Fashioning Lives & Information Activism: reading queer life, restor(y)ing kinship.

This review engages with two queer approaches to archival knowledge and critical literacy, represented, respectively, in Cait McKinney's Information Activism and Eric Darnell Pritchard's Fashioning Lives. In Information Activism, McKinney explores the physical and digital contents of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, considering the implications of late twentieth-century lesbian activism on contemporary queer publics, and on their own identity. In Fashioning Lives, Pritchard fuses his own Black queer literacy narrative with a collage of interviews to form a capacious definition of "reading" and resisting racist, reductionist litgeracy norms. Blending autobiographical, ethnographic, and archival methods, both compellingly excavate racialized, gendered, and queer literacy practices, and present queerness as a text to be read, passed-on, and made-kin with via intergenerational engagement. They also bring to light the epistemic violence underpinning both literacy norms and archives, while simultaneously identifying their ambiguity and partiality as possible points of queer transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Feminist Media Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)