"Biography as Method: Lesbian Feminism, Disability Activism, and Anti-Psychiatry in the Work of Seamoon House," Histoire sociale/Social history, special issue on "Activist Lives" (Pre-print, forthcoming 2020) 

Abstract: Seamoon House was an activist and writer whose political commitments spanned the lesbian feminist, anti-psychiatry, and disability rights movements in the early 1980s. Although she is not widely known, scattered bits of her correspondence and manuscripts have been preserved at the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn and the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University. Rather than simply recovering House from obscurity, this article centres the life of a minor movement figure as one strategy for following the transit of people and ideas between radical social movements in the late twentieth century.

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"Does Queer Studies Have an Anti-Empiricism Problem?" GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, special issue on “GLQ at 25,” 25.1 (2019): 57-62

Abstract: This article responds to Lisa Duggan’s “The Discipline Problem: Queer Theory Meets Lesbian and Gay Studies” (1995), which was published in an early issue of GLQ. In arguing queer theory’s disinterest in empirical research in the 1990s, Duggan’s article seems to anticipate Laura Doan, Valerie Traub, and Heather Love’s recent critiques of queer studies’ anti-empiricism. However, although ostensibly in line with Duggan’s argument, most of this recent work lacks Duggan’s attention to how specific institutional practices give shape to the field. In emphasizing discursive debates over material institutional practices, I argue that queer studies scholars often produce stories about queer studies that are strikingly at odds with what the field actually looks like on an institutional level.

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"Remediating Disability Activism in the Lesbian Feminist Archive," Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, special issue on “Thinking Beyond Backlash: Remediating 1980s Activisms,” 32.1 (2017): 18-28

Abstract: This article argues that U.S. based lesbian feminist cultural work of the 1980s constitutes a generative—but underutilized—archive for scholarship on the intersection of feminist, queer, and disability studies. Specifically, this article uses a May 1981 special issue of the feminist newspaper off our backs (oob) on ‘Women With Disabilities’ to historicize the emergence of a network of lesbian feminist disability activists. Tucked between the pages of this special issue of oob are, for example, Connie Panzarino’s vision for a non-monogamous community of disabled women and a reproduction of Tee Corinne’s solarized photograph of a woman in a wheelchair with her ablebodied lover. In exploring a small and largely forgotten network of lesbian disability activists, this article reads their cultural work as world making projects that model a mode of activist praxis and theory writing for the present moment. 

Awarded: Honorable mention for the 2018 Gregory Sprague Prize, awarded by the American Historical Association’s Committee on LGBT History for an outstanding published or unpublished work by a graduate student.

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"Getting from Then to Now: Sustaining the Lesbian Herstory Archives as a Lesbian Organization," co-written with Deborah Edel, Morgan Gwenwald, Joan Nestle, Flavia Rando, Shawnta Smith-Cruz, and Polly Thistlethwaite, The Journal of Lesbian Studies, special issue on "Lesbian Organizations and Organizing," 20.2 (2015): 213-233

Abstract: This article is a compilation of six narratives written by collective members of the volunteer-run Lesbian Herstory Archives, the oldest and largest collection of lesbian material in the world. Narratives draw on a yearlong series of conversations, which culminated in a panel discussion at the 40th Anniversary celebration. Authors' narratives detail the significance of the Lesbian Herstory Archives as a successful and sustainable lesbian organization. Topics covered span four decades and include: the organization's history and practice, founding and activism, the acquisition of the current space, community engagement, and processing of special collections

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"The Scholars and the Feminists: The Barnard Sex Conference and the History of the Institutionalization of Feminism," Feminist Formations, special issue on "Institutional Feelings: Practicing Women’s Studies in the Corporate University," 27.3 (2015): 49-80

Abstract: The history of what we now call “academic feminism” did not take place exclusively in colleges and universities. Rather, a range of infrastructure facilitated the production and dissemination of feminist knowledge in the decades following the institutionalization of the first women’s studies programs in the United States. This article looks specifically at the infamous 1982 Barnard Conference on Sexuality to trace the multiple trajectories through which feminism was gradually academicized and institutionalized in the university. This conference is a particularly instructive case study because it already exists as a locus of anxiety in which histories of grassroots activism, feminist thought, and proto–queer theory collide. The article, then, provides an archivally driven account of the conference, from its planning stages through its political fallout, with an eye toward the infrastructural and personal networks that weave inside and outside of the academy. Because knowledge production is a collaborative process, the article argues that we end up with oddly skewed accounts of feminist eld formation when inclusion is dependent on proximity to recognizable forms of feminism in the university. 

