Stacks and Intersections: Feminist Thinking in Digital Humanities, a view from these islands

Intersectional feminist work around digital archiving can productively develop stack models to address questions concerning the location, site, and materiality of possible and effective feminist intervention. Developing this proposition, we draw on two DH research projects undertaken between the UK and Ireland (2020 and on-going) focussing on work around community archives at a moment of their radical transformation. Asking what feminist DH can be in relation to these archives, we engage with the hollowing out of intersectional feminism – noting that it at times becomes a reached for category rather than a useful signifier, while also recognizing that theorizing forms of intersection between categories and groups experiencing discrimination is essential to grappling with issues including new forms of institutionalization, context dependency, and privacy. An exploration of various forms of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and of more historically materialist thinking around intersectionality enables us to develop a feminist-informed stack approach able to grapple with the complicated stakes of archiving histories of trauma – including those undertaken by those in different situated positions. We use this to inform a discussion of where feminism should act and develop an argument that stack models – echoing in theory what is found in material infrastructure – can be useful as guides to think about appropriate and expanded sites for feminist intervention in DH.