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

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis 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.