From the June Mazer Lesbian Archives: Grier Periodical Collection and Diana Press Records

Over the course of the winter quarter, I had the opportunity to work with two different collections from the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives. The first collection I processed was the Barbara Grier Periodical Collection. Barbara Grier (1933-2011) was a lesbian-feminist activist, writer, and publisher. She is perhaps best known for her work with The Ladder, the monthly magazine published by the Daughters of Bilitis, the first national lesbian organization in the United States. Writing under the pseudonyms Gene Damon, Vern Niven, and Lennox Strong, Grier began contributing copy to The Ladder in 1957, and continued until 1968 when she assumed the role of editor, and then publisher, in 1970. In 1973, Grier co-founded Naiad Books, which later became Naiad Press, the preeminent lesbian book publisher that opened up lesbian writing to the world. 

The Barbara Grier Periodical Collection represents a rich assemblage of feminist and lesbian themed newspapers, magazines, journals, and small press publications amassed by Grier over the years. Spanning from 1969 to 1992, the bulk of the material is from the 1980s and features periodicals from large United States metropolitan areas as well as smaller towns. A notable strength of the collection is the range in type of periodical—from ad-heavy weekly LGBT newspapers such as Pittsburgh’s Out to newsletters from organizations like Seattle’s Lesbian Resource Center and from bibliographic resources including the University of Wisconsin’s Feminist Periodicals to personal publications such as Dorothy Feola’s Women’s Network.

The second collection, which is still being processed, is the Diana Press Records. Diana Press was a lesbian-feminist printing and publishing house which was started by Coletta Reid and Casey Czarnik in Baltimore, MD, in 1972, then relocated to Oakland, CA, in 1977. Most notably, Diana Press published titles by such authors as Rita Mae Brown and Judy Grahn and reprinted Jeannette Foster’s pioneering Sex Variant Women in Literature. The press was also plagued by a series of misfortunes including a fire in 1975 and a crippling incident of vandalism in 1977. Economic setbacks, coupled with disagreements amongst the leadership, led the press to cease publication in the late 1970s.

The Diana Press Records contains an assortment of administrative materials, author files, unpublished manuscripts, press materials, and a substantial amount of correspondence. The correspondence is fascinating in terms of its scope and content, documenting everything from simple requests for catalogs to major business-related disagreements with authors. The assemblage of letters of support following the 1977 vandalism of their office is a particular highlight of the collection, featuring letters from feminist luminaries such as Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde. 

Both the Grier Periodical Collection and the Diana Press Records represent narratives that are too often excluded from the historical record. I’m excited to be a part of preserving and making these materials available. 

–Courtney Dean

Courtney Dean is a graduate student in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA.

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This research is part of an ongoing CSW research project, "Making Invisible Histories Visible: Preserving the Legacy of Lesbian Feminist Activism and Writing in Los Angeles," with Principal Investigators Kathleen McHugh, CSW DIrector and Professor in the Departments of English and Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA (on sabbatical from April to June, 2013) and Gary Strong, University Librarian at UCLA. Funded in part by an NEH grant, the project is a three-year project to arrange, describe, digitize, and make physically and electronically accessible two major clusters of June Mazer Lesbian Archive collections related to West Coast lesbian/feminist activism and writing since the 1930s. This project, which continues CSW’s partnership with the June Mazer Lesbian Archives and the UCLA Library, grew out of CSW’s two-year “Access Mazer: Organizing and Digitizing the Lesbian Feminist Archive in Los Angeles” project, which was supported in part by the UCLA Center for Community Partnerships. For information on the project, contact UCLA Center for the Study of Women, csw@csw.ucla.edu

The Mazer Archives is the sole archival repository on the West Coast dedicated to preserving lesbian and feminist history. Its holdings include over 3500 books, 1000 unique video and audio recordings, and close to a hundred unprocessed. This project will process and make accessible paper collections and recordings documenting lesbian political acts and effects in their communities, and materials documenting the lives and literary imagination of this burgeoning community. In addition to providing crucial materials to humanities scholars and historians, the project will also grow the Mazer’s infrastructure, preserving content that exists now while ensuring the future of the Mazer and its collections. Currently, the Mazer does not have the physical space to grow. Moving collections to the UCLA Library gives the Mazer the capacity to collect new materials and will enhance UCLA’s holdings in two significant areas of interest: LGBT archives and Los Angeles collections. Scholars and historians throughout the world will benefit directly from the primary research materials this project will make available. 

Un-Thinking Gender?

