 Hello and welcome to this British Library Eccles Centre event looking like a lesbian with Professor Louise Siddons and me, Polly Russell, your chair. I'm delighted that you've all joined us. Thank you so much. I am the head of the Eccles Centre at the British Library and I just want to take one minute just to tell you about some of the things that we do. The Eccles Centre was set up in 1991 to encourage and support creative research about the Americas using the British Library's world-class collections. Within that broad remit now we support a whole host of activities, including funding, academic and creative scholarship, producing bibliographic guides, supporting exhibitions and also staging events like this one today. I think that Louise, and I really hope she won't mind me saying this, Louise is sort of an embodiment of the Eccles Centre and the sorts of things that we try and do. She was formerly a fellow of the Eccles Centre and she now holds the Fulbright Eccles Award and she's of course contributing to this event, which is wonderful. If you would like to find out more about the Eccles Centre, please do look at our pages on the British Library's website and also follow us on Twitter. So, about tonight's event, Louise is going to talk for about 30 minutes and then she and I are going to have a conversation for about 15 minutes and then there'll be an opportunity for questions. I know that Louise would love to hear from you, so please do put your questions in the question bar or in the chat bar. I want to just introduce Louise. She is an Associate Professor at Oklahoma State University teaching courses on American and Native American visual and material culture. In a previous life she was curator at Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, so she really has an informed understanding of museums, archives and curation. And it's perhaps not surprising, although it is impressive that she was the founding curator and a co-director of the Oklahoma State University Museum. She's a historian of American art and visual culture, printmaking and photography. On her full bright Eccles Award, she's researching for a book on the photographer Laura Gilpin and Navajo Politics, which I know that we're going to hear about later. Besides all these many achievements, Louise has also proven to be a resilient, resourceful and determined researcher in the face of lockdown, managing to continue to do her research even when she couldn't get into the library. I'm delighted now that the British Library is open. Louise is a regular visitor in our reading rooms and of course that she is doing this event, so thank you so much Louise, over to you. Thank you. Thank you so much probably for that gracious introduction. And let me add my thanks to the Eccles Center for American Studies and the US UK Fulbright Commission, who are making my six month residency at the British Library both fun and productive. I'm thrilled to be back in the reading rooms as of last month. My research broadly is about visual strategies in marginalized communities. And my current project is a study of the American photographer Laura Gilpin, who was born in Colorado and spent her career in the Southwestern United States first in Colorado Springs, and then in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 1928 Gilpin published this book, The Enduring Navajo, which included over 200 photographs in seven chapters that encompass biography and autobiography, history, politics, and more. Gilpin began working on the Navajo Nation in 1931, when her partner Betsy Foster moved there toast immediately, but it took a couple more than 30 years to finish the Enduring Navajo. In the book I'm writing, I explore the simultaneous emergence of lesbian activism and Navajo sovereignty movements in the 1950s as a frame for Gilpin's lived experience as a lesbian and her decisions about how to depict Navajo people and culture in the Enduring Navajo. Despite the parallels between queer and indigenous political histories, they're very much separate in both the scholarly literature and in the archives. So I'm going to ask a series of questions about archives prompted by and drawing examples from my work on Gilpin that have implications beyond my own research. As my title looking like a lesbian suggests I'm specifically going to think about how lesbians created archives in the second half of the 20th century, and how they use them as vehicles of critique. I acknowledge that my title also suggests other entry points into this question of lesbians and visual culture. For example, one that has preoccupied me in this research has been the question of how we might perceive the influence of Gilpin's lesbian experience in other words a lesbian gaze to be discerned in her work. Later this summer I'm giving a talk on that very question as part of a conference on relationality hosted by the Courtauld. So I'm going to stay away from it tonight but I welcome discussion at the end of my talk if people are interested. The authors are held at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas. They were not created with an eye to posterity but when she decided to donate this pile of material to a public collection. She transformed her personal life into a public record. In so doing she inserted herself into an explicitly feminist history and into the emerging narrative of gay liberation. Her donation can therefore be seen as a political act. She left an intentionally public record not just of Laura Gilpin the individual, but of her life as an example of mid-century lesbian experience in the American West. In her authoritative biography of Gilpin, published in 1986, the historian Martha Sandwise kept Gilpin firmly in the closet, acknowledging her partner Betsy Foster only as her friend and companion. Martha Sandwise was not alone in erasing Gilpin's homosexuality. The stigma created by homophobia meant that queer sexuality was routinely censored throughout the 20th century. It has been treated as an individual characteristic with isolated effects, as though leaving out mention of someone's sexuality is as inconsequential as leaving out mention of their love of marmalade. But in fact this erasure threatens every aspect of our ability to interpret the archive. Gilpin's papers are riddled with overtly lesbian content from love letters to jokes between friends to clippings