Sexing the Archive

Despite being a widely consumed genre of visual culture, pornography remains a touchy subject in contemporary queer historiography. Queer archives overflow with it, but queer histories don’t. Historically associated with low culture and distrusted by value systems that have tended to privilege the “high” faculties of reason to the detriment of the “base” materiality of the body, its affects and appetites, porn is too rarely approached as a legitimate source with which to think cultural, affective, intellectual, and sexual histories. This article draws from porn studies and queer historiographies to draw some methodological considerations about the value, benefits, and challenges posed by porn archives to the writing of queer subcultural histories. Rather than trying to solve porn’s double ontological status as both documentary and fantasy, the authors locate in that defining feature of the genre porn’s value as a historical source. Simultaneously a document of sex cultures and of the edges of morality, and a historically and culturally situated speculation on what bodies and sex may become, porn offers both cultural critics and historians a rich archive for deepening their knowledge of the intersections of culture, morality, pleasure, community, embodiment, and the politics of belonging.

The Personal Is Archival

Chapter 4 investigates Barbara Hammer’s creation and use of queer archives to tell stories—via particular lesbians—of lesbian cultures past. The chapter’s turn to a lesbian filmmaker is an assertion that the preservationist impulse that accompanied much AIDS activism was genealogically connected to and politically aligned with feminist historiographical practice and body politics. The queer body politics of the AIDS crisis, politics rooted in the care of queer bodies, draws from the feminist politics and cinema originating in second-wave feminism. The chapter argues, then, that the lesbian body politics established in Hammer’s cinema, beginning in the 1970s, informed queer filmmakers’ activist approach to filmmaking during the AIDS crisis. Through readings of Maya Deren’s Sink (2011), Welcome to This House (2015), and Lover/Other (2006), this chapter argues that a distinctly lesbian-feminist aesthetic does not exist independently of a distinctly queer one.

“Doing It” in the Kitchen: Rhetorical Field Methods, Arts/Practice-Based Research, and Queer Archives

Everyday domestic spaces, such as kitchens, are often crucial to the understanding of practices and discourses of queer and other marginalized communities. However, due to the private nature of these spaces, they can be difficult for rhetorical critics and others to access. This article offers arts/practice-based research as an intervention into rhetorical field methods (RFM) as a means of accessing and engaging with private, often inaccessible places, such as kitchens. In addition, arts/practice-based methods can expand the notion of “doing” rhetoric and co-creation with participants, which result in the creation of subject formations and alternative, collaborative, and affective archives. Such building of collective queer archives is essential, I argue, in that it helps to not only document the “stuff” of queer lives but also capture fleeting and affective moments of queer collisions and becomings. In addition, arts/practice-based research methods can aid researchers to generate knowledge and archives related to underrepresented aspects of queer lives. To engage with queer domestic spaces and the intersection of RFM and arts/practice-based research, I reflect on Autostraddle.com’s “Queer in the Kitchen” gallery, my participation in the creation of this text, and the development of my own gallery Queering the Kitchen.

Affective investments, queer archives, and lesbian breakups on YouTube

YouTube, as both a video-sharing platform and a social media platform, has become a dynamic space for the proliferation of queer female fandom, including lesbian YouTube couples, around which fans congregate. Two specific YouTube couples, Shannon and Cammie, and Kaelyn and Lucy, both broke up in summer 2016. Their breakups, and the subsequent breakup videos, were met with emotionally intense responses from their fans. To investigate how both fans and the couples themselves invest in these relationships, I conducted a discourse analysis of the language the YouTubers use to speak to their fans as well as the ways in which fans express their connection to these videos in the comments section. The distinct features of this fandom are the result of the affordances of YouTube as a platform, the intensity of queer fandom investments, and the particular liveliness of the fan object. Fan investment in these couples is connected to fans' own sense of (queer) futurity. At the same time, these videos now circulate as monuments of queer melancholia, viewed as they are through the lens of grief or nostalgia.

‘Wittig and Davis, Woolf and Solanas (…) simmer within me’: Reading Feminist Archives in the Queer Writing of Paul B. Preciado

This article considers the relation between contemporary queer and transgender theory and the ‘second wave’ of feminism. Specifically, it explores the ways in which transgender theorist Paul B. Preciado's Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics (2008) calls on feminist theorists, artists and activists of the second wave to explore transgender experience and embodiment, and to rethink gender in light of the new era of biocapitalism Preciado proposes. The article questions the way in which trajectories of feminism are conceived of (most famously through the ‘waves’ metaphor), and finally calls for a ‘scavenger methodology’ as a way to consider the formation of feminist and queer archives.

Meddling with the Past

An analysis of the 7th edition of the Polish queer festival "Pomada" devoted to non-normative pasts and queer archives.