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.
Mapping Femme Stories responds to the marginalization of queer femme voices in queer history and culture by audio-visually situating femme stories within Toronto, a major city that is known as a cultural and intellectual hub. The histories on display are, vitally, plural: through audio clips, femme tell their experiences of place in their own words. Multiple narratives of a single city are threaded together and work to contest stereotypical images of femmes and complicate narratives of femme experience in the city. Mapping Femme Stories makes an important intervention in the misunderstood history and cultural marginalization of queer femmes as well as an important contribution to the historicization of 2SLGBTQIA+ communities in Canada.
Digital map coming soon!
Credits
Principal Investigator: Andi Schwartz
Co-Investigator: Chloë Brushwood Rose
Collaborator: Sarah York-Bertram
This project is supported by:
The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Institute for Research on Digital Literacies at York University
