Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies

In this paper, we examine online friendships at a network level. We focus on three structural signatures: network size, balance (triangles), and age homophily in the friendship ego-networks of 30 users of the virtual world Second Life. In relation to previous findings from studies of offline friendship networks, our results reveal that online networks are similar in age-homophily, but significantly different in size and balance.

Desi hip-hop occupies a changeable and very unique space in American hip- hop. It is not a cohesive movement, nor a genre of definable characteristics. Rather, it is a compilation of numerous self-constructed and self-conscious political identities. Investment in hip-hop is an important act of race consciousness-identification, but also carries the weight and knowledge of appropriating an expressive form rooted in Black Nationalism. Within this essay I hope not just to identify the plurality and complexity of Desi hip-hop identities and approaches; but also the multiple ways in which political identities emerge and the manner in which artists negotiate cultural appropriation. Through this, perhaps we can recognise that social change is manifold and not just explicit in the rhymes and rhythms of Desi artists, but sometimes more implicit via the presence of Desi artists intercepting hip- hop and carving their identities into mainstream channels of communication as a means of countering limitations instilled by a dominant culture.

While efficient and satisfactory access may be a common goal for most archives, it is rarely achieved in full. In this article, the author considers specific access barriers for both transgender patrons and transgender materials within archives. In particular, the author argues that environment and language shape the ways in which patrons encounter archives and the materials contained therein. Rather than seeking satisfactory access, the author suggests that deferred or denied satisfac- tion might also produce productive encounters for archival researchers.

A ddressing a gathering of archival professionals in 1970, Howard Zinn asserted that "[archives are] biased towards the important and powerful people of the society, tending to ignore the impotent and obscure: we learn most about the rich, not the poor; the successful, not the failures; the old, not the young; the politically active, not the politically alienated; men, not women; white, not black; free people rather than prisoners; civilians rather than soldiers; officers rather than enlisted men" (Zinn 1977: 21). While these observations may have been received as an indictment when he delivered this speech, our growing awareness of archival biases has catalyzed a great deal of archival activism. Indeed, those of us who champion archives of oppressed communities can rightfully claim that things have certainly improved in the decades since Zinn's address. Yet his overarching point remains no less profound: leveraging the power of archives is not "the politicization of a neutral craft, but the humanizing of an inevitably political craft" (20).

Furthering the field’s attention to the rhetoric of archives, this article offers an extended consideration of archival description as an information infrastructure that provides powerful, although often invisible, orientations to the past. This article examines three stages of the archival process—selection, organization, and labeling—by focusing on a handful of historical objects, held in two separate collections, that depict transgressive gender presentations. Taken together, these examples demonstrate that archival description functions not only for bureaucratic and access purposes, but for epistemological ones as well.

Marie Høeg, who lived from 1866-1949, was a Norwegian photographer and activist for women's rights. In this photo essay, the authors feature six photographs depicting Marie Høeg in gender transgressive scenes. These photographs are a few of more than 30 that were recovered in the 1980s from a property where Høeg once lived with her female partner, Bolette Berg. Standing out from the traditional landscapes and portraits that were common for the professional studio of Berg & Høeg, these photographs provide a glimpse into Høeg's playful self-expression at the onset of the 20th century. This photo essay explores not only the documentary value of these images, but also the important considerations of visibility, privacy, and the ethics of circulation that they elicit.

Buttons are strange historical objects. After they are retired from their honored place on a backpack or jean jacket (or perhaps rescued out of the junk drawer), scores of buttons have found their way to queer archives where they are proudly claimed as valued queer heritage artifacts.