February, the shortest month, has traditionally been one of the most ambitious, most exhausting, and most rewarding for CSW. Our signature conference, Thinking Gender, opens the month, as we host graduate students from snowier regions to balmy southern California lured by the conference’s well-earned reputation as an incubator of rigorous interdisciplinary exchange. Thinking Gender represents a genuine collaborative effort of faculty and graduate students, the latter running the conference and disseminating their research, the UCLA feminist and LGBTS faculty volunteering their time and expertise by providing written feedback on papers by graduate students from around the globe. 

This year, the 23rd annual Thinking Gender, CSW hosted over 200 attendees from Germany, the United Kingdom, Austria, Norway, Canada, as well as the United States. A highly competitive conference, it features the cutting-edge research of younger scholars who are arguably among the select few most likely to obtain tenure-track positions, making the volunteer labor of already overburdened faculty rewarding enough to keep signing up, year after year, to chair and discuss. Making this conference possible is our unique partnership with UCLA’s Graduate Division, provider of funds for a graduate student coordinator whoin addition to the more specialized training in the vetting of research abstracts and plenary paper selection—gains translatable real-world skills in project management and events programming.

During a lunch chat with Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Education Robin Garrell and Vice Chancellor of Academic Personnel Carole Goldberg at this year’s conference, I hazarded that the range of research on women, gender, and sexuality reflected in the program represents a significant expansion and diversification of women’s issues and feminist activism beyond the days of our early assistant professorships. Garrell shared that it was not uncommon in those days to see pin-ups in the labs in Chemistry. Indeed, if we think of this year’s Thinking Gender as a laboratory of collaborative exchange on the topic of gender, sexuality, and women, it is striking that our program and poster image for the conference—our pin-up, as it were—has come what seems full circle: a gender-indeterminate figure dressed in jeans, hoodie, and athletic shoes, crouched in a culvert with back to the camera. This gender-indeterminate figure, one body length from emerging into the sunlight, might be considered on the cusp of naissance, entering a (hopefully) nurturing new environment after, let’s say, a 23-year–long labor down the canal. This figure doesn’t displace or serve in quite the same way as the pin-up in the organic chemistry lab, which might have been a visual pun on that other meaning of “chemistry”—sexual attraction, the erotic connection or intimacy lived definitely outside the lab even as its amino acid, peptide, and amine components might be studied inside it as molecules. Nevertheless, I extend the laboratory conceit because Thinking Gender has functioned precisely as an experimental space of bringing together organic components—here, graduate student and faculty researchers—mixing and crossing them in conventionally controlled as well as surprising, even volatile combinations to yield new discoveries and unexpected results. To wit, the figure on our poster would most likely not have been the combinatory result expected for those casting about on the subject of women’s rights (with a very middle-class white presumption of who that woman was) in the mid twentieth century.

It is sometimes difficult for those, conceiving of labs and studios as high-cost repertoires of action occurring in brick and mortar spaces, to perceive the more nimble and periodic structure of Thinking Gender as a crucial laboratory infrastructure that gathers individual researchers and cross-pollinates humanistic, social scientific, life, and physical science research.  My mission for this commentary is to illuminate the role Thinking Gender plays and to propose that its documented success in generating interdisciplinary collaboration needs to be expanded further to more tangible outcomes level. One way to do this would be to select plenary panelists for extended research collaboration facilitated by CSW across the year. Tangible here also refers to the inputs (the necessary funding of innovation) for these synergies in cross-training and collective results making. Concretely, these students would be enrolled in weekly Google-hangout meetings, share the results of their work, and collaborate on a multi-authored project that experiments in a networked and blended approach. Happily, this mission aligns with current priorities in bringing more parity to the distribution of funding for graduate students across campus. CSW looks forward to partnering with Grad Division and with private and public foundations to inaugurate this second phase of our exciting, innovative, and renewed laboratory experiment: Un-Thinking Gender—decidedly not; rather, Gender Lab: TG 2.0.

–Rachel Lee

Rachel Lee is Acting Director of the Center for the Study of Women and an Associate Professor in the departments of English and Gender Studies at UCLA

From the June Mazer Lesbian Archives: Lesbian Schoolworker Records

In 1978, Proposition 6 was presented on the California State ballot. This initiative, proposed by conservative legislator John Briggs as well as California Defend Our Children (CDOC), and later nicknamed the Briggs Initiative, rallied to ban gays and lesbians from teaching within the public school system. This later extended to possibly include any supporters of gays or lesbians as "advocates of homosexuality." A CDOC pamphlet in circulation at the time argued that the purpose of the initiative would not deny gays or lesbians their human rights, but instead “protect the rights of innocent children from people who choose their position as a teacher,” maintaining that “there is no inherent right for an individual to hold a teaching job.”

