Pinterest as a Queer Digital Archive
As scholars interested in LGBT history continue to engage with digital visual studies, it will be important to think more deeply about how to use digital visual technologies to support archival work deftly. As Charles Morris argues, archives play an important role for gay communities in that, operating outside of ideology and politics, archives perform rhetorical work. Archives are essential not only for the role that they play in passing down knowledge from generation to generation but also for the work they do in making LGB individuals and experiences knowable (Morris & Rawson). Unfortunately, the archival holdings that are queer in nature are often stored in archives that deflect or discourage queer inquiry. Because so much of LGBTQ history is stored in what might be considered “straight” institutions such as LGBTQ special collections housed in university libraries, or as illustrated by Morris government institutions such as the FBI, it is often necessary for scholars to “queer the archive” (Morris; Rawson). In fact, Morris argues that due to the silencing of queer experiences and benevolence of academic colleagues, scholars of queer rhetoric must become the “deftest of archivist-rhetors or archival queers” (147). He identifies this work as a form of academic activist labor that serves the discipline on three levels. First, it makes room for rhetorical scholarship of sexuality to be taken seriously as a main influence of rhetorical culture, not just an aspect of context or character. Second, it helps the history of LGBT discourse become more widely acknowledged, taught and written about. And third, the circulation of historical queer discourses pushes and stretches disciplinary boundaries in significant ways. In light of such benefits, Morris calls for more scholars to undertake queer archival work.
Digital technologies, the Internet, and social media, in particular, have created an opportunity to increase the circulation and distribution of queer discourses and histories. Also, as evident in this project, they afford new ways to archive, curate, and critique circulating discourses. Alexander and Rhodes, in fact, see online archives and digital curation as powerful tools for enacting queer movement and networks. They state that digital technologies are invaluable to queer archival scholars because they both make available queer voices and experiences as well as facilitate the collection, curation, and circulation of queer artifacts. Digital curation is a catch-all phrase that refers to the use of digital technologies and multiple modes of online spaces to select, organize, and present material artifacts. While traditional institutions are still responsible for much historical curation, in our current digital reality, curation need not be not limited to museum and art professionals. The Internet and social media tools have made it possible for everyday citizens and amateur collectors to collect, exhibit, and curate images and texts in public spaces available to mass audiences. Queer archivists can take advantage of such tools to not only collect and curate these images but also to make images more accessible to the queer community. As Rawson has argued, physical archives can pose a challenge to queer bodies because they may not feel welcomed into material spaces. Digital technologies and platforms can provide resources that allow queer bodies to more easily and comfortably access their histories and communities.1
Pinterest, a digital bookmarking tool that allows users to collect and share photos and websites on themed “boards,” proves to be an especially useful tool for not only generating digital archives but, in Morris’ terms, queering them. Pinterest, as advertised, is a visual bookmarking tool that can help “you discover and save creative ideas” (About Pinterest). For our purposes here, it also “serves as an infrastructure for repository building that supports a wide range of activities including: discovery, collecting, collaborating and publishing” (Zarro et al. 650). The site is particularly relevant to digital visual studies in that its infrastructure privileges the visual not only concerning content but also search techniques. "Pins" are uploaded image files collected from various websites and uploaded onto an individual's Pinterest board. When a user creates a board, typically defined by a theme, and adds pins, the user has the option of writing brief captions and adding URL links. Such links create the option for a visitor to leave that Pinterest board and visit the site where the user found the image to learn more about the context in which that image originated or was reproduced and/or redistributed. In addition to pinning offsite information, users can search for pins that have already been added to the Pinterest universe and “repin" them to their own boards to enhance their own collection.
While Pinterest originated as a way for everyday citizens to collect and share images and to build their own collections, Pinterest can be conceptualized as a means of productive archival research for both everyday citizens and scholars. “While pinners may not call themselves archivists,” Almjed argues, “they are indeed always curating personal identities and exhibits for themselves and others” (10). Such curation actions, I would add, can also be viewed as rhetorical attempts to build personal archives that both represent and construct collective identities, especially in that such actions of visual display entail intentional and deliberate selection and omission. Prelli’s work with rhetorics of display helps elucidate how visual displays on Pinterest do such crucial work in regard to highlighting and revealing and promoting or limiting meaning-making possibilities. As Prelli explains, “whatever is revealed through display simultaneously conceals alternative possibilities;” whatever a display makes visible, in other words, is “the culmination of selective processes that constrain the range of possible meanings to those who encounter them” (1–2). Prelli also notes that visual artifacts and the names, labels, and narratives attached to them direct our attention in specific ways and constrain our responses to them. In addition, the places in which visual artifacts are housed, whether physical or digital, are rhetorically disposed in their design so that their arrangement works to dispose certain attitudes, feelings, and behaviors of those who visit or construct such places. Furthermore, visual displays are always demonstrations, rhetorical performances that not only highlight certain (individual and collective) convictions, identifications, and conceptions of self but also, in Richard Weaver’s terms, “embody an order of desire” in that they “are laced with assumptions about what is or is not desirable or to be valued, about what is and is not praiseworthy, about what ought and ought not to be (qtd. in Prelli 16).
