Gender, Affective Labour, and Community-Building Through Literary Audio Recordings

This article emerged from the “feminist close listening” methodology we devised together during a collaborative listening session in Montreal, December, 2017. We began the practice of listening to recordings together, in real time, as a way of attuning ourselves to the related inquiries that our archives of interest shared. For Karis, this archive is the SoundBox Collection, housed in the AMP Lab at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus, where she serves as Director. For Deanna, this archive is the Roy Kiyooka Audio Archive, housed in the Contemporary Literature Collection at Simon Fraser University. The archives share the same media formats (reel-to-reel and compact cassette tapes) as well as the common generic features of recording spontaneous, candid conversation, often voiced in contexts that are considered domestic, intimate, and private. Our listening sessions aimed to collaboratively outline questions, approaches, and best practices toward this unique subset of literary recordings. The article that follows is one concrete example of how those conversations unfolded