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“A Genealogy of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, 1974-2014,” The Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies, Volume 1, Article 1 (2014): 1-16

Abstract: This paper traces the collection development of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, a community based repository founded in 1974. I argue that the collection grew organically as a reflection of a dialogue between an evolving cohort of volunteer archivists and a community of donors. Primarily focusing on the first five years, this paper pinpoints key early decisions made by volunteer archivists. Specifically, I examine the Archives’ early collecting priorities and the introduction of the special collections in 1978. These decisions, I argue, laid the foundation for the Lesbian Herstory Archives and continue to shape it today, forty years later.

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contribution to CDHI Blog 

In 2017, E.G. Crichton and Jeffrey Escoffier invited me to participate in OUT/LOOK and the Birth of the Queer, an exhibit celebrating the 30th anniversary of the important gay and lesbian magazine OUT/LOOK National Lesbian and Gay Quarterly. For the exhibit, I was asked to create a new work inspired by the magazine, alongside 37 other queer and trans artists, activists, and writers. We were, to quote the curators, “invited to dive into the archive” and “think about our queer history,” using OUT/LOOK “as a kind of score for creating something new and provocative in a medium of [our] choice.” (You can learn more about my project here.) 

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contribution to Notches

On Thursday afternoon, August 12, 1982, Amber Hollibaugh called Dorothy Allison to finalize cat-sitting arrangements for Alice B. Toklas, the cat. At the time, Amber and Dorothy were relatively recent transplants to New York City. First, in 1979, Dorothy and her “off and on” lover Morgan Gwenwald moved to New York by way of Washington DC and Tallahassee before that. According to lore that still floats around the Lesbian Herstory Archives, Dorothy and Morgan came to New York to visit the growing lesbian historical collection housed in Joan Nestle and Deb Edel’s apartment...  

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contribution to New York Historical Society's blog: 

On Wednesday, March 11, my university officially announced the suspension of in-person classes in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Like professors across the country, I was tasked with adapting my in-person classes for online learning. As a visiting assistant professor in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department at Wake Forest University, I teach multiple sections of a lower division course on the history of LGBTQ activism in the United States that draws from much of the same research as the N-YHS exhibition, Stonewall 50... 

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contribution to Gotham's Stonewall @ 50: A Roundtable: 

Fifty years later, Stonewall means vastly different things, depending on how the history of LGBTQ activism is told. As a historian, I am always interested in the process through which ideas about the past are produced and disseminated. However, rarely has the politics of representing a singular event from the past consumed as much of my attention as the 1969 Stonewall uprising on the eve of its fiftieth anniversary. This year, I helped curate Stonewall 50 at the New-York Historical Society as an Andrew W. Mellon predoctoral fellow in women’s history. I also taught an undergraduate course on Stonewall 50: LGBTQ History, Public History, Memory at Stony Brook University...

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contribution to the New-York Historical Society's blog:

In December 1970, Liza Cowan of WBAI sat down with members of the newly formed Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (or S.T.A.R.) for an interview. Three months before this interview, the initial idea for S.T.A.R. came out of a sit-in at New York University’s Weinstein Hall. On September 20, 1970, a coalition of radical lesbian and gay organizations, which proliferated in the immediate wake of the 1969 Stonewall uprising, occupied the hall to protest the cancellation of a gay dance. After five days, the police forcibly removed the activists from the building, though a smaller protest continued on the steps outside...

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contribution to the New-York Historical Society's blog:

In November 1973, the Gay Academic Union (GAU) held its first conference at John Jay College in New York City. A product of the intellectual and activist ferment following the 1969 Stonewall uprising, the GAU had the dual goal of advocating for lesbian and gay academics and encouraging research on gay and lesbian subjects within often virulently homophobic colleges and universities. Deb Edel and Joan Nestle—who would soon found the Lesbian Herstory Archives— both attended this conference... 

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