Cirrus@Austlit

'Archives retain a sustained gravitational pull on feminist researchers. We experience them as sites of promise and desire, even as we recognise they are also sites of power and privilege that have long been implicated in acts of violence and erasure. We celebrate the growth in online social and cultural data and the new questions, methods and debates that this proliferation supports, at the same time as we ask what feminist archival research looks like in an era when the metaphor of the archive is invoked to cover almost any kind of memory, collection or accumulation. Importantly, we also acknowledge that our work as feminists is conditioned by the tools – epistemological and technical – available to us at any given point in time. For this reason, contributors here are keen to mark out what may be novel and what is enduring in the ways in which feminist thought and feminist practice frame archives. What follows are some initial provocations along these lines.' (Editorial introduction)