Working on an archival collection recently, I spent several hours getting to the bottom of a relatively common question: did the institution actually own this collection?

The collection had been signed over to the repository by someone acting as an agent of the transferring corporation, and the question was whether they actually had the power to act in that capacity. Through microfilm reference requests to other repositories, combing through pages of administrative histories and contracts, and calls to other archivists, we decided that yes, we did legally own the property. I printed out a ream of a paper trail to prove it.

This is a stark contrast to one of the first collections I was shown at this same repository: a few items that were loaned years earlier by a local woman I will call “Jane,” but which now hang in limbo in the collection room, as no formal transfer or request for return had been filed before Jane passed away. Jane’s family, I was told, is known to fight amongst themselves, and the items would likely cause acrimony or be split up if they were asked about their wishes for them.

It is entirely possible that Jane would have wanted her items kept in a repository she cared about, or that if the family was contacted, they would be happy for the items to stay. Of course, it is also possible that, as the curator fears, the items would end up scattered, discarded, or leveraged in a familial feud.

What sits uneasily with me is that the power to make those decisions has been taken away from the family, and taken on by a curator who sees their role — though they would, I am sure, be heartbroken to hear it stated this way — as somehow above and disentangled from the deemed messiness of family life. This is a perspective which, first, perpetuates the false idea that the work we do as cultural heritage professionals can be sterile and solitary, and, second, reiterates traditional power dynamics and imbalances through this work.

Dressing in Bunnysuits, 1995, Copyright ©Intel Corporation 1995.

"Mr. and Mrs. Louis Lynch, tract no. 189, Johnston County, North Carolina, Farm Security Administration," Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress.

I suggest that instead of evaluating our collections under questions like “do we own this?”, we could instead ask consent-based questions like “should we have this?” The latter question, unlike the former, is not a question that is answerable by the person with the most power in the room working alone; it is a question that demands an answer only deduced through conversation between people with equal footing and mutual respect.

I have been thinking and writing a lot about different models of consent in the last year. In a time when feminist affirmative consent has been a present topic in public conversation, I have not only been reconsidering personal relationships in light of heightened awareness around consent, but also evaluating how consent can conversationally and politically cross the bounded topic of sex.

"Man and woman engaged in sex and fighting," Yanker Poster Collection, Library of Congress.

Authors of archival collection development policies could benefit from some reflection on how consent is being discussed in this moment. A framework that begins and ends with sexual acts ignores the way sex acts as, and is, a proxy for broader forces in society: a far-reaching web of power structures which upholds and reinforces inequality. Affirmative consent should be seen as a more widely applicable model in which women and others who are often silenced, such as people with disabilities and non-binary people, or those who are on the outside of powerful institutions, are empowered, autonomous actors with full rights over their bodies, their material traces, and the spaces they occupy.

There is a detachment in traditional archival practice between the materials, the archivist, and the user, despite the strongly affective nature of archives. The temporal and spatial fixity of the materials gives a de facto permission to remove them physically and emotionally from the webs of human relationships in which they were forged, used, stewarded, and later accessed.

What is uncomfortable about the archival situation I outlined before, of the blurry areas of desire, initiative, and power that it lives in, is that the line between willful ignorance and forceful violation are so starkly unclear. Legally, the family would likely be able to get the artifacts into their possession quite easily, though with the full resources of this repository, that is nowhere near guaranteed. But will they ever even know those items are in the collection?

"Family," Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection, Library of Congress.

A core tenet of feminist affirmative consent is the idea that consent, once given, is not an eternal blessing. At each step, or each future interaction, consent has to be re-stated and re-received. So, too, in archives, we should not take for granted that the principles or practices that once guided our decision-making are forever relevant and applicable. While the first collection I mentioned, the one whose ownership I researched to the smallest detail, was accessioned during the curator’s tenure and thus received a thorough treatment, the second, Jane’s, predated the curator’s term. As an inherited collection, the decisions about the collection’s whereabouts were not made by the current curator. Responsibility can be abdicated to history.

Consent, for all its definitions, complexities, and nuances, boils down in all cases to communication. The fear of having conversations around consent are foreclosing opportunities to build better relationships with the living people that are entwined with our work. A fundamental, real fear the curator faces is that the nature of their relationship with the materials will change once consent to own them outright is solicited, no matter the outcome, while the inherited relationship was not even one of their own making. However, this changed relationships would not be a worse one. Giving the items back to Jane’s family would be a material good for them, or on the other hand, having the items legally transferred to the repository would allow the curator to display and discuss the items more freely, which would be a material good, as well. Either way, the relationship with Jane’s family and the repository would only improve.

"Helena Hill Weed, Norwalk, Conn. Serving 3 day sentence in D.C. prison for carrying banner, 'Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.,'" Records of the National Woman's Party, Library of Congress.

"Sidewalk conversation, Black Belt, Chicago, Illinois, Farm Security Administration," Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress.

Time is an understandably limited resource. Making space for a conversation with a family, especially one in grief, takes a huge amount of time, and there are likely  more institutional resources allocated toward researching corporate records ownership than family or personal archives. A curator’s sense of powerlessness due to such lack of institutional support for meaningful donor relations, it seems, can overshadow deep self-reflection about the powerfulness of the curator’s position.  

What has been taken for granted in this situation, and other archival situations that live in these margins, is that one person’s priorities, expectations, needs, and experiences have been prioritized so highly over the other people related to these items. Rephrased, the way one person — the curator — cares for these items has been assumed to be the best way to care for them, and that decision has been supported by the person — the curator — with the power to judge it. That the curator can play all these roles simultaneously points to the reason why this shift to a model of consent is so pivotal: it accounts for the multiple people that care, and the multiple ways that people can care.

Along with other models of consent, such as Indigenous protocols, archivists can use feminist affirmative consent to inform new ways of thinking and doing in our collections that strengthen our field and our place in the broader historical record. In building consent-based policies, traditional dominant practices can be combined with expanded modern sensibilities in ways that make these policies highly relevant without being simply trendy or near-sighted.

Julie Botnick is a second year MLIS student at UCLA.