‘Cool articles from way back when’: appropriations and reanimations of the New Zealand feminist magazine Broadsheet

Abstract

This article addresses ‘transition’ within feminist media activism by exploring how archival material is reanimated and mobilized within contemporary forms of online activism. Recent scholarship examining the ‘archival turn’ in feminism has illustrated the potential of archives to intervene in the political present, yet the uptake of archival material within online media generates ambiguous and contentious outcomes. This article explores the controversial reanimation of the New Zealand feminist magazine Broadsheet (1972–1997) by a Facebook page titled ‘Broadsheet, New Zealand’s Feminist Magazine’ (2015). Using critical discourse analysis to examine comments made by followers of the page, I explore how the promotion of increasingly hostile trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) discourses precipitated contention over the legitimacy of the page’s affiliation with Broadsheet. Conspicuously absent from these discussions is Broadsheet’s archival material itself, despite its recent digitization. Instead, commenters invoke experiences and memories of Broadsheet to either validate the Broadsheet Facebook page or to substantiate claims that it appropriates the magazine’s name and legacy. I argue, therefore, that feminists’ engagement with archival materials is structured by nostalgia, whether remembered, encountered, or culturally learned.