Authors-Meet-Critics: "Viral Cultures" (Marika Cifor) and "Information Activism" (Cait McKinney)

Session Submission Type: Experimental Session

Abstract

This joint author-meets-critic session brings the authors of two new books in American studies (2020 and 2022) alongside four critics whose varied areas of expertise bridge dialogue across the texts. The books are Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS (Minnesota 2022) by Marika Cifor and Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies (Duke 2020) by Cait McKinney, which examine unique but entangled sites of activist memory making and keeping. The books attend to the ways that minoritized activists develop information infrastructures–archives, documentation, data, and other media–and in so doing, take technologies into their own hands to build powerful, pleasurable, life-sustaining, and politically meaningful platforms, spaces, and networks. What is contained and what is absent from these information infrastructures shapes the historical record, and possibilities for response, knowledge, and resilience amid ongoing violence. In Viral Cultures, Cifor examines the archives that keep the history and work of AIDS activism alive. Her archival ethnography details how contemporary activists, artists, and curators utilize these records to build upon the cultural legacy of 1980s and 1990s American AIDS activism to challenge the conditions of injustice that undergird current AIDS crises. She analyzes the power structures through which these archives are mediated, positioning vital nostalgia as both a critical faculty and a generative practice, reanimating the past in the digital age. In Information Activism, McKinney follows another late 20th century site of sexual minority work with information: lesbian feminists. The book traces how these women developed communication networks, databases, and digital archives that formed the foundation for their work. 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. Four critics join these authors to explore intersections of sexuality, affect, and activist media and archives: critical data and community activism scholar Roderic Crooks, Assistant Professor of Informatics at UC Irvine; archives of affect and sexuality scholar Ann Cvetkovich, Professor and Director of the Pauline Jewett Institute of Women's and Gender Studies at Carleton University; HIV/AIDS, gender, and activism scholar Jallicia Jolly, Postdoctoral Fellow in American studies and Black studies at Amherst College; and scholar of race in archives and digital studies Tonia Sutherland, Assistant Professor in the Department of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Hawaiʻi. Together, these critics will discuss the relationships between these two books vis-a-vis the larger fields of sexuality, critical information, and media studies, including their methods, theoretical approaches, limitations, and the future directions they propose for American Studies. The session will highlight the first monographs of two long-time ASA members who are also collaborators in other areas of their scholarly work, and will draw connections between critical HIV studies, feminist historiography, queer studies, and archival studies. We anticipate that it will draw an audience of ASA members interested in these fields and in activism, art, affect, and radical archiving more broadly.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Marika Cifor, University of Washington

Panelists

• Marika Cifor, University of Washington

• Cait McKinney, Simon Fraser University

• Ann Cvetkovich, Carleton University

• Roderic Crooks, University of California-Irvine

• Jallicia Allicia Jolly, Amherst College

• Tonia Sutherland, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa