Information Activism - (Sign, Storage, Transmission) Annotated by Cait McKinney

About the Book

Cait McKinney traces how lesbian feminist activists in the United States and Canada between the 1970s and the present developed communication networks, databases, and digital archives to use as a foundation for their feminist, antiracist, and trans-inclusive work.

Book Synopsis

For decades, lesbian feminists across the United States and Canada have created information to build movements and survive in a world that doesn't want them. In Information Activism Cait McKinney traces how these women developed communication networks, databases, and digital archives that formed the foundation for their work. Often learning on the fly and using everything from index cards to computers, these activists brought people and their visions of justice together to organize, store, and provide access to information. Focusing on the transition from paper to digital-based archival techniques from the 1970s to the present, McKinney shows how media technologies animate the collective and unspectacular labor that sustains social movements, including their antiracist and trans-inclusive endeavors. By bringing sexuality studies to bear on media history, McKinney demonstrates how groups with precarious access to control over information create their own innovative and resourceful techniques for generating and sharing knowledge.

Review Quotes

"In providing queer and feminist (activist) histories of disparate technologies, Information Activism creates a new methodological toolkit and researcher sensibility which is deeply innovative. This book will appeal to those looking for queer information management histories, a fresh take on the gendered, sexualized and racialized histories of everyday technologies, and to better understand the improvisational strategies of feminist information activists in challenging archival norms."

--Red Chidgey "Journal of Gender Studies" (9/9/2024 12:00:00 AM)

"Information Activism . . . does the profound work of turning lesbian information-making and -sharing into an utterly invigorating read. . . . The text is a strong contribution to feminist media studies, communication studies, and lesbian feminist queer trans theory more broadly."--Jack Jen Gieseking "Women's Studies Quarterly" (11/1/2023 12:00:00 AM)

"Information Activism is a critical celebration of activist-archivism, practiced via newsletters, crisis lines, periodicals, and other archive-community hybrid spaces. . . . Through a refusal of the safe, straight archive, and an embrace of strategic opacity and theft . . . McKinney invite[s] us to an archive that loves us back. Information is care, passed in the verb of love for ourselves and for each other, and these texts sustain kinship lines both new and old."--Sarah Cavar "Feminist Media Studies" (9/23/2022 12:00:00 AM)

"Information Activism is a perfect book for readers interested in lesbian feminist activist histories and how social movements are sustained through old and new media technologies and productions. . . . McKinney offers readers a perfect entrée into thinking critically about LGBTQ+ archives and communities. Media studies and archival studies scholars might consider joining together to build on McKinney's timely and important research to center the role that community archives play in building and sustaining community networks."--Jamie A. Lee "Journal of the History of Sexuality" (5/1/2022 12:00:00 AM)

"McKinney compellingly argues against strict and discrete definitions of print and digital, drawing instead a through-line between current pressing questions of ethics, access, and search retrieval on the one hand and past archiving practices of lesbian feminist activists on the other. . . . This work is a fascinating read for scholars of media and information, archives, queer histories, and activism. It raises a number of important questions about medium-specific affordances, privacy, and access that merit further study."--Nelanthi Hewa "Canadian Journal Of Communication" (11/1/2022 12:00:00 AM)

"McKinney's Information Activism reinforces why information activism matters. . . . McKinney's work does not feel wholly bound to either the past or present. Like many meaningful queer projects, it is oriented toward a sense of futurity: a perpetual process of improvisation, revision, and worldmaking."--Harris Kornstein "Catalyst" (4/6/2022 12:00:00 AM)

"I loved reading this book. . . . McKinney illustrates the interconnectedness of past social movements, present activism, and the attainability of liberatory futures."--aems emswiler "Information & Culture" (3/9/2022 12:00:00 AM)

"Saturated with vivid historical detail, a testimony to McKinney's extensive archival research. . . . The book's intimate depictions of pre-digital information management invite its readers to reflect on the staggering amount of slow, painstaking technology work that went into feminism's second wave."--Deborah Thurman "Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory" (10/4/2021 12:00:00 AM)

"What can we extrapolate from the sparse log that is left behind? In Information Activism, McKinney ... approaches this question with palpable respect for those doing the work at the time and with a sharp curiosity for the pieces of information that they didn't leave behind. Each chapter examines a different kind of network--newsletters, hotlines, indexing projects, and archives--and centers the women who created and maintained them to make lifesaving, community-sustaining information available and accessible."
--Meerabelle Jesuthasan "The Nation" (1/5/2021 12:00:00 AM)

"Steeped in the words, culture, vernacular, ephemera, and ways of interacting that have been refined by decades of lesbians, queers, and other feminists. The details are delightful. The writing is warm. Individuals and communities come to life on the page."--Alexandra Juhasz "Lambda Literary Review" (1/7/2021 12:00:00 AM)

"In an age when technological innovation itself is often assumed to make the world a better place, Cait McKinney reminds us that, for the past fifty years, lesbian feminist activists have resourcefully patched together their own heterodox information infrastructures--composed of telephone hotlines and spiral-bound notebooks, index cards and digitization technologies, hacked tools and customized protocols--to serve clear social and ethical ends. Their information activism enabled them to create systems of connection and care that are responsive to human need, rather than, as is so common today, to advertisers and algorithms."--Shannon Mattern, author of "Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media"

"Through what might seem like an unlikely mashup of lesbian feminism and information studies, Cait McKinney illuminates both in original and compelling ways. The novel concept of information activism is a valuable contribution to understandings of social movements and counterpublics. And McKinney sheds new light on often misunderstood or neglected histories of lesbian feminism by exploring amateur obsessions with circulating information, including digital media. Together, information and lesbian feminism become unexpectedly sexy, erotic, and affectively charged."--Ann Cvetkovich, author of "Depression: A Public Feeling"

About the Author

Cait McKinney is Assistant Professor of Communication at Simon Fraser University and coeditor of Inside Killjoy's Kastle: Dykey Ghosts, Feminist Monsters, and Other Lesbian Hauntings.