The Rhetorical Power of Archival Description: Classifying Images of Gender Transgression

Rhetoric Society Quarterly Aug 2018

The Rhetorical Power of Archival Description: Classifying Images of Gender Transgression

K. J. Rawson

Abstract

Furthering the field’s attention to the rhetoric of archives, this article offers an extended consideration of archival description as an information infrastructure that provides powerful, although often invisible, orientations to the past. This article examines three stages of the archival process—selection, organization, and labeling—by focusing on a handful of historical objects, held in two separate collections, that depict transgressive gender presentations. Taken together, these examples demonstrate that archival description functions not only for bureaucratic and access purposes, but for epistemological ones as well.

Journal: Rhetoric Society Quarterly
Published: 2018-08-08
DOI: 10.1080/02773945.2017.1347951
Open Access: Closed
Topics: multimodality

Citation Context

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