Writing in Their Time: A Queer and Feminist Analysis of Vancouver’s 1979 Writing in Our Time Series

The 1979 Writing in Our Time series became Vancouver’s most attended reading series, bringing light to the viability and international status of the city’s literary scene. While it has largely been remembered as a celebration of Vancouver’s literary culture, more marginalized voices of Vancouver’s literary communities have highlighted the series’ implications for gay male and female writers in the city. This article considers whose time was actually represented by the Writing in Our Time series. I suggest that while it gave gay men the opportunity to be onstage and speak about their concerns, including the homophobic attacks against bill bissett in the House of Commons that prompted the series, Writing in Our Time provided women limited opportunities to publicly share their work while relying upon their invisible labour to succeed. Through the production of a new socio-cultural history of the series, including an analysis of printed publications, oral histories, and audiovisual documentation of the events, this article demonstrates that Writing in Our Time was catalyzed by attacks on a gay writer, relied on women’s invisible labour, showcased the androcentric relations of Vancouver’s literary scene, and sparked resistance from feminists to women’s peripheral position in the series. I argue that, due to their proximity to or distance from heterosexual white males in power within the scene, the series simultaneously supported gay writers in Vancouver’s literary scene and further marginalized women by reinforcing sexist social hierarchies. The effects of these androcentric relations led to greater dialogue about issues affecting gay men within the series and by women about sexism within and outside of the series at that time.

The Labour of Austerity

This essay explores the social-psychic toll of prolonged austerity on academic librarians and the range of strategies that have (or could) serve as tools of resistance. Using a combination of theoretical analysis and autoethnography, I examine the emotional impact of bottomless and invisible labour imposed by austerity and the ways institutions use emotional coercion to promote self-surveillance, meta-work, and hyper-productivity. Following this analysis, I discuss the ways that oppressive institutional cultures silence dissent and absorb common resistance tactics advocated by educators. Finally, I introduce several examples of performance-based resistance projects and explore how creative, personal, and absurd forms of protest might be used to critique and transform the culture of work and our affective experience as knowledge workers in the neoliberal academy.

Histories of Technology Culture Manifestos

Taking impetus from a collaborative conversation about writing a feminist repair manifesto, this article is focused on examining radical feminist manifestos, new technology manifestos, and their intersecting themes and influence upon cyberfeminist manifestos. Its theoretical underpinnings include histories of repair and maintenance and the manifesto as technological form. As a practice, repair and theorisations of repair regarding technology take into account invisible labour and create a relationship of care not only within communities, but in relation to everyday technologies. Since this work to write a feminist fixers’ manifesto was inspired by the iFixit Repair Manifesto, the NYC Fixers Collective manifesto, as well as manifestos from radical feminist technology movements, it seemed appropriate to consider and critically engage the function of manifestos in these various maker and digital technology communities, as well as the history of radical feminist manifestos in response to cultural oppression. By looking more deeply at specific historical instances and their function, I aim to uncover the importance of such artefacts to give voice to alternative narratives and practices, to subvert systemic oppressions while at other times reproducing them in their form. I argue that there is power in iterating and proliferating manifestos with a critical stance and work to establish the knowledge-producing and world-making potentials of manifesto writing.

WHAT CAN “WHY I LEFT BUZZFEED” VLOGS TEACH US ABOUT INVISIBLE LABOUR?

In this paper I explore the growing trend of posting videos to YouTube to explain the reasons for why an individual has quit their job, detailing a collection of 10 vlogs posted by 11 former BuzzFeed employees to explain their reasons for leaving the company. I argue that the vlogs made by ex-employees are a deliberate attempt to expose the invisible labour that is prevalent in the post-Internet media industry. By posting “Why I Left” vlogs, former employees reclaim their authorship of creative productions previously uploaded without individual attributions and instead credited to the faceless corporate monolith of “BuzzFeed”. Furthermore, these vlogs act as a means to subvert notoriety earned by being a (now former) public face of BuzzFeed to attract hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of viewers to announce their personal pivot and rebranding as content producers now working independently from the company that had launched them into Internet fame. While perhaps not intentional, these vlogs ultimately act as a warning about the uneven playing field between employer and employee. Each year BuzzFeed posts record profits, and yet these vlogs illuminate how employees are actively prevented from being able to grow a personal brand beyond BuzzFeed, stifling future career prospects and additional sources of income. Ultimately this leaves BuzzFeed employees with the option to quit or to stagnate in place, or what Gaby Dunn (2015) stated are ultimately the two options for a BuzzFeed viral video star: “Get Rich, or Die Vlogging.’”