Archives and New Modes of Feminist Research

Maryanne Dever

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429807831
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

In an era when the metaphor of the archive is invoked to cover almost any kind of memory, collection or accumulation, it is important to re-examine what is entailed—politically and methodologically—in the practice of feminist archival research. This question is central not only to the renewed interest many disciplines are showing in empirical research in archives but also given the current explosion of online social and cultural data which has fundamentally transformed what we understand an archive to be. Contributors in this collection are keen to mark out what may be novel and what is enduring in the ways in which feminist thought and feminist practice frame archives. Importantly, they engage with archives in their historical and political complexity rather than treating them as simple repositories of source material. In this respect, contributors are keenly interested in what it means to archive particular materials, and not simply in what those materials may hold for feminist researchers. The collection features established and emerging feminist scholars and brings together interventions from across such disciplines as history, literature, modernist studies, cinema studies and law.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Australian Feminist Studies.

Stains and Remains: Liveliness, Materiality, and the Archival Lives of Queer Bodies

Marika Cifor

ABSTRACT
This article places itself at the centre of a complex debate between scholars of new materialism and feminist theory. Feminist scholarship has been forcefully critiqued by new materialists for its ‘flight from the material’ that may have foreclosed vital attention to ‘lived material bodies and evolving corporeal practices’ [Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman. 2009. “Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory.” In Material Feminism, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 1–20. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 3]. Through my own encounters with bodily remains and stains in LGBTQ archives, I develop the lens of liveliness to argue that such bodily matter animates and is animated because of its archival context. Liveliness offers a novel approach to new materialism as a productive means for feminist scholars to articulate how matter itself, including bodily matter, is animate and imbued with a particular kind of vitality and affective force. Approaching these archival records as lively emphasises how feminist scholarly research and practice in archives can be guided by and interrelated with the materiality of the bodies, objects, and spaces that constitute them. Liveliness in turn illustrates how archives themselves are vigorous and changeable.

Introduction

In the small reading room at the GLBT Historical Society, I sift through a records carton that is awaiting archival processing. The carton is brimming over with artefacts and ephemera including keys, fliers, t-shirts, and candles for a commemorative march. Here, amongst the messy residue of lives lived by Harvey Milk and his friend and lover Scott Smith, I pull out a manila envelope. Handwritten large letters in black marker on the envelope’s fore side is ‘Harvey Milk’s Pony Tail’ (Harvey Milk and Scott Smith Collection of Artifacts and Ephemera). Perhaps with such an explicit label, it should have felt less surprising than it was that a peek inside the envelope did indeed reveal the thick, dark brown locks of Milk’s shorn ponytail. This encounter between my own body, Milk’s bodily matter, and the archives itself is startling. These locks, seemingly both dead and alive, trouble and move me because of the queer body that is actually present here in the archives. The disappearance of human bodies from archives and the things they collect, arrange, describe, make accessible, and preserve is not unexpected. Archives hold deep communion with the dead, but they are not morgues that are literally engaged in anatomising corpses. Touching Milk’s shorn locks sets off my ongoing hunt for the queer bodily remains and stains in archives. In this paper, I consider the archival materials – the bodily traces, fragments, and fluids – that I discovered as lively. Approaching these records as lively emphasises how my interpretation of these objects is guided by and interrelated with their very materiality. Liveliness in turn illustrates how archives themselves are vigorous and changeable.

The detritus matter of queer bodies in archives matters quite a lot to feminist scholarship and practice. Feminist scholarship has been frequently and sharply critiqued for its ‘flight from the material’ (Alaimo and Hekman 2009, 3). A significant group of scholars aligned with new materialist movements assert that this ‘flight’ has foreclosed the possibility of sustained scholarly attention to ‘lived material bodies and evolving corporeal practices' (3) within feminist theory and praxis (Barad 2003; Coole and Frost 2010; Grosz 1994; Sobchack 2004). There is no scholarly consensus on whether such a flight from material and corporeal realities has really occurred. Another group of leading feminist scholars asserts just as vehemently the opposite position. They argue that feminist theorising and practice has never turned away from the material and that the assertion that it has is in itself a wilful and dangerous act of forgetting (Ahmed 2008; Bruining 2013; Sullivan 2012). By reading together new materialist works and critiques of new materialism by feminist scholars, I assert that new materialism can be productively understood as more than just a mere corrective to a perceived or real lack of attention to the material in feminist thought. New materialism can instead be generatively understood as a response to and a means to contend critically with evolving and emerging understandings and forms of materiality. It also offers an approach to relations that defy textual representation. Turning new attention to the presence of bodily matter in LGBTQ archives and collections with a lens informed by new materialist scholarship and its critiques ensures that feminist scholars are bringing due attention to both the material, the corporeal, the affective, and to their interrelations. This project takes on a critical urgency amidst a contemporary moment characterised by frequent and meaningful shifts in understandings and experiences of the material, the bodily (Stephens 2014, 197), and the affective. Feminist engagements in archives and the encounters they provide with queer bodily synecdoches – with their blood and their hair – offer promising possibilities for contending complexly with ‘the entanglement of matter and meaning’ (Barad 2007) throughout feminist research and praxis in and with archives.

