2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

“To be recognized as a feminist is to be assigned to a difficult category and a category of difficulty,” writes Sara Ahmed in The Promise of Happiness (2010). As Ahmed embraces this difficulty while exploring its philosophical valences, in this panel we champion the difficult as a necessary method for feminist historical scholarship utilizing digital tools. We argue it is the work of interdisciplinary women’s, gender, and sexuality scholars to seek out, record, and grapple with that which is difficult, ensuring a wide-ranging future for the feminist past.

While panels at past Berkshire conferences have considered the possibilities and limitations of digital scholarship, we further these conversations by arguing that doing women’s history digitally requires methodological difficulty. The need for difficulty arises both out of the marginalization of the subjects themselves and the underfunding of institutional and grassroots archives that contain these histories, thereby perpetuating this marginalization. We resist the techno-optimism of the digital to point out, often and loudly, that the field known as digital humanities too often reflects the persistent “-isms” of academia as a whole.

Rather than resisting the difficulties inherent to working through these histories with digital tools and methods, we theorize them as part of the histories themselves. Our three papers explore key moments and sources in feminist and LGBT movement building and grapple with the digital tools and methods necessary to document these subjects. In doing so, we interrogate the utility of digital humanities for the study of gender and sexuality in 20th century America.