Demographic

Age: 24

Gender identity: Non-binary

Race: Multiracial settler (Japanese mother, white settler Canadian father)

Indigenous: n/a

Class: Lower-middle class (has contingent access to generational wealth)

Other identity (e.g. linguistic, religious): Queer

Education: Some post-secondary (they are a 4th Year Media Studies and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies joint major)

Language: Japanese, English, French

Personal responsibilities: Works part-time on top of schoolwork; collective house member; House Parent and performer in an east Asian drag performance collective called Dango

Location: Born in Japan but their family moved to Canada when they were a toddler. They grew up and attended primary and secondary school in Vancouver and attend a University in Burnaby.

Widgets: Tools & Platforms

• Collaborative Annotation – Metadata games (possibly)
• Curation – Ponga, HistoryPin
• IIIF – Mirador
• Visualization – Gist

Brief Biography

Summary of all factors as narrative.

Rae Akiyama (they/them) is a queer, multiracial settler millennial of Japanese and Canadian descent, who lives in the Lower Mainland. Rae is estranged from their birth family, and lives in a collective house with their queer found family. They are a House Parent and performer in an east Asian drag performance collective called Dango, and volunteer at a local queer resource centre, Qmunity. Rae is a fourth year Media Studies and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies joint major, who is working on a term paper about queer drag performance in the Lower Mainland. Although they are skilled with different technologies, they are a novice archival user and don’t know where to start in navigating archival systems to find photographs, event posters, and video for their project. Because of their racialized and marginalized identity, they are doubly anxious in using archives for the first time. But Rae wants to persevere and find the archival resources, not only for their term paper, but also to incorporate into their drag performance, and ultimately feel connection to their queer ancestors in the Lower Mainland.

Character description

Because of Rae’s history of family estrangement and previous encounters with institutional cis-normativity, they hold a lot of anxiety coming into the archives. On top of the regular new-user archival anxiety, they have another level of anxiety and exhaustion worrying that they won’t be welcome or respected in an institutional space like the archives. However, when they feel safe and comfortable in other spaces, they are open and love to share their findings with others, like asking for help and clarification when they don’t understand things, and communicates their barriers to understanding.

Interest in archives & Life experience

Why interested in archives: Rae has a term project where they have to undertake primary source research on a media topic of their choosing. Because they are a queer drag performer in Vancouver, they want to explore the history of queer drag performance in the Lower Mainland. And beyond this, they want to incorporate these materials into a multimedia drag performance.

Community affiliations: As the House Parent for Dango, they organize drag performances with their collective and perform at queer venues around the Lower Mainland at least once a week. They also volunteer at a local queer resource centre, Qmunity, several times a month.

Represented in archives: Rae feels like they can sometimes find slivers of their identity represented in archives—they have seen photographs and documents in Canadian archives relating to Japanese internment or Japanese labourers at the turn of the 20th century; in Japanese databases they can find photographs and videos of Noh and Butoh performance. They can also find small pockets of digitized materials of queer communities online. But they never see themselves, as a non-binary and half-Japanese person inside the archive.

Professional affiliations: n/a

Access needs and mobility: n/a

Motivations

Why: Rae wants to feel connected to their queer forebears. Since Rae came out as non-binary, they were disowned by their father, and is currently navigating a rocky relationship with their mother, who they rely on for limited financial support. They were able to reach out to folks in their community after they were kicked out of their home, and built their own found family in their collective house. Because of this family estrangement, they want to feel connected to a queer ancestry in the Lower Mainland. They are searching not only for archival records, but also for belonging and security in their identity.

Frustrations

Barriers: Because they are racialized, queer, and nonbinary, they feel like the archives aren’t necessarily “for” them, so they feel nervous going in. They worry about their identity being respected by staff, and hopes to not be misgendered in the reading room or via correspondence, or have to navigate microaggressions related to the queer materials they are researching.

They also worry about having to provide identification when registering as a user in the reading room. They haven’t gone through the process of changing all their government ID cards to reflect their gender, so their current ID doesn’t correspond with their gender identity. They also don’t have the money to go through the process of legally changing their name, and worry that their deadname will be tracked by the archives because of this.

Also, since they are a novice user, they feel out of their depth navigating archival procedures, tools, and structures, and hopes that they won’t be looked down on by staff.

Info and Tech Access & Experience

Hardware: Rae is skilled with desktops, laptops, and mobile devices. They are also familiar with recording equipment that they use to document Dango’s performance. They can use both Mac and Windows OS.

Software: Rae is skilled with Microsoft products, Google products, Adobe products, social media, and video conferencing.

Network connectivity: They have reliable home internet and have a mobile plan on their phone.

Experience with archival tools: Little experience. They have found themselves on AtoM, Islandora, Collective Access, and other archival databases by chance, mainly searching in Google and navigating to the archival tools from search results.

Experience with archival frameworks: None.

Comfort with learning technology: Rae is comfortable learning how new technology works.

Goals

What do they want to do: Rae wants to find photographs, event posters, and, especially, video of queer drag performers in the Lower Mainland from the 1970s to the 1990s. These materials will supplement their arguments and serve as case studies in their term paper. Additionally, Rae wants to use these materials in a public performance, re-mixing drag history and drag present in their act.

What relationship do they want to the archives: Since they are a novice user of archives, they want to feel supported by staff, so they can learn how to specifically search for resources in person and online, and have guidance navigating copyright, citation, and reproduction. They want a thorough and pleasant experience.