Scholars in Residence Digital Collections Lab at The ArQuives

Scholars in Residence is a month-long digital collections lab for undergraduate students, based out of The ArQuives and organized by the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, under the directorship of Dr. Elspeth Brown, in partnership with the Jackman Humanities Institute and the South Asian Visual Arts Centre. Five students worked on creating digital collections for The ArQuives throughout May: 1) “Not a Place on a Map,” a Desh Pardesh Festival oral history project (a partnership with the South Asian Visual Arts Centre); 2) The Mirha-Soleil Ross Archives; 3) The Foolscap Oral History Project. More details on each project available here.

Update from Mac Stewart on Mirha-Soleil Ross/gendertrash Collection During the first week of the program, Mac and Caleigh worked on searching through the Mirha Soleil-Ross collection, researching the zine she made, Gendertrash from Hell. The first edition of Gendertrash was published in 1993, when Ms. Ross moved to Toronto. She used a pseudonym when writing the series, publishing under the name Jeanne B, in collaboration with her partner and co-editor Xanthra Phillipa MacKay. Four issues of Gendertrash were circulated, and a fifth had material collected to be published but was never compiled. The Mirha-Soleil Ross collection was donated to The ArQuives in 2008 and has only recently been processed. The ArQuives received new materials from Ms. Ross in early 2017, and expects further accruals later this year.  When going through the Gendertrash parts of the fonds, we discovered materials such as some of the original cut-outs used to create the zines, full transcripts of interviews that were cut down and edited for Gendertrash, correspondence between Ms. MacKay and various individuals and bookstores that received the zines, buttons, and much more. Contact queeries@arquives.ca to inquiry about accessing Mirha-Soleil Ross’ fonds. The Gendertrash digital collection will soon be available via https://digitalexhibitions.arquives.ca/ Mac Stewart is a University of Toronto student majoring in English and Sexual Diversity Studies. Originally from Lloydminster, Alberta, he specializes in studying transgender communities and transgender community building.