STICKY IMPULSE ARCHIVE NIGHTS ARCHIVE
East Van dyke parenting in the 1980s and ‘90s
Curated by Emily Guerrero
Lavender Conception Conspiracy takes its name from a lesbian mothers support group-slash-DIY insemination and pregnancy skill share from the mid 1980s, during a time that queer parents had little legal protection nor medical support.
Spatially and politically, East Vancouver has been a hot spot of dyke and queer parents since the 1970s. Drawn to the neighborhood by the abundance of affordable, single family dwellings available in the ‘70s through the ‘90s, working class queer people and single moms carved out their own political and cultural spaces, in ramshackle communes, lefty cafes, and on the playground. While working as the archivist at the CDMLA in 2019, I started a project to uncover traces of these parents nestled within the archival holdings.
These tapes work to document a predominantly white, working-class lesbian perspective on a community that’s shaped my neighborhood before me (spot the requisite cameos of East Side Food Co-Op and Britannia Middle School!). Rooted in their specific experiences, these mothers straddle the often infuriatingly incompatible life of queer social culture and motherhood one “daily crisis management” at a time (as a mom in “Your Mother Wears Combat Boots” accurately describes single parent life). Coming to these videos at a 20 – 40 year remove and from several different identity points, I nevertheless experienced a deep relief at the candidness of the women interviewed about the difficulties of parenting as young dykes and queers. From the tenTative requests put forward in “Lesbian Mothers” for non-parents to occasionally help out with childcare, to the cathartic rage at the fetishization of dyke single moms in “1-800 Yer Mama,” these videos capture feelings I’ve rarely seen outside of bitch sessions on my friends porch or my own social media rants. As a young queer parent who’s lived in East Van for the past decade, I experienced the thrill of “suddenly seeing myself existing” within these records (Caswell 2016). Through following these threads left for me by other exhausted, under-resourced parents, I’m finding a living community history, piece by scrappy DIY piece.
Building off my archival practice, this program contains two parts – the selection of videos, arranged for your at-home viewing pleasure, and an archival mixtape of further reading, viewing and listening.
-Emily Guerrero
Emily Guerrero
Emily Guerrero is an archivist, librarian, and researcher living on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and Səl̓ílwətaʔ Nations. Since graduating with an MLIS from the University of British Columbia, they have worked at Xwi7xwa Library, Simon Fraser University, and for the Burnaby Public Library. Her ongoing research is an investigation into gossip as both information practice and a method of care, and her archival practice is rooted in community-responsive metadata practices and queer lineages. They are a parent and a Leo.
About Sticky Impulse
Sticky Impulse is a monthly series featuring works from the Crista Dahl Media Library & Archive. Its’ title references the materiality of video – from the originating electrical impulses that transfer content to magnetic tape, to a videotape’s inevitable demise from deterioration of its core elements – and evokes the problematic,things difficult to navigate or to let go of, creative spontaneity, compulsion, euphoric abandon, or the urge to act.