This essay, written as a collaborative process document, chronicles some of the challenges of creating digital spaces that can house and encourage trans- feminist and queer affective and cultural archives. Here, we imagine a digital archive that will animate the artistic, cultural, social, political, sexual, knowledge and subject experiments and possibilities opened up, and foreclosed, by a phenomenon like Meow Mix—the Montreal-based cabaret for “bent girls and their buddies”—while foregrounding the ethical and technological contradictions that characterize the digitizing process. Pursuing concerns of labour, preservation, design, and subcultural politics and aesthetics as essential to the digitizing process, we reproduce the interrupted, reflexive flow of this research-creation project.