from magazines to the identities of her correspondence. It's everywhere and thanks in part to the network of queer women within which she situated herself, it affected her life at every level. However, this isn't obvious at first. How do we know from looking at a name or a face or reading a few lines of correspondence that the woman in question is a lesbian or that queerness was affecting the interaction. But to me the aggregated signs felt unmistakable and important. Looking at Gilpin's archive as a lesbian in other words, I saw its specific significance as part of a lesbian archive. Early in my research I began to trace Gilpin's lesbian network in order to reveal its material impact on her career. I had a long list of Gilpin's correspondence, subjects and collaborators, but the question of their queerness posed an immediate challenge. Given the censorship of homosexual identity and experience by historians and the self censorship that was often practiced by lesbian women themselves in relation to the archive, how was I to distinguish a specifically lesbian network from Gilpin's broader social circle. For example, Mary and Hotop, a doctor, Peach Meyer, a teacher were both unmarried women Sylvia Saunders who we see here was also unmarried. She lived with another woman and raised horses. Their correspondence with Gilpin makes no explicit mention of their sexuality or romantic preferences and why would it. As a result, however, their identity remains opaque in comparison with, for example, Alice Marriott and Carol Racklin, or Helen Seth Smith and Carol Preston, who signed their letters to Gilpin as couples and expressed specifically lesbian empathy with the photographer when Foster died in 1972. In the context of Gilpin's broader network and a culture that expected women to marry, however, couldn't Hotop, Meyer, Saunders and others of Gilpin's unmarried correspondence be construed as queer? Obviously, as I traced the women in Gilpin's lesbian network, I was making decisions about who counted. I've based those decisions in part on the evidence of other archives, most often obituaries and local newspaper articles. As you can imagine, public facing documents are the least likely places to find evidence of lesbian identity in this period. But Gilpin's acquaintances rarely left their private papers to public collections as she did. Her best friend sculptor Brenda Putnam was an exception, but she excised her personal correspondence from her papers before she donated them. Where Gilpin's papers include hundreds of letters from Putnam from 1916 through the 1970s, Putnam preserved none of Gilpin's letters. As I attempted to discover and reconstruct lesbian lives from these inadequate records, two concerns were ever present. First, how was I to negotiate the limits of the archive? And at the same time, without any definitive way to identify lesbianness among women who had no reason to declare themselves publicly and many reasons not to, how was I to delimit the archive I was proposing? By 1978, when Gilpin donated her archive to the Amon Carter Museum, the idea of the lesbian had coalesced into a collective identity and the lesbian archive was something that women were publicly constructing for themselves. The early lesbian archive, in contrast, was built by outsiders, psychologists and sexologists like Sigmund Freud, Havelock Ellis, and Alfred Kinsey, men who were talking about lesbian identity from the perspective not only of a different gender, but also from the disciplinary vantage point of social science, which took as its premise, if not its conclusion, the belief that homosexuality was a deviant and even pathological condition. Feminist and lesbian magazines emerged in the 1950s and proliferated throughout the 1970s. Their definitions of lesbianness were often extremely inclusive and rooted as much in political affinity, the woman identified woman, as in sexual activity. This was in part an effort to protect both their readers and the magazine themselves from the law. In 1956, the editors of the latter, the first lesbian magazine published in the United States, described the lesbian as, quote, a very elusive creature. She borrows underground in her fear of identification. But even as they encouraged readers to come out, arguing that homosexuality is not the dirty word it used to be, they reminded readers that a subscription to the latter, or membership in its parent organization, the daughters of the lightest, was open to anyone who's interested in the minority problems of the sexual variant, and does not necessarily indicate one's own sexual preference. Early lesbian magazines made explicit reference to the Sexological Archive and even wanted to contribute to it. The third piece that the latter's fourfold mission statement was participation in research projects by experts directed toward further knowledge of the homosexual. When the British magazine arena three was founded by Esme Langley in 1964. It was under the auspices of the minorities research group, an organization that was founded a year earlier to quote conduct and to collaborate in research into the homosexual condition, especially as it concerns women. Their readers, however, seemed interested in a much wider variety of concerns, contributions to English language lesbian magazines around the world in this period included short stories, poetry, political discussions, and philosophical reflections on aspects of lived lesbian experience. Collectively, these magazines created an intentional public archive. This marked a shift away from private subcultures toward public collectives as a bid for political agency. The public archives asserted a collective right to visibility, and therefore to exist in. When we see ourselves in the archive, we're authenticated. And more than that, the collective archive controlled by those it describes asserts their right, our right to a voice in the public sphere. The idea of a collective archive is premised on the validity of a correspondingly collective identification. In other words, for there to be a lesbian archive, those building it have to agree on who and what a lesbian is. More subtly, they have to find a shared point of view. A communal identity implies a community specific gaze, the claim that what we see is different from what they see. I strongly suggested that humor was one way they found to articulate