Abstract
Abstract: This essay mobilizes critical archival studies and Tonia Sutherland’s notion of “the carceral archive” in dialogue with Asian American feminist praxis to propose the framework of promiscuous archives, which seeks to harness the power and resources of archives towards unconventional, liberatory aims directed by community need. I draw principally from the concrete archival practices employed by the “Private Practices: AAPI Artist and Sex Worker Collection” at the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive to ask: What can abolitionist knowledge practices look like? What can archives learn from sex workers? Weaving critique of carceral narratives around sex workers with interrogation of the logics of capture and surveillance that direct archival practice, the essay presents promiscuity as an exploratory strategy of collaboration, proliferation, and usurpation that radically expands the porosity of archives, challenging the temporality, affective charge, and social role of archival repositories.
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