Article:
Pioneers and Feminisms: The Swedish Suffrage Movement as Archival Boundary Object

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dc.creatorPierce, Rachel
dc.date.accessioned2024-03-01T11:35:45Z
dc.date.available2024-03-01T11:35:45Z
dc.date.issued2020
dc.description.abstractFeminist historiography is rife with debates about the nature and boundaries of women’s movements. Arguments over who to call an activist or a feminist sit at the heart of these definitional debates, which provide the groundwork for how scholars understand contem- porary feminisms. Given the heated nature of ongoing disputes over the complicated identity politics of feminism and its archives, it is sur- prising that scholars have afforded so little attention to the technical infrastructure that defines and provides access to digitized primary source material, which is increasingly the foundation for contem- porary historical research. Metadata plays an outsized role in these definitions, especially for photographic material that cannot be made word-searchable but is favored by digitizers because of its popularity. This article uses qualitative content analysis to examine how two digital archives define the Swedish suffrage movement – a histori- cally contested concept, here understood through the theory of Susan Leigh Star as a “boundary object” subject to “interpretive flexibility”. The study uses keywords attached to photographic material from the the National Resource Library for Gender Studies (KvinnSam) and metadata within the related Swedish Women’s Biographical Lexicon platform for women’s biographies. The findings indicate that the hier- archies of archival organization do not disappear with individual document digitization and description. Instead, the silences built into physical archives are redefined in digital collections, obscuring the tensions between individual and movement feminisms, as well as the contested nature of movement boundaries.en
dc.identifier.doi10.14361/dcs-2020-0206
dc.identifier.doihttp://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/21896
dc.identifier.urihttps://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.14361/dcs-2020-0206/html
dc.identifier.urihttps://mediarep.org/handle/doc/23194
dc.languageeng
dc.publishertranscript
dc.publisher.placeBielefeld
dc.relation.isPartOfissn:2364-2114
dc.relation.ispartofseriesDigital Culture & Society
dc.rightsCreative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 Generic
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
dc.subjectArchivesen
dc.subjectWomen’s historyen
dc.subjectPhotographen
dc.subjectIdentity politicsen
dc.subjectSuffrageen
dc.subject.ddcddc:700
dc.subject.ddcddc:600
dc.subject.ddcddc:300
dc.titlePioneers and Feminisms: The Swedish Suffrage Movement as Archival Boundary Objecten
dc.typearticle
dc.type.statuspublishedVersion
dspace.entity.typeArticle
local.coverpage2024-03-02T02:35:37
local.source.epage114
local.source.issue2
local.source.issueTitleThe Politics of Metadata
local.source.spage87
local.source.volume6

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6(2) 2020: The Politics of Metadata