that shared identity. If you haven't already seen it, I encourage you to read my blog post about the cartoons in the British lesbian magazine Sappho. I was drawn to these cartoons in part because throughout the early issues of these magazines, there's significantly less visual material than written. There were several reasons for this ranging from technical limitations to the need for anonymity. To be specific enough, why then do I want to make an argument for the visual archive as a distinct concern? My colleague, the art historian, Terza True-Ladimer, has argued that the problems accompanying lacunae in the visual archives are particularly critical because of all the claim I see implies about verifying believing and knowing. Many women at mid-century observed with frustration that the largest archive of visual material relating to lesbians was pornography made by men for male viewers. When they took control of their archive, therefore, one of their core concerns was to offer alternative visual representations of lesbian experience. These are early examples of lesbians in visual culture that are not pornography, of course. In the 1920s and 30s, we might consider reddled marshes, prints at the Chop Suey Club in New York, Frank Van Sloan's Mythic Amazons in San Francisco, or breast-sized photographs in Paris just as a start. To reject those on the basis that their images by outsiders, we can turn to Romaine Brooks and her portraits of lesbians in the circle of Natalie Barney. And indeed, later artists have taken up Brooks's portraits of the early 1920s as a touchstone for lesbian visibility. Gilpin visited Paris in London with her close friend sculptor Brenda Putnam in 1922, but they had no interaction with the queer counterculture of Barney, Brooks, and their circle. Gilpin's lack of interaction with these canonical figures of queer art history has not helped her in the eyes of art historians. But if we're looking for a lesbian archive rather than an art historical canon, Gilpin's body of work and her network offer a fascinating insight into a lesbian community that extended much further than the countercultures of Paris and London. Gilpin's distinction has professional implications. Art historians have increasingly been questioning our disciplinary history of reinforcing existing power structures through the invention and consolidation of a canon, defining a select slice of our visual and material field that we've historically claimed has superlative cultural intellectual or economic value. Unsurprisingly, those value judgments have often coincided with the opinions and needs of those in power. The entire logic of the canon, in other words, works against inclusion. In contrast, and excitingly for scholars like me who see visual culture as a key component of marginalized histories, the archive is by definition, expansive. It's a tool for collective identification and political action as the publishers of lesbian magazines at mid-century recognized. The magazines represented an emphatic move into the public sphere. But as I've already suggested this didn't mean that the pressure to stay closeted suddenly disappeared. In the eyes of the ladders editorial board inconspicuousness was a path to diversity within the lesbian community. They depended on contributions from readers and in return promised to protect those readers privacy. This discretion was reflected in the cover art of the magazine, which through its first year depicted two figures in silhouette visually coded as masculine and feminine at the foot of a ladder that reaches up into the clouds. At lower right a triangular logo for the daughters of the lightest and name which was also chosen for the obscurity of its reference is similarly inscrutable. If you didn't already know it was a magazine about lesbians, the cover wouldn't clue you in. This time went on though the ladders illustrations diversified and sometimes got a bit more explicit. The October 1957 issue, for example, introduced a new cover by Kay Summers, which depicted a woman stylized in a masculine in a masculine fashion, holding a tragedy mask away from her face. The mask is overtly feminine with lengthened eyelashes, a lipstick bowed mouth and curls coming down across her forehead. The message is clear. The latter was encouraging lesbian women to remove the mask of heterosexual femininity. In contrast to the figurative covers of the latter, the cover of the February 1966 issue of arena three is an abstract red and black ink blood. If evocative simultaneously of the playfulness arena, it's also gently reminiscent of labia. By the 1970s, as gay liberation moved discussions of gay and lesbian identity emphatically into the public sphere, this type of imagery became commonplace in feminist and lesbian art. In a 1975 article for SAFO, for example, artist Monica Stu wrote enthusiastically about a report on a talk given by the American artist Judy Chicago that was published in the feminist magazine Off Our Bags. She quotes that report, using numerous slides of her own work and that of Georgia O'Keeffe, Louise Bourgeois and Miriam Shapiro. Among others, she pointed out four patterns she had observed again and again in women's art. They are repeating forms, circular forms, organic forms, and the central aperture, the representation of an opening at the center of a painting. As this quote suggests, and as the art historians in my audience will know well, this train of thought led Chicago into a lifetime of investigating central core imagery as an essentially feminine and feminist form of image making. Starting in the 1970s, many lesbian artists embraced it with enthusiasm, creating work that more or less explicitly celebrated the vulva as a generative source of visual pleasure. Corrine, for example, made work in this genre that ran the gamut from metaphorical to literal, as in this example from the Yantras of Woman Love series, reproduced in the landmark 1991 book Stolen Glances edited by Tessa Boffin and Jean Fraser. Corrine stylized Yantras recall the ink blot on the cover of arena three. And also the cover of the 1968 August 1968 issue of the latter, which encircles the theme of the changing scene in a central aperture that is surrounded by mirror symmetrical biomorphic forms. I hope you're all noticing the fundamental tension that these images introduced when it comes to defining