The Feminist Snap Archive
About the Archive
The Feminist Student News and Protest Archive -- Feminist SNAP -- builds cultural memory of student activism, with a particular focus on the history of feminist student activism at McGill University, where the project is located. The collection includes materials that represent the diversity of student movement actors and the range of internal and cross-movement dialogues that constitute and transform student social change efforts. Materials in the collection include: student press coverage, organizational texts, peer training and educational materials, and movement ephemera such as flyers, public letters, stickers, and photos. The collection focuses on materials and documents created and collected by students, as well as off-campus materials that report on and represent their efforts.
"Feminist snap: how we tell a counter-story."1
The name of the archive is inspired by Sara Ahmed's concept of the feminist snap. In Living a Feminist Life, Ahmed describes a feminist snap as a moment, or series of moments, in which one comes to realize that they can no longer carry on as things are, that it is too much to bear: clear moments of transformation in an otherwise ongoing structure of power relations. For the student activists with whom we we have collaborated, those structures are fuelled by the intersecting oppressions of racism, sexism, misogyny, ongoing colonialism, heterosexism, transphobia, and ableism. Students experience these structures in their day-to-day lives, in the ways they are situated in and at university, and in the processes of working to make change. Students clearly identify these structures in their activist work, from naming patriarchy and institutional racism to examining how university administrators can refuse to listen to student demands. They also work to hold their own movements accountable when they reproduce oppression.
The feminist snap signals acts of refusal that catalyze actions and ideas toward a more just world. As Ahmed writes, "By snapping you are saying: I will not reproduce a world I cannot bear, a world I do not think should be borne."2
Viewed over time, we see how feminist snaps reveal longer histories of feminist struggle while serving as guides for how to enact different futures. It is both a feminist genealogy and a feminist pedagogy. It is also collective: “a series of accumulated gestures that connect women over time and space."3 For the movement activism we archive, it also connects cisgender men, and trans and gender non-binary folks who are doing the work of feminism. Ahmed's own approach to snaps as a "feminist communication system" that demands attention, including by snapping one's fingers (something she only briefly mentions), loosely connects her work to a longer genealogy of queer Black men's and trans and cisgender Black women's communicative gestures and rituals of critique tied to the "snap."4
The documents and other materials in the Feminist SNAP Archive document some of the weight of these accumulated gestures and the different contexts and lived experiences from which they emerge. Collected here, they offer multi-perspectival historical views of key feminist transitions over time as well as the longer, and slower, organizing work and campus reporting that students do. The archive collects materials of eventful snaps and the documents that guide and train students in the forms of organizing that undergird them. We hope visitors to the archive can learn something from the decades of work students have been doing on our campus. And we hope you might find some inspiration for future feminist action and intervention in these materials and the stories they tell. Some visitors to the site might also recognize some shared experiences with the student activism documented here.
The Importance of the Student Press
While the archive includes several types of materials, the most numerous are student press articles. Student news reports are key sources of information on McGill’s histories of student activism: they record key incidents of sexual violence and student activism (on which a lot of our materials focus); they center students as both agents and documentarians of student activism; they preserve conversations that were underway on campus at any given moment in time; and they serve as sites for students to speak back to university administrators and others.
Ranging from the mid-1980s to 2021, across several different student publications, the articles collected here reveal "the recursive nature of activism and institutional reticence." A 1991 article in The McGill Daily, for example, records one of the early published student calls for a sexual violence policy at the university, though our ongoing historical research on campus may reveal earlier efforts, especially around the 1986 sexual harassment policy. The 1991 article notes that McGill University administrators considered a separate sexual violence policy unnecessary because there was already a general policy on assault in place, the same argument administrators made in 2013 and 2014 when students again demanded a policy. After 3 years of student organizing, policy writing and research work, in November 2016 the university adopted a stand-alone sexual assault policy. As some of us have argued elsewhere, the archive documents both student activism and some of the evidence of the university’s "record of 'non-performativity'—that is, the ways it performed inaction" at key points in the movement.5 Even when behind-the-scenes social change work is happening at the university, it is often not visible to students, creating other challenges and barriers for student movements.
A Focus on Policy
A lot of student activism against gender violence at McGill has been focused around developing a policy framework for responding to acts of sexual violence on campus, activism that accelerated in 2013 when other schools and universities in Canada faced student demands for these policies. A significant number of materials in this archive are related to this policy work. In addition to various iterations of university policies related to harassment and assault, the collections include drafts of student-written policies and materials from McGill's Faculty Senate and the Board of Governors, the latter of which we have been researching in the university archives (the materials of which are forthcoming).
