Charting Lesbian Feminism: The Pains and Promises of the Archival Encounter with Digital Social Network Mapping

Keywords: Feminist Geography, Queer Geography, Social Network Analysis, 1970s
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 70

Abstract

Recent developments in social network analysis technology have made it possible to reanimate the geometries of relationships once housed only in memories and across far-flung archival locations. Social network mapping represents both a profound opportunity and a challenge for feminist and queer geographers – social network maps enable us to better understand the social processes by which space, place, and community are made, unmade, and remade while also making information about personal and political formations that have often been at odds with the state and other normative structures of power transparent rather than opaque. In this paper, I take up the practice of digital social network mapping alongside my own research on radical feminisms in the United States in the 1970s and the womyn’s land movement. I trace the digital turn in lesbian social network analysis through the archive assembled by The L Word’s Alice Pieszecki, asking what happens when details of past social networks that might have otherwise been rendered ephemeral are excavated from the archive and reassembled using digital social network mapping tools. I further outline the possibilities of social network mapping software as an emergent queer methodological tool for geographers interested in archival research. Finally, I point toward the importance of integrating a feminist ethics of care into queer social network mapping work, rooted in both the methods for archival retrieval and the process of determining how to reassemble the material.