lesbian identity on display in the magazines, central core imagery threatened to reduce lesbian identity to an essentializing biologically determined iconography. The exclusionary potential of this aspect of the archive is all too evident today in the transphobic positions taken by groups such as the women's liberation front. Intriguingly, the arena three cover pushes back against such essentialism in its reference to the Rorschach test. It reminds viewers that what we think we see is illusory coming as much from our own unconscious as from external information, destabilizing her family individual. The image is a witty metaphor for lesbian identity at mid century, cargo in her identification of an iconography specific to women's art was engaged in cannon building. In order to explain her practice, she cited a genealogy of specific artists, O'Keefe bourgeois Shapiro for her own work, reciprocally affirming theirs as influential, and therefore worthy of consideration by historians. Women artists who didn't fit into her history of influence fall aside unable to find their way into the narrative. They remain outside the cannon. In intentionally building a community and its archive, lesbian magazine solicited and published a wide range of visual art made by lesbians for lesbians, rather than focusing on building a specific cannon. Diversity within the category lesbian was routinely recognized, turning against the illustrations in Sappho. We find trans and asexual identities included the lesbian umbrella. These representations were historicized with discussions of lesbian history, Dr. James Miranda Berry, whom author Vern Niven described as a lesbian as well as a transvestite. At the same time, there were evident limitations, particularly when it came to race. Early feminist and lesbian organizations struggled to reach beyond white and often middle class women. In 1972, editors of the Washington DC based lesbian newspaper, The Furies admitted that they were confused by guilt feelings about black, poor and third world women who were not represented in their group. Throughout this period, lesbian activism remained profound and segregated, even as its strategies and concerns mirrored those of other social justice groups. This was unintentionally made by a 1966 article by a black woman, Pet Brineberg, in arena three. She wrote, as a Negro in London, I quickly learned to recognize its homosexuals by their sympathetic understanding where other minority groups are concerned. Neither Brineberg nor editor as may Langley in her commentary on the article acknowledged the two categories black and lesbian might overlap. The question about intersectionality, of course, is about Navajo queerness. Where is the archive of Navajo lesbian experience. Throughout the second half of the 20th century that archive was still dominated by outside voices anthropologists who made claims about native experience from the position of your American gender norms. In our own century, this is changing artists, journalists, performers and writers have been contributing to an archive that is growing exponentially every year. In the queer Navajo visual archive, as in the broader lesbian archive, we see an emerging tension between the impulse to create a visual cannon through the adoption of mainstream pride symbols like the rainbow flag, for example, or portraits of icons of the Navajo drag scene, and the desire to document the full range of queer experience among Navajo people. A few years now I've had the privilege of working with Jolene and Yazi, an artist, designer, and photojournalist whose interdisciplinary work experiences the Daba project. Yazi created an archive of Navajo lesbian experience. She traveled across the country building relationships with the women she photographed. And the resulting images are intimate, funny, ordinary and profound. In other words, they refuse an anthropological photography of the Navajo lesbian. Like many of her contemporaries, Yazi uses the structure of the archive, the proliferation of images and information to push back against stereotypical expectations of outsider audiences. At the same time, the project has personal meaning, as Yazi sought a community of her own, echoing the motivations of the women who started the latter arena three and all the other magazines we've dipped into tonight. In a Navajo context, Yazi's focus on women identified subjects in her photography and writing is still unusual. But echoing that independent magazine movement of 70 years ago, the archive is growing through scenes like the Nizoni beat. And on the cover of their first issue was traditional feminine Navajo clothing, and her hair is traditionally wrapped. She's additionally called out as Navajo by the word Nizoni, which means beautiful. Inside the zine, the portraits of the editors offer a less typologically rigid representation of feminist Navajo identity. Amber McCrary appears in a tank, Capri shorts and chucks, while Melanie Faes leopard print scoop neck is lit by the sparklers she holds in each hand. In the introduction to the zine, the two women are quote here to stand in opposition to the media and its stereotyped portrayal of native peoples. Like the woman on the cover, we're here to say that every native woman is allowed to dance to her own beautiful beat. In contrast to the rigidly culturally rigidly culturally coded self presentation of the cover figure McCrary and Faes self styling suggests the expansive set of visual identities encompassed by live Navajo experience. The visual archives want to extend themselves to become both deeper and broader. Their strength is in their rhizomatic proliferation. The visual archive produced by mid century lesbian magazines was limited by the assumptions and networks of its creators limits that in turn constrained the political possibilities of the collective. Over the course of Gilpin's career, a lesbian visual archive appeared in the public sphere. When she donated her papers, including her photographs, the aim and Carter, she was adding them to the collective lesbian archive. I think this is particularly significant because almost none of her images are explicitly lesbian subjects. What then is she asking us to see in them. In my book, I suggest the self conscious intentional claiming of their archive by lesbian women at mid century paralleled Native American