Welcome to the Pink, White, and Blue Collection
Project Description
The Pink, White, and Blue Collection is an archive documenting transgender history within the University of Michigan. We created this site to shine light on transgender history as it has been proactively excluded from popular history, even in queer-specific history. "[...] in the last half-century there have also been many examples of trans* people being shunned by gay and lesbian political organizations, or of having their trans* histories exproproated as lesbian or gay" (Devor, 2014 pg. 201).
Primary users of the archive include LGBTQ+ staff and students at UMich, specifically those of the community who are trans. Secondary users include the general student and staff at UMich, the greater Ann Arbor area, and leaders of LGBTQ+ groups and organizations. These users need a safe place where they can learn this history that has been ignored for decades. This information also needs to be easily accessible and searchable to an audience not familiar with it.
We organized the primary structure of this site to aid users in this specific need. We categorized our item records into four sections: Transgender Activism on Campus, Inclusion within the University Community, Student & Campus Perspectives, and Campus Resources. We are aware that this does not follow the archival theory of respect des fonds, the idea that "archivists should keep together as one unit all archival material from one creating agency, according to their provenance or external order or structure" (Millar, 2010). We organized by subject as we wanted this system to aid users in finding items, and we believe our audience will appreciate this as they are unfamiliar with archival theories.
Most of the archival materials here were located from the Bentley Hsitorical Library at the university. There were also a number of items found from the Micihgan Daily Digital Archives. These collections were found in a number of ways, including:
- Learning about it from either a classmate or from the archive resources list discussed during class time
- Utilizing the Bentley Historical Library site that includes a page of subject guides that organize their collections
Our main criteria for the selection of records depended the age of the item, its relation to the fields we chose to organize our items into, and if it had some significance to the university. In particular with finding older records, there were some issues with this task as trans people have been excluded from records until only two to three decades ago. We found ourselves feeling what Saidiya Hartman described: "(t)he loss of stories sharpens the hunger for them" (Hartman, 2008). We wanted to find older records of trans history at the university as a way of proving the existence of trans people not being a "current popular trend," but a real community that has always existed.
Perspectives showcased throughout our site include university students (both trans and cisgender) and organizations primarily from the 1990s to present as well as faculty and policy makers of the univeristy. These perspectives are expressed through policy change reports, fliers, newspaper clippings about student life, LGBTQ+ organizational resources, and more. While we include a record or two pre-1990s, they are few compared to the many we found from the '90s and later, so we are missing many perspectives from before 1990.
As this site was created as a semester project, we have to further consider the sustainability of continuing a project such as this. "Like social movements, community archives can also decline" (Sheffield, 2017). Should we continue this archive after the semester finishes, we would have to consider things like user engagement and interest, as well as who would run the site.
Disclaimer about Language and Terms:
Many of the items in this collection use the terms "transsexual" and "transvestite" in their historical sense. The term "transgender" didn't enter common use until the 1990s, and it didn't completely replace "transsexual" until later in the early 2000s. Be mindful that the word "transsexual" used to be used much in the same way "transgender" is used now, but the former term has fallen out of favor because it implies that all transgender people undergo medical transition. Also be mindful that "transvestite" used to be a catch-all term for anyone who wore clothes perceived as "inappropriate" for their sex; this term has also fallen out of favor because it's not necessarily exclusive to transgender people.