One of the first (and smallest) collections I processed was the Lesbian Schoolworkers Records, which contains information regarding organizational history, principles of unity and structure, press releases, newsletters, flyers, paste-ups, and photographs. With a commitment to "fighting racism, sexism, class, and oppression within our own movement and this society," the group organized in 1977 to defeat Propositions 6 and 7. While this organization was among the many to rally against the bill, it also actively campaigned against anti-lesbian and pro-death penalty laws and sought to identify the relationship between Third World oppression and the oppression of all lesbians. Throughout the election fight, the Schoolworkers emphasized that the struggle was not about a single campaign issue or even a fight for civil rights, but instead proclaimed “that we are all suffering at the hands of a common enemy."

Comprising a core group of 20 and over 70 participants, the Schoolworkers planned educational activities, sponsored cultural events, and produced leaflets and newsletters aimed at defeating the legislation and educating voters. Representatives often went before various civic groups, councils, and educational organizations to speak against the measures, and were notorious for their slideshow, "Don't Let It Happen Here." Designed to inform others of the dangers of the Briggs Initiatives, the slideshow drew together crucial struggles over abortion, the death penalty, and oppression of women and lesbians. Amber Hollibaugh, a political activist from San Francisco, traveled throughout small but crucial Northern California towns presenting the slideshow and participating in public debates.

The collection includes material about pro- and anti-Briggs organizations; a San Francisco Board of Education study on the possibility of including "gay lifestyle" into school curriculum in family and health studies; and a Oregon State Task Force of 1977 report that collected "information on homosexual men and women in Oregon in order to make recommendations on legislation and administrative policies that would ensure the civil rights of all Oregonians."

In end, the Briggs Initiative failed miserably, even after first receiving overwhelming support. With help from Harvey Milk, public opinion was soon swayed; groups seen as traditionally heterosexual, such as the trade union movement, the teachers’ associations and unions, child-care workers, health-care workers, and even churches, largely opposed Proposition 6 in end. While the defeat of the Briggs Initiative did not solve the discrimination of California’s gay and lesbian citizens, it did for the first time—as explained by Hollibaugh in a 1979 interview—“expose sexual dynamics as central in this society” by discussing homophobia as an intrusion of basic human rights.

—Kimberlee Granholm

Kimberlee Granholm is a Graduate Student Researcher at UCLA Center for the Study of Women.


The finding aid for this collection is available for viewing at the Online Archive of California (http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8wq04k3/?query=lesbian+schoolworkers). Digitized materials from the collection and the finding aid will be available for viewing on the UCLA Library’s Digital Collections website. This research is part of an ongoing CSW research project, “Making Invisible Histories Visible: Preserving the Legacy of Lesbian Feminist Activism and Writing in Los Angeles,” with Principal Investigators Kathleen McHugh, CSW Director and Professor in the Departments of English and Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA and Gary Strong, University Librarian at UCLA. Funded in part by an NEH grant, the project is a three-year project to arrange, describe, digitize, and make physically and electronically accessible two major clusters of June Mazer Lesbian Archive collections related to West Coast lesbian/feminist activism and writing since the 1930s.

For more information on this project, visit http://www.csw.ucla.edu/research/projects/making-invisible-histories-visible
For more information on the activities of the Mazer, visit http://www.mazerlesbianarchives.org

Doll Power: Female Action Figures as Multimedia Tie-Ins

Particularly since the 1970s, action figure tie-ins have served as an integral part of the merchandising strategy for cross-platform multimedia entertainment, including comics, film, television, and gaming. While initially designed for and marketed to children, many figures are now geared just as often to adult collectors.

This exhibit is devoted to female action figures tied to action-centric, fantasy, and superhero narratives. The figures in this exhibit, from the private collection of librarian Diana King, demonstrate a range of marketing and design features.They depict female characters and the female form itself through a variety of cultural and industry lenses. The exhibit also includes a selection of books on media paratexts, tough women in popular culture, and comics history.


Doll Power: Female Action Figures as Multimedia Tie-Ins: UCLA Arts Library, from February 11 to April 14, 2013.

UCFemTechNet

The UCHRI working group UCFemTechNet is proud to host "Feminist Infrastructures and Technocultures: Cross-Disciplinary Legacies and Futures" an assembly at University of California, San Diego from the evening of April 18 through the morning of April 20, 2013. This event is hosted by UCFemTechNet, a UC-wide interdisciplinary working group supported by the UC Humanities Research Institute, the the University of California, Santa Barbara Center for Information Technology and Society, and at UCSD the Science Studies program,the Department of Communication, the Critical Gender Studies program. Below a description of the event.

The working group UCFemTechNet has more than 60 members. There were more than thirty participants at the brainstorming session which took place last October at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, where the seeds were planted that have resulted in this assembly.