and specifically Navajo activism in the same historical moment. Like lesbians native activists began to use independent publications to document their lives, explore their history, and build an alternative archive to the externally imposed definitions of indigenous identity that came from anthropologists and sociologists. Both lesbians and Native Americans have used archive building as a way to unify themselves in the face of external oppression and to assert their own control over their histories. Thank you. Thank you for that really incredibly rich and illuminating and fantastically illustrated paper just wonderful to see all those sources. I've got lots of things I wanted to ask you but I wondered if you could just say something about Gilpin's archive and whether there's any evidence of her decision to donate that archive or is it sort of just there and we don't understand the context of her giving that. No, she absolutely. She spent a lot of time thinking about where to donate to the bulk of her archive is at the Amon Carter but she also obviously had connections in Santa Fe and Colorado Springs and so she wanted to give relevant parts of the archive to different collections around the Southwest. And she really she made that decision for the most part based on geographic relevance so Colorado related material went to Colorado, etc. But her personal letters and sort of that aspect of her archive she very intentionally kept together to give to the Amon Carter. She chose the Amon Carter because a good friend of hers Mitch Wilder was the director there. And she had known him since she was a very young woman. And so it was their personal connection that made her choose that. In terms of sort of her goals I do think that primarily she was concerned. And I think this is a common concern for for people who don't have children or family was sort of how to how to preserve her own legacy. She had this massive body of work and and what was going to happen to it when she died. Betsy had died already in 1972. So by 1975 76 she started thinking about disposing of her own estate. And, yeah, for me, the most significant kind of unspoken intent was that lack of censorship, right that she could have destroyed a lot of material or chosen not to give it and instead, basically everything that she had went to the archive. Yeah, that's really interesting and I wondered, was there it was as when did she die in 1979. So in the course of her life did she live more visibly as a lesbian at any point, or did she become. Yeah, it's such an interesting question because it all depends on what you mean by openly. As far as I know she never used the word lesbian in writing. She had a nephew who, or Betsy had a nephew who is gay himself and so they apparently had personal conversations about sexuality, where she was quite open. And, from, from the beginning, she writes when she's writing whether it's to friends or strangers, she refers to Betsy, as though it's a given that they're a partnership. She uses a variety of words to describe her one of the ways that sand wise explains how she chose her language was to say well, Laura used companion quite a lot. But she also she used this really endearing phrase side partner which I think is very quirky and kind of delightful. She didn't have I mean there are no good words throughout these lesbian magazines see we see conversations about how there are no good words to describe the people in kind of your queer family. And so she was struggling with that I think. And, but she brought Betsy with her when she did talks and gave her credit in the book as her life partner and collaborator. And so to that extent, she was very open and I believe that part of the reason she stayed in the West because people wanted her to move to New York to have sort of a photographic career. I think one of the reasons she stayed West was because she could live more openly in that context. Was she connected in the sort of later part of her life with that kind of cultural more visible political sort of burgeoning of queer culture. Yeah, also a great question. She was interviewed in 1974 by Gloria Steinem who really wanted to put her in kind of a feminist art history. And she simultaneously welcomed that opportunity to kind of put herself in front of I think essentially a new audience. But also said, you know, like feminism, she was 70 by the time feminism even started to think about existing. And so there's this moment of like, well, I kind of just had to get on with it. Yeah, I think she she sort of felt like she had already done the work she needed to do and so she didn't. I mean, as far as I know she didn't sort of subscribed these magazines or she certainly didn't sort of participate in political activism mused by the attention that suddenly it was permissible to pay to these issues. Thinking about these magazines that such a kind of interesting range across the period of time that you cited. And I was really struck by you saying a number of times how they were on the one hand they're sort of concealing or they're promising to kind of conceal readers and contributors identities and yet at the same time, you're talking about them being really diverse that they're creating a diverse community. Which I just, this is obviously my own ignorance but that is surprising to me that they didn't feel sort of cliquey that they are sort of more can you just talk a bit more about that diversity and how, and is that connected to the politics do you think of also having to be hidden, not being seen. Yeah, I mean to be frank, I think that it was partly an economic motivation right that in order for these publications to exist they relied on donations and subscriptions and so it was in their interest to reach as wide an audience as possible. Also they were coming out of a variety of civil rights era movements that were really interested in kind of solidarity and in the connection between different minority groups so that minorities research group name that Langley came up with and really reflect the idea that the interests of one minority were going to be shared by the interests of other minorities and so there was an advantage politically to solidarity and cross identification. And then I think part of the diversity comes from back that they honestly didn't. There wasn't a clear sort of model for the imagery for the people. And