

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Reviews

Through what might seem like an unlikely mashup of lesbian feminism and information studies, Cait McKinney illuminates both in original and compelling ways. The novel concept of information activism is a valuable contribution to understandings of social movements and counterpublics. And McKinney sheds new light on often misunderstood or neglected histories of lesbian feminism by exploring amateur obsessions with circulating information, including digital media. Together, information and lesbian feminism become unexpectedly sexy, erotic, and affectively charged. -- Ann Cvetkovich, author of * Depression: A Public Feeling * In an age when technological innovation itself is often assumed to make the world a better place, Cait McKinney reminds us that, for the past fifty years, lesbian feminist activists have resourcefully patched together their own heterodox information infrastructures-composed of telephone hotlines and spiral-bound notebooks, index cards and digitization technologies, hacked tools and customized protocols-to serve clear social and ethical ends. Their information activism enabled them to create systems of connection and care that are responsive to human need, rather than, as is so common today, to advertisers and algorithms. -- Shannon Mattern, author of * Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media *

In an age when technological innovation itself is often assumed to make the world a better place, Cait McKinney reminds us that, for the past fifty years, lesbian feminist activists have resourcefully patched together their own heterodox information infrastructures-composed of telephone hotlines and spiral-bound notebooks, index cards and digitization technologies, hacked tools and customized protocols-to serve clear social and ethical ends. Their information activism enabled them to create systems of connection and care that are responsive to human need, rather than, as is so common today, to advertisers and algorithms. -- Shannon Mattern, author of * Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media * Through what might seem like an unlikely mashup of lesbian feminism and information studies, Cait McKinney illuminates both in original and compelling ways. The novel concept of information activism is a valuable contribution to understandings of social movements and counterpublics. And McKinney sheds new light on often misunderstood or neglected histories of lesbian feminism by exploring amateur obsessions with circulating information, including digital media. Together, information and lesbian feminism become unexpectedly sexy, erotic, and affectively charged. -- Ann Cvetkovich, author of * Depression: A Public Feeling * Steeped in the words, culture, vernacular, ephemera, and ways of interacting that have been refined by decades of lesbians, queers, and other feminists. The details are delightful. The writing is warm. Individuals and communities come to life on the page. -- Alexandra Juhasz * Lambda Literary Review * What can we extrapolate from the sparse log that is left behind? In Information Activism, McKinney ... approaches this question with palpable respect for those doing the work at the time and with a sharp curiosity for the pieces of information that they didn't leave behind. Each chapter examines a different kind of network-newsletters, hotlines, indexing projects, and archives-and centers the women who created and maintained them to make lifesaving, community-sustaining information available and accessible. -- Meerabelle Jesuthasan * The Nation * Saturated with vivid historical detail, a testimony to McKinney's extensive archival research. . . . The book's intimate depictions of pre-digital information management invite its readers to reflect on the staggering amount of slow, painstaking technology work that went into feminism's second wave. -- Deborah Thurman * Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory *

In an age when technological innovation itself is often assumed to make the world a better place, Cait McKinney reminds us that, for the past fifty years, lesbian feminist activists have resourcefully patched together their own heterodox information infrastructures--composed of telephone hotlines and spiral-bound notebooks, index cards and digitization technologies, hacked tools and customized protocols--to serve clear social and ethical ends. Their information activism enabled them to create systems of connection and care that are responsive to human need, rather than, as is so common today, to advertisers and algorithms. --Shannon Mattern, author of Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media

In an age when technological innovation itself is often assumed to make the world a better place, Cait McKinney reminds us that, for the past fifty years, lesbian feminist activists have resourcefully patched together their own heterodox information infrastructures-composed of telephone hotlines and spiral-bound notebooks, index cards and digitization technologies, hacked tools and customized protocols-to serve clear social and ethical ends. Their information activism enabled them to create systems of connection and care that are responsive to human need, rather than, as is so common today, to advertisers and algorithms. -- Shannon Mattern, author of * Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media * Through what might seem like an unlikely mashup of lesbian feminism and information studies, Cait McKinney illuminates both in original and compelling ways. The novel concept of information activism is a valuable contribution to understandings of social movements and counterpublics. And McKinney sheds new light on often misunderstood or neglected histories of lesbian feminism by exploring amateur obsessions with circulating information, including digital media. Together, information and lesbian feminism become unexpectedly sexy, erotic, and affectively charged. -- Ann Cvetkovich, author of * Depression: A Public Feeling * Steeped in the words, culture, vernacular, ephemera, and ways of interacting that have been refined by decades of lesbians, queers, and other feminists. The details are delightful. The writing is warm. Individuals and communities come to life on the page. -- Alexandra Juhasz * Lambda Literary Review * What can we extrapolate from the sparse log that is left behind? In Information Activism, McKinney ... approaches this question with palpable respect for those doing the work at the time and with a sharp curiosity for the pieces of information that they didn't leave behind. Each chapter examines a different kind of network-newsletters, hotlines, indexing projects, and archives-and centers the women who created and maintained them to make lifesaving, community-sustaining information available and accessible. -- Meerabelle Jesuthasan * The Nation *

Author Information

Cait McKinney is Assistant Professor of Communication at Simon Fraser University and coeditor of Inside Killjoy's Kastle: Dykey Ghosts, Feminist Monsters, and Other Lesbian Hauntings.

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