Welcome to Questioning in the stacks. This slideshow highlights key components of the
University of Washington Libraries' feminist and queer collections over the past 50 years.
We own over 26,000 titles with feminism alone as the main subject, a feminist book
collection as big as an entire branch of your local public library. But this only represents
a fraction of the scholarship and literature of gender, women, and sexuality studies, known
as GWSS, across our 11 branches and online. In academia, peer-reviewed journals often take
center stage. Dozens of scholarly feminist and queer journals followed after Signs:
A Journal of Wom en in Culture and Society premiered in 1975
Aggregators like JSTOR and Project Muse give complete run, full text coverage of many journals,
back to Volume 1 Issue 1. The left side of the screen shows the different genres of feminist
and queer literature besides journal articles that can be found through a UW Libraries Search.
To collect feminist and queer books you must reach beyond the mainstream.
In the 1970s the Boston women's health collective reclaimed medical and personal knowledge of our
bodies as a liberatory act. A decade later, the anthology This Bridge Called My Back found its
way into many classrooms. This Bridge exemplifies the feminist notion of distinct voices within the
collective, featuring the writings of 29 different authors edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa.
Feminist and queer bookstores (of which there were several in Seattle) and publishers like
The Feminist Press and the Kitchen Table Press - are part of the production of knowledge
Theoretical books such as Judith Butler's Gender Trouble
and graphic novels, graphic memoirs such as Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Allison Bechdel’s
Fun Home have equally touched global audiences, leading us to the current era and a boom
in popular feminist writing, such as Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists.
Government publications also reflect feminist and queer issues.
The 1990s began with the Persian Gulf War, The Tailhook Report, and totally
new frontiers for women and queer people in the military. Congressional hearings
spotlighted women sexual issues in the workplace - all collected by the Libraries.
With the dawn of the web, librarians were keeping up with databases
as academic resources and newspapers went online. For those with internet access, library research
could finally happen from home. That was radical! Audio and video media has been the most exciting
and challenging part of the online information world
In the 2000s, library collections grew to include CDs, DVDs, and TV shows. Smartphones and social
media had librarians scrambling to address this "firehose" with structured, curated collections
The Media Center morphed in the 2010s into the Media Arcade, where students and faculty learn
to create their own feminist and queer audio and video projects, as many from GWSS have done.
With online finding aids, digitization, and a lot of behind the scenes work, many more
of the University Libraries' Special Collections holdings were daylighted in the 2010s.
University Archives holds the history of GWSS, its departmental records and faculty personal papers.
The Womxn Who Rock archive goes along with the GWSS-affiliated annual gathering.
The Labor Archives of Washington chronicles women in the trades. The Pacific Northwest
Collection documents everything from Seattle's early nightclub performers
to January 21st, 2017, the largest single day street protest in Seattle.
And our nationally regarded Modern Book Arts collection
of handmade books includes stunning examples of women's artistic vision.
How can you find all this content? Enter any search into the big purple box on our
homepage. Many, but not all, of our databases, include their content in this one interface.
For the complete picture, give yourself time to explore our numerous guides by subject and format.
Even when you're out searching on the open web, we hope that many roads will
lead you back to the University Libraries. If you're stuck in your questioning, Ask Us!