so they solicited actively from their readers, all kinds of contributions and published whatever they, they got to a certain extent and so there is this sort of moment of people figuring out who they are in public, which is fascinating to me. Another interesting part of that question. Yeah, is this shift from drawn illustrations from hand work to photography, and as the decades progress and it becomes less stigmatized to be identified publicly as a lesbian photography of members of the group of readers becomes much more and so you see a shift until by the end they're almost completely photographically illustrated. Whereas in the early days there wasn't a photograph to be found. And that's something that as an art historian I'm sort of interested in the history of media and how they use that. Well actually I have a question about the camera, which I'd love to ask you I just want to remind people to send in questions I can see we've got questions coming in but don't forget if you want to ask a question do do right. This question about the camera and the sort of significance of the camera as a piece of technology in allowing Gilpin to sort of see and also be seen as compared to sort of other forms you know is there a significance in the camera that rather than her choosing ethnography or painting or writing about that mediation and a reason that she chose that you think that's related to the subjects and also her own subjectivity. Yeah, it's a very good question in part because she engaged in a variety of artistic media herself she was a musician she took sculpture classes. And, and, but her love was for photography, and she came to photography way before she came to native subjects. And so by the time she by the time Betsy moved to the Navajo Nation, Gilpin had established a studio portraiture practice she had established herself as a fine art landscape photographer. And I think that she liked the medium because for her it combines expressive in the world. And she brings that to her photographs of Navajo people, and then as the as the decades go on I mean there's this long process that I'm going to condense into about a sentence. And, but, but she really realizes that the camera is also this political tool that some of the aspects of photography that have been used in very damaging ways, whether that's sort of creating these anthropological archives of non white bodies that have been used for all kinds of sort of scientific and pseudo scientific reasons, and, or the use of photography as sort of evidence to against the gay community right like as I'm sort of documentary evidence in court cases and all the rest of it. So photography has this juridical mode that is really problematic. And she sees at some point that she can flip that around by using her skill as a fine art photographer and her interest in sort of the relationships that photography creates. She can actually tell a story about not only her own experience but also Navajo sovereignty and their right to kind of political agency. So yeah, I think she's drawing on photography's history to really make a meaningful statement. That's really fascinating and it's something I wanted to ask you about this kind of point about indigenous people in the USA have not notoriously sort of not been seen or have been ignored or raised and yet are also kind of hyper represented in in the sense, you know the subjects of film or photography painting in a kind of very westernized racist tradition and I was interested in the degree to which her focusing on the Navajo nation was sort of expressing a sympathy for marginalized people but also, you know whether her, her gaze sort of breaks the Western gaze does she do something different with her representational form as compared to stereotype and what is that. Yeah, and I think I mean it's a question it's an open question. There are scholars out there who think that guilt is the worst of the worst in replicating this kind of anthropological tourist e gaze. And certainly in her early work I mean she sold photographs as postcards. She was actively taking advantage of that tourist audience for her photographs. I do think, first of all it's important as historians to realize that people change over time. And over the course of the 35 or so years that she was working either actively or passively on the enduring Navajo. She came to a completely different understanding. Again, this is partly about media right because as a photographer she very consciously chose the book form as the form in which her photographs would be disseminated. She also did public slide presentations where she was present and kind of talking through the images. I did show the work in exhibitions as well but I think the idea of the book is the culminating object, where you have not just one photograph or even 20 photographs but 200 and something photographs. Along with a narrative that she has written very few people who have written about Gilpin have approached the book as her object, which I think is a huge mistake because you have to see it all together because that's the way that the idea of here is sort of a story about my interactions with people but also here are biographies of people in the Navajo nation who have made significant contributions, who are doing things. And ultimately, I think that she's using these images, not only to show a deeper vision of people's lives she has multiple sets of photographs in the book that are the same people over decades, which sets up your photographic subject as not just here's a static image of a romanticized native person, but here are real people who grow up like here's the grandchild of a person who was in the book earlier. And there's that sense of a living community and a contemporary community that a lot of other images didn't provide. So yeah, in a bunch of ways I think she's really speaking back to the dominant narrative mode. That is so at the same time lately. I was going to say late in her life, a student at the Institute for American Indian Arts curates an exhibition of her photographs. And she says, it's so interesting that this native student has taken my work and made me see my own photographs completely differently tell a narrative. At the level of practice that is so sort of contrary to the kind of, you know, staged, controlled central subject of some of those kind of typical sort of