It is a due attention to the category of liveliness that the presence of bodily matter in LGBTQ archives and collections contributes to feminist engagements with archives and materiality. Liveliness articulates how matter itself, including the bodily matter, is animate and imbued with a particular kind of agential and affective vitality. Through the lens of liveliness, the relations of archival records, the space of the archives, and the other actors (human and non-human) involved can be understood as moving, changeable, and interrelated constructions. This enables a focus to be put on the translations of matter and meaning that those relations produce. This article begins by developing the concept of liveliness from a reading of new materialist literature. Then it introduces discussions of materiality in feminist new materialist literature and in feminist critiques of new materialism. Next, the article moves through two acts that are grounded in two moments of encounter between my body, the lively trace elements of queer bodies captured within LGBTQ archives and collections, and the social, physical, and technological space of the archives. These are relations that defy simple textual representation. The first act examines the rusty remains of dried red blood on Milk’s garments in service of addressing the affects and the intimacy of archival collecting and the significance of the materiality archival space to feminist archival encounters. In the second act, I return to the presence of hair in archives. A queer man’s sampling of his sexual partners’ hair allows for an exploration of the affects of disgust and intimacy wrought by the very materiality of this bodily matter. In each act, it is the lens of liveliness that opens the possibility of conceptualising these archival materials, spaces, and the bodies at work in them as agential forces. Liveliness brings to light pressing concerns around archival collecting, materiality, language and text, and affect. By embracing in their engagements with archives these uncanny human remains and stains, feminist scholars can shift and enrich their approach understanding archival practices and research beyond the linguistic. Through the lens of liveliness, feminist scholars embrace affect, queer bodies and embodied experiences, and acknowledge the changeable set of material conditions that constitute archives.

Liveliness, or 'The pulse of the archive'

‘The pulse of the archive’, as anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler so beautifully terms it, equates the Dutch colonial archives that are her subject with a body whose pulse quickens and slows in response to colonial fantasies and fears (2010). Here, I take that notion of an archival pulse quite literally, examining the traces of the blood that once pulsed through the veins and arteries of queer bodies and the hairs they grew. These materials from human bodies are transformed into matter when separated from their creators’ living physical bodies. I propose that these traces of bodily matter are themselves animate, imbued in a new way with a kind of vitality or liveliness. It is that vibrant liveliness that I find intriguing, troubling, and provocative about this blood, those hairs. Liveliness as developed through a reading of new materialist literature reaches beyond conventional understandings of the concept. Liveliness is most often used to describe the very quality of being alive. In relation to the liminal cases of human bodily remains in archives addressed inthe following acts, once blood or hair are shed and thus separated from their role as parts of a living human body, they are not typically understood as living things. Rather than that being confined to a traditionally accepted living human or non-human agent, liveliness in this article is employed to describe a larger vigorousness and vivacity in feeling, activity, intensity, and sensation. Liveliness is understood here to encompass objects and spaces as well as human and non-human bodies.

Liveliness is a concept that emerges from a reading of new materialist literature. New materialism names in William Connolly’s (2013, 399) words,

a series of movements in several fields that criticise anthropocentrism, rethink subjectivity by playing up the role of inhuman forces within the human, emphasize the self-organizing powers of several nonhuman processes, explore dissonant relations between those processes and cultural practice, rethink the sources of ethics, and commend the need to fold a planetary dimension more actively and regularly into studies of global, interstate and state politics.

The movements that together make up new materialism are informed by a number of theoretical strands including actor network theory (Latour 2005), biophilosophy (Ansell-Pearson 1999; Massumi 1996), philosophical posthumanism (Braidotti 2013), quantum physics (Barad 1996), Spinoza and Deleuze’s monism (Clough 2008; Fox and Alldred 2014), and feminist and queer theories (Braidotti 2006; Grosz 1994; Haraway 1997). Jussi Parikka describes new materialism as that which forces scholars, ‘To come up with elaborated ways to understand how perception, action, politics, meanings (and, well, non-meanings) are embedded not only in human and animal bodies, but also in much more ephemeral, but as real, things – even non-solid things’ (2012, 97). As a scholarly approach, new materialism shifts away from an anthropocentric focus on the implications of social processes only for human bodies or subjectivities. The ontological focus of social inquiry thus moves away from purely individual entities to a focus that instead emphasises relationality. Such a focus on relationality includes an emphasis on movement and transformation. Nothing remains entirely static. For example, Latour (2005) writes about ‘translations’, which he describes as the shifts or movements of materials and meanings from one form or space to another as the product of such ongoing relations among actors. New materialism is characterised by attention to how the animate and the inanimate affect and are affected by one another (DeLanda 2006, 4). Work in this vein is often framed as a return to questions of materiality that have been neglected within contemporary critical theory, including feminist theory.

