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“I’m also prepared to not find me. It's great when I do, but it doesn't hurt if I don't”: crip time and anticipatory erasure for disabled archival users

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Abstract

Using data collected through semi-structured interviews with disabled archival users, this article foregrounds disabled people's relationships with time, specifically to pasts and representations thereof in archival material. It illustrates the ways in which disabled people use their knowledge of how disability is understood—in archives and in society—to anticipate their erasure in archival material. First, focusing on the past, this data illustrates the prevalence of disability stereotypes, tropes, and limited perspectives within the records that document disabled people. Second, in witnessing such representations (or lack thereof), disabled researchers described how they are affectively impacted in the present moment: witnessing the violence of the past is emotionally difficult for many disabled people researching their histories. Third, using past experiences of archival erasure, interviewees described coming to expect and anticipate future absences—anticipation as an affective mode helped them prepare to encounter forms of erasure, to protect themselves against possible harms, and to hope for something different, all of which reflects their experiences of how disability is understood in society. This data reflect the way anticipation is a central facet of crip time—the multiple ways that disabled people experience time, pace, and temporal moments—to show how disabled people feel through multiple temporal landscapes and approach historical and archival representation.

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Notes

  1. To add, fat bodies are regulated by heteronormative constructions of time, as they “fail to ‘keep up’ with normative tempos,” around marriage, reproduction, and death, which can open up unique temporalities and “challenge dominant life timelines” (McFarland et al. 2018).

  2. This is an incredibly short description of Berlant’s complex concept, where optimism does not always feel optimistic and she addresses the past’s relation to the future and the distribution of sensibilities that discipline the imaginary about what the “good life” is and how proper people act,” (Berlant 2011, p. 53) as well as how “we need to think about normativity as aspirational and as an evolving and incoherent cluster of hegemonic promises about the present and future experience of social belonging that can be entered into in a number of ways” (Berlant 2011, p. 167).

  3. This term explicitly came from an email exchange with Michelle Caswell.

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Acknowledgements

First and foremost, to the participants of this research: this article is only possible because of your vulnerability, time, and contributions. It is such a pleasure to be in community with you, to elevate your words, and to have the opportunity to build theory around the magic you all bring to archives. Thank you to Michelle Caswell for your ongoing support, guidance, and time you have put into this article and my work in general; to Alison Kafer for encouraging me throughout this research and offering insight into spending more time with the nuances of this data; to Jess Lapp for feedback, reflections, and conversations on this article; and to Ellen Belshaw for facilitating part of the literature review.

Funding

Part of this research was made possible through the Graduate Summer Research Mentorship (GSRM) Award, at University of California Los Angeles in Summer 2018. (Grant number: 66764).

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Correspondence to Gracen Mikus Brilmyer.

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Approved by UCLA’s IRB.

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Reprinted by permission from Springer Nature Customer Service Centre GmbH: Springer Nature Lecture Notes in Computer Science “‘It Could Have Been Us in a Different Moment. It Still Is Us in Many Ways’: Community Identification and the Violence of Archival Representation of Disability” Gracen M. Brilmyer, Springer International Publishing (2020).

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Brilmyer, G.M. “I’m also prepared to not find me. It's great when I do, but it doesn't hurt if I don't”: crip time and anticipatory erasure for disabled archival users. Arch Sci 22, 167–188 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-021-09372-1

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