portraits or kind of depictions of Indigenous people. So interesting. I'm very reluctant to give up my position as being able to ask questions so I've got about 10 more I'd like to ask you but there are lots of wonderful questions coming in, Louise so I'm going to turn to some of those. Here's one about asking how you're thinking about or theorizing the archive is it primarily documents photos and how does the holding of Gilpin's art in other museums for example play into that idea that conception. That's a good question I definitely was being a bit. So, I don't know how. And the role of things like digitization in that and all the rest of it but I do. I think, I think of the archive as the body of. And then I would drill down from there. I'm finding that you're cutting out quite a bit so if I if I disappear or don't ask you a question will you just check into the Q&A because I think you're there might be something up with my connection but I'll keep going. Okay, so sorry. You suggested that you made decisions reviewing the archive about who else was a lesbian what criteria did you use to make those classifications. So in some cases it's very easy. You know I mentioned Carol Preston and Helen says Smith and they had they were both fairly prominent public figures and so their lives are well documented I didn't have to think very hard about that. And also in their letters back and forth to Gilpin there's a clear acknowledgement that they're in similar situations. And this is, I had to be quite loose, I guess is the right word. I mean I don't I don't say so and so as a lesbian when I have no evidence that they're lesbian. I think it's like with Mary and hotop and Sylvia Saunders, you know these are women who live with another woman for decades, who didn't marry whose correspondence are many of them are identifiably lesbian, or bisexual. To a certain extent when I say lesbian network for Gilpin, I mean something a little bit more expensive than I'm literally everyone on this list is definitely a lesbian in the way we understand it today. Here's the question, how can you discern or can you discern a lesbian gaze in Gilpin's work and also is there a connection between her work and was it Jolie Niazi's work. Right. There is no direct connection between Gilpin and Jolie Niazi. The only connection I think is that as I was writing the book, I simultaneously advocate for Gilpin as an advocate for the Navajo and for Navajo sovereignty and recognize that one more white person talking about Navajos is not actually furthering that goal particularly. And so I wanted to think about sort of how especially because there's been this explosion of sort of queer media coming out of the Navajo nation in the past decade or so. In part in response to the DNA marriage act which prohibited gay marriage and still does. And so I was interested in kind of bringing that conversation forward and Jolie N's work happens to pick up some of her design work really picks up on the iconography that's evident in Gilpin's work. And so I think there to answer also the question of a lesbian gaze. I think there is what these magazines would have called a woman identified gaze that is evident in both Yazi's work and Gilpin's. And in a Navajo context that focuses on some particular feminine signifiers weaving and shepherding things like this that come up repeatedly and so I was interested in sort of marking out. Kind of the women centered communities that they were both working within. That's related to a question which is here also about the kind of evidence for attitudes towards lesbianism queer identity in the Navajo nation and indigenous cultures and how that's changed across generations. Yeah. And I think this is the other aspect of talking about the gaze right as you have to historicize it. And so one of the. Gilpin was far from the only lesbian Gilpin and foster were far from the only two lesbians who went to the Navajo nation. It was a magnet for lesbian women particularly who worked with in anthropology or similar fields. And part of the reason for that I think is because many Navajo people particularly in the early part of the 20th century they saw outsiders as kind of irrelevant. And again I'm sort of oversimplifying. But basically if you weren't Navajo they didn't care what you did in your personal life. And so the idea of discrimination was not really there the experience of discrimination wasn't there it was just well you guys are you know, non Navajo so get on with it. The second aspect of that is the Navajo culture does historically recognize multiple genders. And so like for instance Betsy when she was working as a nurse. So people in the community that she worked with started to refer to her as a as a medicine man as a singer. But a kind of white version but using masculine language to describe her activities. And so there's some suggestion that they were recognizing her own kind of non binary gender in that in that conversation. It's hard to know you know we only have anecdotes and Betsy, neither Foster nor Gilpin spoke Navajo. And so they were working with translators and jokes were being explained to them kind of in translation. So it's all a little bit speculative. I think it was passed in 2005. I'm a little embarrassed and should have looked that up. But recent very recently recent. And, but it's legislation that a lot of people attribute to the influence of the church, and their, you know, Foster was funded to go out to the Navajo Nation by a religious organization. There's a huge amount of missionary work on the Navajo Nation, both sort of Christian and Mormon. And so the influences of those churches was really damaging to all aspects of traditional culture, but particularly spiritual beliefs and kind of social practice. So, in more recent years, I think again is kind of the resurgence of indigenous activism globally, but in Native North America specifically, there's a real movement to reclaim cultural sovereignty. And part of that has been this recognition that you know there are different people count differently but sort of five or six gender categories in Navajo culture. And, and all kinds of queerness in cultures across the continent right but I think both being being tribally specific being culturally specific is important. And also recognizing that none of these things are static right it's impossible to say