It is by bringing together the theorising of agency, vibrancy, movement, and animacy by Karen Barad, Jane Bennett, and Mel Y. Chen that I develop the concept of liveliness. The work of these scholars examines the relations between animate life and inanimate matter as part of the larger conversation of new materialism. Barad asserts that materialities have ‘agential’ force (2003, 812). Matter is transformed from something provided for human body-subjects to perceive to an understanding of humans and matter as mutually constitutive. In what she terms an ‘agential cut’ between subjects and objects (2003, 815, 2007, 133), Barad conceptualises meaning as possible only through such relations, rather than in addition to them. In other words, humans and matter are co-constituted through the process of ‘making themselves intelligible to each other’ in their inevitable and intra-active relations (Barad 2007; 185 as quoted in Taguchi 2013, 712). This decentring of human meaning-making means that not only perceiving human body-subjects can act intentionally, orient themselves, and have agency to know themselves. Intention is distributed and emerges in complex networks of human and non-human material agents that include historically specific sets of material conditions (Barad 2007). Barad’s work moves scholars towards a different kind of interpretation that is ‘provisional and interrelated with its object’ (Jones 2015, 25). In Vibrant Matter, Bennett (2009) develops a theory of matter that she terms ‘vital materialism’. As she articulates it, things including dirt, discarded plastic bottle caps, and landfills act as agents with productive power. ‘Thing-power', Bennett writes, is ‘the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects’ that are both large and small (2009, 6). Her theorisation frames humans and nonhumans, or subjects and objects, not as mutually exclusive categories but as fundamentally cooperative and co-constitutive. In emphasising interactions among the various and changing human and non-human actors, her work highlights how things, objects, spaces, and people are in a state of constant flux. Bennett’s work on materialism serves as an inspiration for Chen. In Animacies, Chen (2012, 2) examines ‘how matter that is considered insensate, immobile, deathly, or otherwise “wrong” animates cultural life in important ways’. Chen turns attention to the development of the concept of animacy in and across fields including linguistics, disability studies, queer theory, gender studies, and critical ethnic studies. Animacy is ‘a quality of agency, awareness, mobility, and liveness’ (2012, 2). Chen begins from the position that matter is animate. In a chapter titled ‘Lead’s Racial Matters’, Chen employs the example of a recent ‘lead panic’ in the United States surrounding toys with lead paint made in China. Lead is ‘a highly mobile and poisonous substance that feeds anxieties about transgressors of permeable borders, whether of skin or country’ (Chen 2012, 15). Chen shows how in this case animacy actually becomes transformed into property of the lead itself. This scholarship suggests that there are meaningful gradations to the category of the living. For Barad, Bennett, and Chen, humans and objects are fundamentally and crucially interrelated. Liveliness names that complicated relationality between bodies, objects, and spaces, imbuing all as agents in the productions of activity, feeling, and sensation. These are relati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Archives and New Modes of Feminist Research
• 1 Stains and Remains: Liveliness, Materiality, and the Archival Lives of Queer Bodies
• 2 Archiving Wimmen: Collectives, Networks, and Comix
• 3 Queering the Community Music Archive
• 4 Archiving the Other or Reading Online Photography as Queer Ephemera
• 5 Archives, Creative Memoirs, and Queer Counterpublic Histories: The Case for the Text-as-Record
• 6 The Australian Women's Archives Project: Creating and Co-curating Community Feminist Archives in a Post-custodial Age
• 7 Decolonising Archives: Indigenous Challenges to Record Keeping in 'Reconciling' Settler Colonial States
• 8 Feminist Archiving [a manifesto continued]: Skilling for Activism and Organising
• 9 Documenting the Domestic: Chantal Akerman's Experimental Autobiography as Archive
• 10 Of Archives and Architecture: Domestication, Digital Collections, and the Poetry of Mina Loy
• 11 Feminist Research Practices and Digital Archives
• 12 Silence in Noisy Archives: Reflections on Judith Allen's 'Evidence and Silence - Feminism and the Limits of History' (1986) in the Era of Mass Digitisation
• Index