As we mentioned above, student calls for a sexual violence policy, one distinct from the existing university policy on assault, go back to 1991. In the absence of visible university action on the subject, students turned to their own policy writing and research to draft policy documents for their own organizations, and for the university more broadly. From 2013-2016, students co-authored a policy that went through extensive student consultations, and subsequent revisions. In early 2016, the policy draft was finalized and presented to the McGill administration who in turn rewrote parts of the policy, stripping away many key student demands, such as the incorporation of an intersectional framework and the inclusion of more substantial student involvement in subsequent policymaking and review.
We have collected materials related to development and writing of both student-authored and university administration-backed policies in order to highlight the labour and critical thinking that students brought to the creation of a sexual violence policy at McGill. By collecting drafts of the policy that students authored, we can begin to see how "activist language and anti-violence frameworks around survivor-centeredness and intersectionality... became part of the final institutionally-produced policy."6
Other Materials
In addition to student press coverage and policy documents, the archive also includes materials such as:
- activist training manuals and anti-oppression curricula that were created by students
- student and survivor-created zines and poetry and art journals
- stickers
- open public letters
- ephemera from protest actions and organizing campaigns
These are materials that “are less often granted the legitimacy of academic preservation,” as Alexis Lothian and Amanda Philips (2013) have argued around their own #transformDH efforts.7 Many of these materials pertain to the institutional histories of student groups on campus organizing around the issue of sexual violence. We include these sorts of documents because we believe that delving into into student organizations and their histories helps to reveal "what drives the engine of student activism and [restores] their authorship to many contemporary efforts to transform campus culture."8 Archiving these materials also helps situate current student activism within a longer lineage of movement labour directed at transforming the university.
Our Inspirations
None of us had experience building a digital archive before we started this project. So we turned to and learned from other feminist archiving projects and DIY digital archivists that became important models for our work. We want to thank and recognize the contributions the following projects have made to queer and feminist histories: the Cabaret Commons project on queer cabaret performers and performance spaces created by TL Cowan, Jas Rault, and collaborators; the Chicana por mi Raza digital memory project on Chicana feminism; FemTechNet and its digital practices for feminist pedagogy on technology; Rise Up!'s Canadian history project on feminist protest; the VHS Activism Archive, a collection built by Alex Juhasz and collaborators about AIDS activism and queer, feminist, anti-racist video-making that explores the relationship between personal and political archiving; the Canadian Sex Work Activist Histories Project led by Shawna Ferris, Amy Leibovitch, and Daniella Allard; and From Third Cinema to Media Justice: Third World Majority and the Promise of Third Cinema, collected and edited by Thenmozhi Soundrarajan and Kara Keeling.
Works Cited
1. Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017): 210.
2. Ibid., 199.
3. Ibid., 200.
4. Ibid., 211; footnote 5, p. 277. Ahmed draws this connection in a short footnoted paragraph that cites the sources listed just below. Ahmed presents her use of the snap not as an appropriation of those practices, but instead as a recognition of this longer community-based history and its uses in other contexts. For more on Black queer men's and women's Snap! culture, see E. P. Johnson, "Snap! Culture: A Different Kind of 'Reading',” Text and Performance Quarterly, 15, no. 2 (1995):122-142; and M. T. Riggs, "Black Macho Revisited: Reflections of a Snap! Queen," Black American Literature Forum, 25, no. 2 (1991): 389-394.
5. Sara Ahmed, "Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism," Borderlands 3, no. 2 (2004), quoted in C. Rentschler, B. Nothwehr, A. Vemuri and A. Kent, “The Feminist Protocols of Building an Archive of Student Activism,” in iMPACTS: Reclaiming the role of universities to address sexual violence through multi-sector partnerships in law, arts and social media, eds. Chris Dietzel and Shaheen Shariff (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023).
6. C. Rentschler, B. Nothwehr, A. Vemuri and A. Kent, “The Feminist Protocols of Building an Archive of Student Activism,” in iMPACTS: Reclaiming the role of universities to address sexual violence through multi-sector partnerships in law, arts and social media, eds. Chris Dietzel and Shaheen Shariff (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023).
7. A. Lothian and A. Phillips. "Can digital humanities mean transformative critique?," E-Media Studies 3, no. 1 (2013): 6.
8. C. Rentschler, B. Nothwehr, A. Vemuri and A. Kent, “The Feminist Protocols of Building an Archive of Student Activism,” in iMPACTS: Reclaiming the role of universities to address sexual violence through multi-sector partnerships in law, arts and social media, eds. Chris Dietzel and Shaheen Shariff (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023).