Nothing Much was Lost: Theorizing Feminist Records Creation

Talk by Assistant Professor Jessica Lapp, University of Toronto, Faculty of Information.

Abstract

This talk traces the history of the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance (ALFA) Archives, currently located in the Rubenstein Library at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. During its active period between 1972-1994, ALFA was one of the most significant Southern lesbian feminist activist organisations. In the 1980s, it established a formal archival arm to legitimise its activities and status as a not-for-profit. Over the remaining years, membership in the organisation dwindled, resulting in its dissolution. In 1994, the Sallie Bingham Center, part of the Rubenstein Library at Duke University, acquired ALFA’s materials, officially shifting its status as a community-based lesbian feminist archive to an institutional collection. Here in 2025, the ALFA archive has been a university collection longer than it was ever a community one. ALFA’s evolution demonstrates tensions between archiving the self and archiving the collective, navigating blurred distinctions between creating a record and creating an archive and incorporating lesbian feminist process as archival practice. The tensions are illustrated to demonstrate how traditional Western understandings of ‘archival creation’’ and ‘archival practice’ become challenged by the vast array of social, cultural and political entanglements that influence, shape and constrain lesbian feminist memory-making.

Bio

Jessica Lapp is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information, where she studies feminist archival practice and process, provenance and records creation, and the creation and use of digital surrogate records. Her work has been published in Australian Feminist Studies, Archival Science, and Information & Culture.