“I’ve Never Heard a Story Like That Before": Negotiating Temporal and Affective Differences in Intergenerational Oral History Interviewing:”

• In Event: "Are You In or Out?” Negotiating Power, Privilege, and Precarity as Scholar-Activists

Abstract

My paper is an auto-ethnographic analysis of my experience as an oral historian interviewing and working with lesbian seniors. As an MA student I coordinated an intergenerational research project, bringing younger queer women in cross-generational conversation lesbians active in feminist politics during the 1970s and 80s in British Columbia. This paper explores the affective experience of negotiating the boundaries of generation, scholarship, and temporality, and examines the complex “structures of feeling” imbued in research, the emotional landscapes and political tensions between different ‘queer’ generations.

Presenter

• Nadine Boulay, Simon Fraser University