Joseph Plaster

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Joseph Plaster
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Born1978
NationalityAmerican
CitizenshipUnited States of America
Occupation
  • Writer
  • curator

Joseph Plaster (born 1978) is a writer, curator, and public humanities scholar based in Baltimore and the San Francisco Bay Area. [1] He is Curator in Public Humanities and Director of the Winston Tabb Special Collections Center at Johns Hopkins University.[2] He is also a Lecturer in Hopkins' Program in Museums and Society[3] and a member of the Faculty Board for the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute.[4] His books include Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco's Tenderloin (2023).[5]

Life and work

Plaster earned a B.A. in History from Oberlin College[6] and a PhD in American Studies from Yale University.[7] He worked as a Public Humanities Director for the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, CA. He currently serves on the OutHistory Advisory Board, City of New York;[8] the International Advisory Board, Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre, Toronto Metropolitan University, and the International Advisory Board, Malmö Life Stories, Malmö, Sweden.[9]

Polk Street: Lives in Transition

From 2008–10, Plaster recorded more than seventy oral histories from people experiencing the transformation of San Francisco's Polk Street from a working-class queer commercial district to a gentrified entertainment destination serving the city’s growing elite. Oral histories enabled him to document a local past rich in non-biological family structures, which he interpreted through public “listening parties,” professionally mediated neighborhood dialogues, a traveling multimedia exhibit, and radio documentaries.[10] The project challenged gentrifiers’ claims to be promoting “safety” and “family” by positing alternative understandings of both concepts drawn from oral histories with transgender women, queer homeless youth, sex workers, and working-class gay men who had made Polk Street their home.[11] Plaster produced Polk Street Stories for National Public Radio's Hearing Voices in 2010.[12]

Vanguard Revisited

In 2010 and 2011, Plaster worked with activist minister Megan Rohrer and trans youth organizer Mia Tu Mutch to enlist marginally housed youth in documenting, interpreting, and performing the history of San Francisco’s Tenderloin in relation to their own lives—to position themselves as part of its genealogical lineage and embody its counter-history through the arts and reenactment.[13] The process was aligned with Participatory Action Research, which enables marginalized publics to frame research questions, project design, and interpretation with the goal of generating social change.[14] Their project zine Vanguard Revisited (2011) illuminates continuities and discontinuities in the lives of street youth activists over the previous fifty years.[15]

San Francisco ACT UP Oral History Project

Plaster documented San Francisco’s AIDS direct action movement by recording oral histories with people who were involved in Enola Gay, the ARC/AIDS Vigil, AIDS Action Pledge, ACT UP/Golden Gate, Prevention Point, and ACT UP/San Francisco, a highly visible and influential group of militant AIDS activists associated with a national network of independent organizations that shared the name AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power.[16] Project outcomes included oral histories with more 40 ACT UP veterans; an exhibition at the GLBT History Museum; and a multimedia Internet presence.[17]

Kids on the Street

Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco's Tenderloin (Duke University Press, 2023) explores the informal support networks that enabled abandoned queer youth to survive in tenderloin districts across the United States, and in San Francisco’s Tenderloin in particular, over the last century. Drawing on archival, ethnographic, and oral history research, the book explores the social trauma inflicted on street youth and the ways they have worked, collectively and creatively, to reframe and reinterpret those brutal realities.[18] The book focuses on four world-making practices: kinship networks Plaster's informants call “street families,” which resemble the moral economies common among people with severely limited resources; syncretic religious formations Plaster calls “street churches,” which are often based on a streetwise, gothic Catholicism; storytelling strategies that enabled youth to secure employment in the district’s vice and bar economies and, at times, to reinterpret the abuse from which they were running; and migratory circuits that connected far-flung tenderloin districts across the country and the people who traversed them, all the while fostering alternative socialities, cooperative economies, and novel forms of mutual aid.[19]

