This article reflects on the author’s research-creation project entitled After Hours Chez Madame Arthur as a speculative practice of archival media bricolage. After Hours was a multimedia installation returning to the 1970s lesbian bar Chez Madame Arthur mounted at the Centre Never Apart in summer 2019. Made possible by the support of co-researchers, community groups, technicians, research assistants and artists who share my fascination with local queer women’s history, After Hours restaged this storied bar deploying diverse archival media traces and period objects. This essay discusses some of the possibilities of research-creation and non-representational theory for lesbian, feminist, and queer historical projects. I explore the affordances of archival media traces for forging affective and erotic relationships between past and present, with a particular emphasis on presence, metonymy, storytelling, and space.
Lesbian Bars, Archival Media Bricolage and Research-Creation: Revisiting After Hours Chez Madame Arthur
Julianne Pidduck is associate professor in the Communication Department at the Université de Montreal. Her work explores questions of gender and sexuality in visual culture and public discourse, including cinematic gender and genre, public discourses and visual media related to gender violence, and LGBTQI2+ media visibility and enunciation. She has recently co-edited with Joëlle Rouleau a special issue of the journal Cinémas entitled “Le regard queer et l’image en movement” (Queer looks and the moving image). Pidduck has published widely in scholarly journals such as camera obscura, Media, culture & society, Jump Cut, GLQ, Studies in French Cinema, Screen, and the Canadian Journal of Film Studies. In 2019, she curated a multimedia installation entitled After Hours Chez Madame Arthur as part of her current study of LGBTQ+ post-war media entitled Afterimages and urban spaces. She is also a core member of the Queer Media Database Canada/Quebec Project.
Julianne Pidduck; Lesbian Bars, Archival Media Bricolage and Research-Creation: Revisiting After Hours Chez Madame Arthur. Feminist Media Histories 1 April 2022; 8 (2): 132–155. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2022.8.2.132
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