When pinners chose to include or omit visual artifacts on their Pinterest boards, they are making claims about who and what they value, and in many cases, such as my Pinterest board, they are indicating a sense of belonging to communities such as the LGBTQ community. As Ott, Aoki, and Dickinson (2011) point out, ways of looking are never neutral and what is left out of a visual display is just as important as what is made present. Such omission is crucial for the pinner or archivist who wants to not only present a particular version of themselves to the world or make visible communities they align with but also construct what kinds of histories they want to tell. Who is included or left out of archival records determines who is or isn’t remembered. Traditionally, materials and artifacts that have been preserved in archives tend to omit or silence those who hold less privilege in society such as LGBTQ populations and people of color (Jules). The erasure of entire communities from the historic record results in what media scholars have coined symbolic annihilation, a phenomenon that most commonly occurs as marginalized groups and individuals are ignored or misrepresented in mainstream media texts. Symbolic annihilation within historical archives can result in marginalized groups feeling alienated and isolated from mainstream culture. When marginalized groups see themselves represented in historical archives (institutional or personal), on the other hand, they experience what Caswell, Cifor, and Ramiree have termed representational belonging—an affective reaction to seeing themselves and communities represented in complex and nuanced ways. Pinterest boards are one way to facilitate representational belonging, community visibility and identity legitimization as well as foster an affective sense of inclusion and belonging.
Such archival and rhetorical work on Pinterest, of course, is not without problems.
Several scholars have noted that Pinterest is heavily skewed towards women and reproduces normative and hegemonic notions of femininity and heteronormativity. The platform encourages users to participate in normative ideologies surrounding gender and sexuality through the collection of images related to normative notions of femininity such as fantasy weddings, dieting, interior decorating, and parenting (Almjed). Pinterest also feeds America’s obsession with consumption (Vetter). This is especially the case in that soon after its development, businesses realized the selling potential of Pinterest and began creating their own boards featuring their own products, essentially placing items that were explicitly for sale into the Pinterest universe. Pinterest also recently introduced “buyable pins,” a feature that allows users to buy products directly from the Pinterest interface. Such commercialization of the Pinterest universe creates a discursive link between heterosexual and normative expressions of consumer behavior that must be acknowledged (Almjed; Vetter).
Despite Pinterest’s normative leanings, however, users are starting to evolve and create boards and repositories for purposes other than serving consumerist agendas. According to Zarra et al., “there is [also] a growing number of people who build repositories for purposes other than showcasing beautiful and visually interesting imagery” (656). Such uses include academic and activist endeavors that often question and critique the normative assumptions that have come to construct the Pinterest universe. For example, Jen Almjeld speaks about her personal and academic uses of Pinterest that both help her explore how Pinterest helps to construct girlhood identities and experiences socially. Almjeld created publicly accessible boards related to things such as recipes and crafts. In creating such “domestic” related boards, Almjeld could be seen as upholding normative gender assumptions and Pinterest behavior, but she remains self-reflective in her engagement with the site stating, “as an adult and academic I am trained to critique, question, and in some cases resist the ways the Pinterest interface and community seem to encourage me to act” (11). Thus, Almjeld also created a secret board (a feature that allows users to create collections that cannot be accessed by other users) where she collects things related to her research that she does not find appropriate for her online Pinterest persona.
Almjeld is not the only scholar who is questioning and engaging with Pinterest in ways that resist and challenge the interface. Matthew Vetter critiques the heteronormative and consumerist nature of the Pinterest interface and as an academic experiment “queers the tech” by pinning images that resist consumerism and heteronormativity. Vetter’s project thus simultaneously acknowledges the ideological and political rhetorical agenda of Pinterest and uses the interface to resist these very ideologies. Through such double play, Vetter ultimately concludes that this misappropriation of the interface is a productive endeavor. Not only does Vetter introduce subversive content into the Pinterest universe, the interface she creates now works for academic projects. Vetter’s academic activism could potentially be seen as a creation of a queer anti-consumerist archive hosted on Pinterest.
Despite its gender normative and consumerist agendas, then, Almjeld and Vetter show us that Pinterest can be a useful academic tool for digital visual studies when engaging with queer and LGBT discourses. Such a clash of Pinterest's normative uses and queer resistance is very much in line with Halberstam’s concept of queer methodology.
A queer methodology, in a way, is a scavenger methodology that uses different methods to collect and produce information on subjects who have been deliberately or accidentally excluded from traditional studies of human behavior. The queer methodology attempts to combine methods that are often cast at odds with each other, and it refuses the academic compulsion toward disciplinary coherence (13).
Indeed, as this very project makes clear, queer digital archiving may ultimately prove to be a messy affair. However, despite such messiness and contradictions, we will see, when it comes to producing “The Evolution of Obama Pride” archive, Pinterest’s interface and boards can indeed become a productive digital research tool for collecting and analyzing queer discourses. As such, I move next to show through a description of my own archival construction process how we might cultivate productive queer archival research for doing digital visual studies.
1. Rawson argues the physical spaces that house archival material can pose at worse safety risks and at best a lack of comfort when queer individuals attempt to access materials house there. Rawson uses the example of bathroom access for transgender individuals as a barrier to archival access.↩