Register, see the program, see the speakers, and get more information at: https://quote.ucsd.edu/feministit

Don't MIss Thinking Gender 2013!

The 23rd Annual Graduate Student Research Conference convenes on tomorrow, February 1, 2013, at the UCLA Faculty Center. Thinking Gender is a public conference highlighting graduate student research on women, sexuality and gender across all disciplines and historical periods.

View the Conference Program
 
This year's plenary session, titled SURPLUS LIFE: INFRASTRUCTURE, ARCHITECTURE, AND TEMPORALITY, will be moderated by Rachel Lee, CSW Interim Director, Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies. It takes place from 1 to 2:30 pm in the Sequoia Room, at the UCLA Faculty Center. It features:

Margaret Fink, University of Chicago, English,
Toenail Polish on a Prosthetic Limb: Salience and Intersectionality in Chris Ware’s Building Stories

Jacob Lau, UCLA, Gender Studies,
Which Child? Whose Queerness? On Situated Knowledges, Queer Embodiment and No Future

Krista Sigurdson, UCSF, Sociology,
Valuing Milk, Care and Technology: Human Milk Banking and Sharing

Thinking Gender is free and open to the public.

Superdiversity California Style

Inaugural Conference of The Institute of American Cultures at UCLA

Superdiversity California Style: New Approaches to Race, Civil Rights, Governance and Cultural Production

Los Angeles has come to epitomize the global phenomenon of dramatically increased ethnic, racial, linguistic, and religious diversity.  With intensified immigration from all parts of the world, new racial complexities, and the steady growth of Latino and Asian American populations, the entire state of California has become “majority-minority” as districts around the nation follow suit.  The resulting intercultural mélange has obscured some traditional boundaries, while encouraging new forms of production and being.  This new reality raises fundamental questions about the pursuit of equality, social justice, racialization, and the various ways that global pressures interact with and shape our responses to emerging geo-political dynamics. At the same time, ethnic and cultural fusions have launched an explosion of bold new musical, artistic, and even culinary forms.  What these changes mean for Los Angeles specifically and the United States remains under-examined and poorly understood.  Structured in the form of a one-day conference, with a preconference roundtable on the preceding evening, Superdiversity California Style seeks to initiate a conversation about the foregoing developments and identify the kind of research that is necessary to both understand and manage the changing face of our society.

Participants: Stephan Aron, Eric R. Avila, Asli Bali, Elise C. Boddie, Duane Champagne,  Mishuana R. Goeman, Laura E. Gomez, Cheryl Harris, Bill Ong Hing, Darnell M. Hunt, Jerry Kang, Kauanui J. Kēhaulani, Robin D.G. Kelley, Scott Kurashige,  Taeku Lee,  Chon Noriega, Michael Omi, Jemina Pierre, Karthick Ramakrishnan,  Angela R. Riley,  Addie C. Rolnick, Mark Sawyer, Brenda Stevenson, Rene Tajima-Pena, Rebecca Tsosie, M. Belinda Tucker, Abel Valenzuela, Jr.,  Allison Varzally,  and David K. Yoo

DATE: Thursday/Friday, February 28/March 1

TIME: Thursday: 4 pm to 8 pm; Friday: 9 am to 6 pm

PLACE: UCLA Faculty Center, California Room 

RSVP: http://iacinauguralconference2013.eventbrite.com

INFO:: (310) 825-6815, accoordinator@conet.ucla.edu
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The mission of the UCLA Institute of American Cultures (IAC) is to advance our understanding of the new social and cultural realities in America.  The unparalleled population shifts that have occurred in recent decades have transformed our sociocultural landscape, expanding both intra-group diversity as well as opportunities for intersectional exchanges.  Drawing on ethnic and American studies that serve as its intellectual core, the IAC is devoted to the study of this emerging America, with an emphasis on academic excellence, civic engagement, and diversity.  The IAC serves as the administrative hub for UCLA’s four ethnic studies centers:  the Asian American Studies Center, the American Indian Studies Center, the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, and the Chicano Studies Research Center.  It also initiates campus-wide programs and collaborations that support a wide range of disciplinary approaches to the study of ethnic and American cultures at UCLA. Located in Los Angeles – one of the most diverse and dynamic urban areas, and arguably a bellwether for the new demographic and sociocultural changes – the new IAC is well positioned to make innovative contributions to research on these developing trends.   Among other activities, the IAC both supports and initiates original research focused on emerging America, fosters a productive multidisciplinary intellectual environment on- and off-campus (through lectures, symposia, conferences, and workshops), links the research mission to professional development activities for faculty and students, and engages strategic partnerships with the broader community.