Coming Out of the Archive: Intergenerational archival temporalities in the digitization of the LOOT oral history tapes

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). This talk will explore the case of the Lesbian Organization of Toronto (LOOT) oral history tapes as an example of queer intergenerational memory transmission. 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: A Lesbian Nation in Formation. 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. The stakes of intellectual property and privacy such as these tapes are perceived as high risk in digital environments, particularly when working with analogue materials that pre-date digitization and the Internet. While approaching the digitization of the LOOT tapes, we have taken into mind the historical, structural and harm that privacy law and intellectual property law now continue to perpetuate in the environment of digital archives. This talk will explore our approach through a framework of archival temporalities (Caswell 2021), as we work to navigate intergenerational contexts and reconcile them with our own contexts and identities as queer researchers.