AHA Session 65
LGBTQ+ History Association 1
Friday, January 8, 2027: 8:30 AM-10:00 AM
Rhythms Ballroom II (Sheraton New Orleans, 2nd Floor)
Chair:
Jacquelyne Thoni Howard, Tulane University
Session Abstract
Feminists have long often relied on storytelling as a tool of activism. As scholars have noted, feminists often relied on oral narratives, such as feminist talking circles and protest, to collaborate in consciousness raising and to find commonalities around lived experiences (Harker and Konchar, 1). Additionally, historians established that feminist activists operating from the 1980s through 2010 relied on print media to raise questions, explore diverse feminist issues, and provide advice to diverse audiences, even as new technologies emerged. Yet gaps in the scholarship remain regarding the expansive topics covered by feminist activists and the techniques they used to engage their communities and audiences. This panel builds on this historiography to explore how various activists used print media to collect and share information about a range of feminist causes, including environmentalism, STEM representation, and reproductive justice, to reach local, regional, and national audiences from 1980 to 2010. By examining these practices through a range of traditional and non-traditional women’s liberation causes, we will show how activists across fields used reciprocal community-engaged techniques such as crowdsourcing, storytelling, interviewing, and artistic expression to develop unique practices tailored to their audiences' needs and to address particular issues. Feminist activists created a range of “ephemera” about the experiences of women in the U.S, (Beins, 47; Forester, 812). They also created networks and built communities of writer-activists. Feminists encouraged ordinary members across their networks, including themselves, to express their identities and experiences through various print media. They crowdsourced narratives from their networks to produce interviews, advice columns, advertisements, and art regarding issues they cared about, and created self-help guides and self-narration. The writers covered in this panel wrote about intersectional feminist issues affecting women and LGBTQ+ communities, such as STEM representation and workplace equality, including and expanding beyond the pay gap in regional newsletters, the effects of an environmental disaster for marginalized groups, while also uncovering identities and subcultures in local zines, and abortion stories that expanded reproductive justice coverage in the national Ms. Magazine. These feminist activists used a range of actions through print media to target local, regional, and national audiences, while also encouraging their networks to participate in exploring and expanding various feminist causes through written expression. This panel will appeal to broad audiences with scholarly, public, and archival interests around intersectional feminist, LGBTQ+, and STS topics.
Agatha Beins. “A Revolution in Ephemera: Feminist Newsletters and Newspapers of the 1970s.” In This Book Is an Action, edited by Cecilia Konchar Farr and Jaime Harker, 46. University of Illinois Press. 2015.
Townsend-Bell, Erica E. “Writing the Way to Feminism.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38 (1). University of Chicago Press: 127–52. 2012.
Jaime Harker, and Cecilia Konchar Farr. 2015. “Introduction: Outrageous, Dangerous, and Unassimilable: Writing the Women’s Movement.” In This Book Is an Action, edited by Cecilia Konchar Farr and Jaime Harker, 1. University of Illinois Press.
Forster, Laurel.“Spreading the Word: Feminist Print Cultures and the Women’s Liberation Movement.” Women’s History Review 25 (5). Routledge: 812–31. 2016.
