2027 SPE Annual Conference: Community in Contrast
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print this pageSelf-Archiving as Lesbian Reclamation
Olivia Bull
Saturday, October 17 - 9:00AM to 9:30AM
Hopkins 246
As a child, I filled journals with entries about the girls I had crushes on, only to tear out the pages and shred them into the garbage, fearing I'd be found out. I grew up hearing "gay" used as an insult, and when the only girl in my entire K–12 experience came out, it became school-wide gossip. "Lesbian" was synonymous with being man-hating, masculine, and undesirable. I knew I liked girls and considered that girl a friend, but I convinced myself I wasn't like her. I had long hair and loved dresses. Surely, I couldn't be a lesbian.
Growing up as a queer woman in a rural farming town in Wisconsin, coming to terms with my identity has been an ongoing process rather than a singular proclamation. I came out at 22, but the emotional work of understanding my place in the world, publicly loving another woman, and confronting the expectations placed on queer women was only beginning. It took years before I could proudly call myself a lesbian and understand how heteronormativity, misogyny, and even exclusion within queer communities had discouraged me from embracing that identity. Looking back, I realize the momentum for this project was building long before I recognized it. Every discarded journal entry, every hesitation around language, every quiet act of "self-preservation" accumulated below the surface until it became something capable of carrying me forward.
The desire to self-archive emerged after I encountered an early 1900's girl's diary and scrapbook in my university's archives. She wrote freely about her crushes, the flower a boy had given her, and who she hoped would ask her to a dance. Reading her words, my heart ached for my younger self, for the girl who never believed her own desires were worth recording. It also made me realize that even after five years with my girlfriend, I had never created work about our love or the life we had built together. I began asking myself what it would mean to intentionally build an archive of our lives.
For the first time, I am photographing the woman I love as a form of reclamation. Through the sustained act of photographing her, I am starting to understand myself as a lesbian not only privately, but publicly, historically, and artistically. What began as a portrait series has now become a way of declaring both my identity and our relationship while creating an archive of a life which, for a long time, I had never thought worthy of forming a significant part of my artistic practice.
This project has become its own form of momentum. It is sustained through care, mutual recognition, and the continual decision to document intimate moments. This is a project we plan to continue for the rest of our lives, and the archive will grow alongside us. In moments when political rhetoric or social hostility sensors queer belonging, the work reminds us that our lives are worthy of documentation. The photographs offer concrete proof of our joy, intimacy, and resilience, while tangibly reminding me that the stereotypes I absorbed as a child were never the truth. They calm my anxious mind in periods of fear and affirm that my identity, my relationship, and our existence deserve to be seen and remembered. The archive carries us forward.
By bringing this work to Midwest SPE's "Momentum," I hope to share how self-archiving can serve as both an artistic methodology and a practice of self-actualization. My presentation will explore how momentum is built through sustained collaboration, how personal archives can reshape inherited histories of representation, and how photographing the people we love can amount to an act of resistance against erasure. By combining a discussion of our own collaborative practice with the historical misrepresentation of lesbians, I plan to contribute to a broader dialogue about how images gain meaning over time, creating new possibilities for belonging, not only for ourselves but all those who come after us.
speaker
Olivia Bull
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