who we are

The Femme Story Archives is a research initiative that supports the documentation and preservation of queer and trans femme stories and culture. Founded as a way to describe the oral history archive narrated through the On Our Own Terms project, the Femme Story Archives has become a hub representing and supporting multiple projects that foreground queer and trans femme lives. We exist to amplify femme narrators, artists, and cultural producers, past and present. 

Our projects

  • On Our Own Terms:

    Using a combination of documentary and archival research and oral history interviews, On Our Own Terms explores the proliferation of queer and trans femme politics and culture in 1990s Toronto, and the nature of femme experience, identity and culture at that time.

    PROJECT DETAILS

  • Still Brazen

    Still Brazen is a podcast celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Brazen Femme: Queering Femininity (2002).  Produced by Andi Schwartz and featuring Trish Salah, Kathryn Payne, Anurima Banerji, Zoe Whittall, Chloë Brushwood Rose, Anna Camilleri, and more.

    PROJECT DETAILS

  • Mapping Femme Stories

    Mapping Femme Stories puts Toronto femme history on the map. Drawing on archival material and oral history interviews collected in On Our Own Terms , the project integrates femme history with Toronto’s landscape. With the use of digital tools, this project demonstrates how one point on a map can hold multiple, sometimes conflicting, histories.

    PROJECT DETAILS
We took the Femme Story Archives project to the @punkscholarsnetwork.us conference a few weeks ago, which took place at the Punk Rock Museum in Las Vegas. What a time! We presented a paper called "Femmecore: Archiving the Punk Sensibilities of
It’s the first Monday of the new year, but we’re still easing into it with some femme literature 📚 Not that this is an easy read! I Am A Red Dress: Incantations on a Grandmother, a Mother, and a Daughter by Anna Camilleri (@anna.camiller
Last week I posted about Clit Lit, the wildly popular and impactful reading series that took place monthly at the Red Spot on Church Street. But did I mention that the series also produced a wonderfully queer anthology? Edited by Clit Lit founder E
Inspired by Vancouver's "Dyke Words" and started in Toronto in 1998, Clit Lit was a queer women writers' reading series initiated by @elizabethruthauthor (pictured on slide 2!) and hosted at The Red Spot. Often described as the "only&q
I will get back to posting archival material soon I promise! But on this #FemmeFriday I’m feeling something like luck, gratitude, and awe rolled into one about the spaces, culture, politics, and work that the femmes participating in this histor
We’ve just learned about the passing of femme literary icon Dorothy Allison. Her works are numerous, but include Trash: Short Stories (1988), the novel Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), Skin: Talking About Sex, Class, and Literature (1994) and Tw
For most of us in North America, this week has been scarier than Halloween—and not in a fun way 😔 We've been stewing in this bleak political moment for years at this point, and over the last little while I've found inspiration in talking to fe
The 90s performance troupe Pretty Porky and Pissed Off is the subject of its own archival project called "Archiving PPPO'd" led by Femme Story Archives participant Allyson Mitchell and femme scholar Allison Taylor. The first slide shows an
Thank goodness for queer archives and queer culture historians! In most of what I've read online, the Strange Sisters cabaret is cited as starting in 1990, but reading Moynan King's research and looking closely the flyers in @thearquives collection t
“I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.” — Anne Shirley 🍂 This month is going to get freakier and spookier 👻, but first we’re starting off with the wholesome Anne Shirley—with a twist. 👒 The b
in my very first academic paper, I cited a Tumblr post by a student I knew complaining that they were trying to write an essay for class about femme 👠⛓️ but all the academic sources they could find just focused on femme as being one half of butch-fe
as much as we love our brain-tickling academic theory, here's another take on femme science 🧪: earlier this month I was at the Bikini Kill show in Toronto (maybe you were there too?) as Tobi Vail and Kathleen Hannah traded off on the mic and talked
tag yourself, I’m a swamp of sincerity & sentimentality 💁‍♀️ this month we’re heading back to school and back to femme science 🧪 I first read the phrase “femme science” in the delightfully quotable article “T
And, of course, even the briefest look at femme life writing would be remiss not to feature the work of Joan Nestle. Nestle, who describes herself as “a pornographer, a queer, a whore” (A Restricted Country), is co-founder of the Lesbian
How can we describe the powerhouse that is femme author Dorothy Allison? Any story written by Allison will blow you away for its raw emotion, complex reasoning, and frank truth. Allison writes beautifully about her family and being a white, working-c