the things that people are bringing back now, like the word debaught in Jolene's projects and is a word for a kind of lesbian gender identity in Navajo culture. And there's some evidence of that word being in use earlier, but even the scholars who are researching that material say, you know there's been such a cultural break that we can't completely know what people would have thought 100 years ago. If only. And here's a sort of question about the difference between British and European lesbian visual culture and US lesbian visual culture and do these differences or similarities change over time. That's a huge question. Thank you whoever asked that. And I would love to know. I think. Certainly that set the central core imagery that that Judy Chicago kind of articulated. That didn't start with Judy Chicago but it was very popular across the board with American artists and sticks around for decades. And appears in a variety of ways this idea of a kind of I'm basically vulva abstraction, I guess, is really really powerful in the UK there's a much stronger sort of cultural social criticism element a kind of historical materialism Marxist influence and that really draws people away from the kind of biological essentialism that attracts a lot of American artists and writers. And so I would say that's the biggest distinction that is evident I think in feminism as well more broadly. And so it's actually quite surprising to me that this trans exclusionary rhetoric has gained so much traction in the UK, because it really flies in the face of a lot of the feminist tradition in this country. And so that's one distinction I cannot summarize I think. Yeah, just out of interest in her archive were there. Maybe you said this but were there any of these magazines or any of this kind of queer lesbian sort of culture printed culture. I know of. On the other hand, a lot of these magazines were things that people shared. And so it's not inconceivable that she saw them, but no, as far as I know she was never a subscriber to any of them. There's this point about the kind of non explicit lesbian in your research. So the kind of either the possible illustrated woman on the cover of a lesbian magazine, or an archive filled with images and materials that allow for the inference but also scream other, you know, when you're doing, I think the question there is about, you know, the importance of all the, the significance of the non explicit lesbian, you know, of that kind of being present but not being seen or not being available for other people to see, and the magazines and the kind of representation playing with that. Can you just reflect on that at all. Yeah, I mean I think for me that that is another way in which it's useful to look at lesbian culture through the lens of native culture and vice versa. And because there's the idea that to be lesbian you have to be continually talking about some sort of lesbian activity, like, you know, the magazines are themselves they start to say like, what, like, do you have to be having a lesbian sex to be a lesbian like what does that mean, still a conversation that people have today right is like how do you identify how do you know if you like, do you have to have done things. And I think similarly in kind of native culture. There's this sort of anxiety about authenticity right like I'm a friend of mine America Meredith who's the editor of First American Art magazine. She has this sort of straightforward explanation like Native American art is art by someone who's native. It doesn't have to have certain iconography it doesn't have to meet certain criteria right it just it is. And so I think similarly, in the way that that invites us to look at the whole range of someone's production and think about how culture might influence beyond the obvious. And when we look at something like Gilpin's archive. We asked kind of, I mean it goes back to that question of the gaze like what, why did it matter. That she was lesbian why do I care. And I think part of that is about the imagery part of it is also because she made a living off of the gigs basically that she got from her network. And so the fact that that network was lesbian like there's this really powerful sort of frankly economic network that she's tapping into. And that is having this broader impact then on cultural production. But because I mean she was talking about the Navajo for 30 years so it wasn't like she was going around talking about lesbians. But lesbians were making the talking about the Navajo possible so isn't that a really interesting connection between those two politics that I think is worth seeing. And that would be in in what form in like groups of women facilitate it just explain how that how that kind of actually worked in practical terms. Yeah, I mean it really depended so Mary and hotop whose photo I showed she was a doctor. I'm some of Gilpin's work she collaborated with obviously partly through foster various medical practices on the Navajo nation. So sometimes she would she would be invited to go speak to like the hotop invited her to go to speak to a medical group. And but then others Carol Preston was the head of a school so she went and gave a talk at the school. And so again it wasn't necessarily like it wasn't sort of consciousness raising groups the way that we might think of them from the feminist movement. It was just sort of like here all these people scattered around the country the world. And they're giving Gilpin access to these audiences in really interesting ways. That is the way in which the kind of economic collides with the sort of projects and her own identity is really fascinating. I am really upset because it's eight o'clock and so I think we probably need to draw this to a close. I just wanted to thank you for this fabulous talk for this wonderful research you're doing and also just for, you know, for being so resilient. Louise in the face of lockdown I know so many people have been but I know that you've been plowing on with research and we're just thrilled that you can now come into the library and then we can meet you there and find out about all your work and see what you do for the next few months at the British Library. So thank you so much for sharing with us about this fantastic sort of visual culture and about Gilpin and her work. And thank you everybody who's watched. Good night.