We speak often about “preserving women’s voices,” but rarely do we address the uncomfortable truth: archives are inherently violent. They exclude, they sanitise, they organise memory into palatable sequences. Women, queer people, neurodivergent bodies, sex workers, punks, migrants — we are usually documented only in moments of scandal, danger, or failure.
This is why self-archiving became a feminist act.
Brighton Arts Club, Goddamn Media, the digital diaries, the moving-image loops, the obsessive documentation of performance personas — these were never indulgences. They were counteractions. Survival tactics. Ways of refusing erasure.
Mainstream archives prefer a certain legibility: dates, exhibitions, institutions, grant-funded projects. But counterculture thrives in the unrecorded, the ephemeral, the badly lit, the chaotic. Feminist art history is full of ghosts. Brilliant ghosts. Unseen performances. Lost zines. Deleted photographs. Women whose entire careers exist only in memory and myth.
I have no interest in becoming one of them.
My current archival practice — the NotWiki pages, the autobiographical essays, the combination of feminist theory with punk narratives — is part artwork, part resistance. Feminist counter-archives must be messy, breathable, contradictory. They must resist canonisation even as they build visibility.
To archive oneself is to refuse disappearance.
It is also to declare:
My life happened.
My art happened.
And I will decide how it is remembered.
The feminist archive of the future will not be a climate-controlled building.
It will be a network of self-authored digital traces — wild, interconnected, deliberately unprofessional, defiantly alive.
In other words: precisely what women like me have been building all along.
