Project Details
Overview
The Pride in Plymouth archive acknowledges the lack of lesbian visibility across formal archives in the city. The Box is currently addressing the ways in which changes to cataloguing can help to make diverse lives more visible.
There have been a number of international projects in the past decade that have sought to address LGBTQ+ visibility in archives and museum collections. The edited collection, Out of the Closet, Into the Archives (2015, eds Amy L Stone and Jaime Cantrell) presents a range of international projects, some of which have a specifically lesbian focus. The Pitt Rivers Museum’s ‘Beyond the Binary: Queering the Collections’ working with community curators to queer museum objects and experiment with new ways of enriching the catalogue descriptions in order to make this visible to museum users, James Daybell and Kit Heyam’s work on gendering objects is also relevant here, as are the initiatives by the Queer Heritage Network and Queer Britain museum. The National Archives have actively addressed the question of lesbian visibility in their collections https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/lgbtq-visibility-and-archives-history-between-the-lines/. And Dalhousie University in Canada recently held a panel discussion specifically on lesbian visibility in archives https://events.dal.ca/event/1255-visibility-matters-representation-of-lesbian#!view/day/date/20230225. The Bishopsgate Institute in London, which collects LGBTQ+ archives, returns 6466 items in its archives under the simple search term ‘lesbian’, which compares very favourably with other sexualities represented in the archive.
This project therefore seeks to understand the scale of lesbian visibility in Plymouth’s archives and the potential for enriching the archives through metadata enrichment and also collecting materials. We will undertake a comprehensive analysis of the Pride in Plymouth archive; work with archivists at The Box to explore the presence of lesbians in both the document and the media archives; and use participatory methods to gather from Plymouth’s lesbian and allied communities collections of lesbian ephemera, media and oral histories to address gaps in the archive. The project will work with the lesbian community and archivists at The Box to co-develop approaches to cataloguing that both adheres to institutional standards and experiments with techniques to ‘queer’ those standards. It will seek to ask: what are the impacts of lesbian visibility on archival practices?
Finally, we will explore curatorial strategies used in exhibitions of LGBTQ archives and collections and question whether these curatorial approaches may unwittingly reproduce lesbian invisibility. How might we develop alternative curatorial practices to mitigate against this?
There have been a number of international projects in the past decade that have sought to address LGBTQ+ visibility in archives and museum collections. The edited collection, Out of the Closet, Into the Archives (2015, eds Amy L Stone and Jaime Cantrell) presents a range of international projects, some of which have a specifically lesbian focus. The Pitt Rivers Museum’s ‘Beyond the Binary: Queering the Collections’ working with community curators to queer museum objects and experiment with new ways of enriching the catalogue descriptions in order to make this visible to museum users, James Daybell and Kit Heyam’s work on gendering objects is also relevant here, as are the initiatives by the Queer Heritage Network and Queer Britain museum. The National Archives have actively addressed the question of lesbian visibility in their collections https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/lgbtq-visibility-and-archives-history-between-the-lines/. And Dalhousie University in Canada recently held a panel discussion specifically on lesbian visibility in archives https://events.dal.ca/event/1255-visibility-matters-representation-of-lesbian#!view/day/date/20230225. The Bishopsgate Institute in London, which collects LGBTQ+ archives, returns 6466 items in its archives under the simple search term ‘lesbian’, which compares very favourably with other sexualities represented in the archive.
This project therefore seeks to understand the scale of lesbian visibility in Plymouth’s archives and the potential for enriching the archives through metadata enrichment and also collecting materials. We will undertake a comprehensive analysis of the Pride in Plymouth archive; work with archivists at The Box to explore the presence of lesbians in both the document and the media archives; and use participatory methods to gather from Plymouth’s lesbian and allied communities collections of lesbian ephemera, media and oral histories to address gaps in the archive. The project will work with the lesbian community and archivists at The Box to co-develop approaches to cataloguing that both adheres to institutional standards and experiments with techniques to ‘queer’ those standards. It will seek to ask: what are the impacts of lesbian visibility on archival practices?
Finally, we will explore curatorial strategies used in exhibitions of LGBTQ archives and collections and question whether these curatorial approaches may unwittingly reproduce lesbian invisibility. How might we develop alternative curatorial practices to mitigate against this?
Project Aims
The project aims to:
• Address the observed problem of lesbian visibility in formal archives, informal collections and exhibitions of LGBTQ+ ephemera and media
• To identify lesbian content in The Box archives and in the Pride of Plymouth archive and contribute cataloguing detail
• Encourage younger lesbians to engage with museums and archives by gathering and donating/loaning artefacts, photos, writings collected and saved by their older lesbian friends and family.
• To continue the Lesbian Voices of Plymouth oral history project by recording more stories of older Plymouth lesbians.
• To begin to build a Lesbian Voices of Plymouth Archive – an informal collection of material and digital artefacts and ephemera for academic research and for loans to exhibitions.
• Address the observed problem of lesbian visibility in formal archives, informal collections and exhibitions of LGBTQ+ ephemera and media
• To identify lesbian content in The Box archives and in the Pride of Plymouth archive and contribute cataloguing detail
• Encourage younger lesbians to engage with museums and archives by gathering and donating/loaning artefacts, photos, writings collected and saved by their older lesbian friends and family.
• To continue the Lesbian Voices of Plymouth oral history project by recording more stories of older Plymouth lesbians.
• To begin to build a Lesbian Voices of Plymouth Archive – an informal collection of material and digital artefacts and ephemera for academic research and for loans to exhibitions.
| Short title | Lesbians in the Attic |
|---|---|
| Status | Finished |
| Effective start/end date | 1/08/25 → 30/11/25 |
Funding
- University of Plymouth Get Involved Award: £8,000.00
UN Sustainable Development Goals
In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. This project contributes towards the following SDG(s):
