Re-visiting an old thought

This is an article abstract that a colleague and I wrote together almost one year ago, in an effort to get our perspective published in a special printing of Archivaria, which was to be focusing on Queer Archives. To date, nothing more has been done with this article abstract. All that this abstract represents are the thoughts and casual debates between two Information Professionals (one an archivist, the other a librarian) who happen to be very passionate about concepts of scholarship and the definitions of pornography; and the overlap between the two.

In the history of archival scholarship, numerous studies have focused on the specific function records and documents in society, such as medical records, legal dockets and architectural drawings; however there are no equivalent studies in quantity or breadth that focus on sex – those documents which are created to record the act of, the discussions about or social perspectives on sex and sexuality. This article focuses on the relationship between archival theory and practice and pornography.

We begin with an examination of available archival scholarly research focusing on alternative sexualities within mainstream sexual studies; then note the differences in primary source materials available for both alternative (LGBT, etc.) sexualities and mainstream sexualities (specifically in terms of quantity, accessibility, and quality of resources). This leads to an examination of archival theory and practice in relation to what are considered erotic or pornographic records and materials, which are often not recognized as significant cultural artefacts in their own right, and thus may be removed from a fond or collection as an ‘irrelevance’.

We will demonstrate that there are inconsistencies in archival values and practice by examining a sexually explicit collection. Our discussion thus focuses on the ways in which pornographic materials, and by proxy, alternative sexual records (LGBT, BD/SM, etc) are assessed, appraised, and made accessible within archives, and how such materials are addressed by current archival theory. The collection in question is the Max Allen collection, which is owned by the Center for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. We will discuss the nature of the collection with respect to archival science/theory; examine the history of the collection; and look at the acquisition of the collection.

The collection presents a number of interesting contradictions such as: the paradox between the potential for pornographic material to be the most prevalent form of record creating genre while being the least prevalent form of record keeping genre with respect to a society’s cultural and heritage institutions. The collection also presents a number of commonalities between archival studies and sexual studies such as the fact that both scholarly fields have a strong sense of marginalization within democratic societies, albeit for vastly different reasons. By this method of analyzing differences and similarities, the article exposes the censorship and bias that affects pornographic collections (for example, the classification of materials as “pornography” generally stigmatizes them, and thus equates them with records of no redeemable value).

Finally, the article reaches two conclusions: First, that the potential for primary resource research in the field of queer studies would be positively affected by re-examination of how pornographic materials or sexually explicit materials should be viewed as cultural materials in their own right allowing sexuality studies to occur within a context – not as an isolated factor; and second, with respect to sexual diversity studies, and thus queer studies, there is a pressing need for further archival scholarly research into stated values of context, democracy, and uniqueness.