Putting a hold on Queer Coding the Audio Archive: Ethical Data and the Lesbian Organization of Toronto (LOOT) Oral History Tapes

This paper was presented at the SpokenWeb Archives Research Workshop (Sept. 2023) The LOOT Oral History Project interview tapes were recorded during 1988-1990 by sociologist Becki Ross and are extensively quoted in The House that Jill Built. Each of the interviews provides a unique perspective on LOOT’s four-year existence (1976-1980) and the politics of a particular Lesbian community located in Toronto (Ross 1995), that overlaps with poetic and publishing communities in the Spoken Web network. What are the ethics of making these overlaps visible through metadata work, even if the content of the tapes must remain restricted? The genre of oral history tapes is a powerful form of mediated oral transmission of knowledge between geographically dispersed communities and generations. The act of listening to recordings of stories of survival and joy, forms affective bonds akin to kinship networks for listeners who identify with marginalized sexualities or genders (Chenier 2014). But what does it mean when the ethical choice is to put a hold on listening to the tapes until we sort out permissions and donor agreements to institutional archives? El Chenier describes this limbo as a “return to the closet” that queer communities have faced within digital archiving spaces. Because the stakes of intellectual property and privacy are perceived as high risk in digital environments, particularly when working with analogue materials that pre-date digitization and the Internet.