“How Not to Get Killed”: Feminist Aftercare in the Dorothy Allison Papers

Abstract

Born from a deep dive into Dorothy Allison’s published works and personal papers, this article proposes a praxis of perverting the archives to make room for promiscuous readings that emerge from the unpredictable confluence of pleasure and danger in archival research. I argue that perverted readings can serve as an imperative form of aftercare (to borrow from S/M terminology) that opens up multiple pathways for excavating the webs of care that arose during the lesbian/feminist sex wars. Allison and her work with S/M communities convey a sexual politics rooted in reflexivity, critique, and a lesbian feminist framework of collective care for women’s sexual realties. Moreover, I argue that narrating histories of the sex wars through the lenses of care work and erotic labor creates more possibilities for holding together the diverse perspectives that constituted these debates, which tend to be glossed in popular accounts of feminist histories as dichotomous or otherwise at odds with each other.