Frottage of Ephemera

Abstract

Gregory D. Victorianne's Buti Voxx is a window into the diffuse erotic networks across the African diaspora who forged international information networks between the 1980s and early 2000s. The Afro-erotic zine occasions an opportunity to tease out what the author calls ephemera fever, the compulsion across contemporary Black queer studies and queer of color critique to frame the trace as evidence of imagining otherwise. The author attunes to the frictions, or what Keguro Macharia calls “frottage,” between the production of Buti Voxx and José Esteban Muñoz's paradigm of “ephemera as evidence” in an effort to query the conceptual pressures undergirding the process of scaling the quotidian to the erotic and political blueprint. The conundrum of the black vernacular is that objects like Buti Voxx become locked into the affective expectations and hermeneutic feedback loops set in motion by altruistic grammars like ephemera. Frottage of ephemera is a launchpad for thinking through how grammatical possibility concurrently functions as hermeneutic enclosure.