Reviewed by: An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures Erica Meiners (bio) An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures by Ann Cvetkovich. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003, 355 pp., $69.95 hardcover, $22.95 paper. In her afterword to a 2003 anthology on melancholy, loss, and mourning, Loss: The Politics of Mourning, Judith Butler suggests the emergence of a landscape of "new" political agency (and scholarship) that addresses . . . the loss of loss itself: somewhere, sometime, something was lost, but no story can be told about it; no memory can retrieve it; a fractured horizon looms in which to make one's way as a spectral agency, one for whom a full "recovery" is impossible, one for whom the irrecoverable becomes, paradoxically, the condition of a new political agency. (467) Loss includes a chapter, "Legacies of Trauma, Legacies of Activism: ACT UP's Lesbians," by Ann Cvetkovich that is a modified selection from her 2003 book An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (portions of most chapters are previously published). In her chapter in Loss and in the wider project of An Archive of Feelings, Cvetkovich refuses the binary distinction often animated in trauma studies scholarship between acting out (frequently pathologized or designated unhealthy) and working through (often viewed as psychologically positive) to suggest that public practices or "acting out" are "a crucial resource for responding to trauma"(164). Foregrounding this shift from pathologization and/or victimization into an "archival" context that documents how negotiations of the violence of heteronormativity (and patriarchy, white supremacy, and the annihilating practices of fluid transnational capitalism) become a site of/for radical inventions of desire, resistance and community makes An Archive of Feelings an intriguingly pleasurable read and a contribution, as Butler suggests, to an understanding of "new" political agency. Working from writings, interviews, performances, films, and other texts from a range of lesbian, feminist and/or queer authors, performance artists, rock bands and sites—Dorothy Allison, Achy Obejas, Leslie Feinburg, Shani Mootoo, Margaret Randall, Cherríe Moraga, Rebecca Brown, Carmelita Tropicana, Sister Spit, ACT UP's lesbians, Boys Don't Cry, the Michigan Women's Music Festival, Tribe 8 and Le Tigre—the seven chapters in An Archive of Feelings avoid the normalization of whiteness and the preoccupation with textuality that too frequently is a hallmark of "queer" scholarship. Cvetkovich's insistence on locating the work as a political project grounded in material lives, and linking trauma explicitly to political practices, places An Archive, for this reviewer, out of the academic economy of another "lit crit/cult studies" deconstructive act. Cvetkovich layers ethnographic/oral histories of women in ACT UP (her [End Page 224] suspicions of authenticity and voice and her worries about the recuperative powers of narrative serve her ethnographic practices well) next to an analysis of published (or performed) incest survival narratives. The continual juxtaposition (and the simultaneous co-constructions) of the textual and the real lives of lesbians in An Archive, while not a new methodology, animates a central strength of the project, as evidenced in the epilogue of An Archive where Cvetkovich chronicles her moves into the world of largely positivistic medicalized professional trauma studies (i.e., International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies). This tentative reverse anthropological foray, a form of "studying up," functions as an exploration of the limitations of disciplinary ways of knowing and the material consequences of these disciplinary (and discursive) limitations. Professional trauma organizations and practitioners (social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, etc.) shape resource-laden interventions into the lives and bodies of those that experience trauma, including people of color, women and/or queer bodies, and Cvetkovich works not to bridge or necessarily to study the disciplinary or epistemic gap but to insistently represent the queerly/other material body in these spaces and/or to witness and to report out on these professional and disciplinary organizations and practices (which for Cvetkovich were not inhospitable). As a concluding qualifier, I am partial to any text that has an endorsement from Kathleen Hanna of the feminist/queer band Le Tigre (previously from Bikini Kill) and from a project that discusses the Michigan Women's Music Festival (an annual week...
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Feb 9, 2023
Massimo G Colombo + 3
Open Access