Peabody Ballroom Experience

The Peabody Ballroom Experience is a collaboration, coordinated by Plaster, between Johns Hopkins University and the ballroom scene, a counterpublic composed primarily of queer and trans artists of color. The project cultivates an exchange of knowledge between JHU and ballroom, bringing together faculty, students, and performers as partners in education.[20] Components include film screenings, panel discussions, dance workshops, oral histories, a documentary film, and ball performance competitions at the opulent Peabody Library. Library curators work with the event’s organizers and participants to present them with selections from the Sheridan Libraries’ collections during workshops and gatherings. Those books, which are interpreted by ballroom performers and organizers, are used to produce the events.[21]

Awards

  • National Council on Public History, Outstanding Public History Project Award, Peabody Ballroom Experience, 2023[22]
  • American Historical Association’s Allan Bérubé Prize for outstanding work in public GLBT history, 2010[23]
  • National Council on Public History, Outstanding Public History Project Award, Honorable Mention, Polk Street: Lives in Transition, 2011[24]

References

  1. ↑ "Joseph Plaster". Joseph Plaster. Retrieved 2023-07-14.
  2. ↑ "Joseph Plaster". Sheridan Libraries. Retrieved 2023-07-14.
  3. ↑ "Joseph Plaster". Museums and Society. 2019-05-13. Retrieved 2023-07-14.
  4. ↑ "People". Humanities Institute. 2013-06-06. Retrieved 2023-07-14.
  5. ↑ Duke Press. "Kids on the Street". Retrieved July 13, 2023.
  6. ↑ "Out of the Past / Oberlin Alumni Magazine / Winter 2008". www2.oberlin.edu. Retrieved 2023-07-14.
  7. ↑ "Joseph Plaster | Public Humanities at Yale". ph.yale.edu. Retrieved 2023-07-14.
  8. ↑ "Contact Us · OutHistory". outhistory.org. Retrieved 2023-07-14.
  9. ↑ Espinosa, Adriana de La Peña (2021-11-01). ""Listening to the City"- A workshop". Institute for Urban Research. Retrieved 2023-07-14.
  10. ↑ Seligman, Katherine (2009-08-08). "Oral histories tell Polk Street's story". SFGATE. Retrieved 2023-07-14.
  11. ↑ Plaster, Joseph. "Safe for Whom? And Whose Families? Narrative, Urban Neoliberalism, and Queer Oral History on San Francisco's Polk Street". online.ucpress.edu. Retrieved 2023-07-14.
  12. ↑ "HV099- Polk Street Stories". Hearing Voices. 2018-07-19. Retrieved 2023-07-14.
  13. ↑ "Vanguard Then and Now: An Evolution of Gay Youth Activism in the Tenderloin - FoundSF". www.foundsf.org. Retrieved 2023-07-14.
  14. ↑ "Imagined Conversations and Activist Lineages: Public Histories of Queer Homeless Youth Organizing and the Policing of Public Space in San Francisco's Tenderloin, 1960s and Present". read.dukeupress.edu. Retrieved 2023-07-14.
  15. ↑ "Vanguard Revisited (February 2011) - Digital Transgender Archive". www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net. Retrieved 2023-07-14.
  16. ↑ "Saving the Stories of San Francisco's ACT UP Heroes". The Advocate. Retrieved 2023-07-14.
  17. ↑ GLBTHS. "GLBT Historical Society". GLBT Historical Society. Retrieved July 13, 2023.
  18. ↑ Duke University Press (2023). "Kids on the Street".
  19. ↑ "On Polk Street and in the Tenderloin, a family of hustlers and priests". 48 hills. 2023-03-15. Retrieved 2023-07-14.
  20. ↑ cathyschaefer. "Home". Peabody Ballroom Experience. Retrieved 2023-07-14.
  21. ↑ IV, John-John Williams (2023-04-14). "Posing at the library: Baltimore's ballroom scene werks The Peabody". The Baltimore Banner. Retrieved 2023-07-14.
  22. ↑ "Outstanding Public History Project Awards". National Council on Public History. Retrieved 2023-07-14.
  23. ↑ "Allan Bérubé Prize | The Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History". Retrieved 2023-07-14.
  24. ↑ "Outstanding Public History Project Awards". National Council on Public History. Retrieved 2023-07-14.

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