THE COUNTER-ARCHIVE OF ELIZABETH NIELSEN

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank D. Rita Alfonso, Mel Chen, Huma Dar, Roshanak Kheshti, and Fouzieyha Towghi for their astute and generous comments on the counter-archive material. For careful comments on an early draft thanks are due to Judith Bishop, Diane Cady, Jennifer Hooffard, Bula Maddison, Cynthia Scheinberg, Katie Simon, Susan Schweik, and Kara Wittman. The author is grateful to the reviewers and to Anitra Grisales for editorial feedback on this essay. The author wishes to thank the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture at the University of California Berkeley for granting her the Magistretti Fellowship which provided crucial resources needed to conduct this research.

Notes

1. All correspondence used in this paper is from the Elizabeth Catherine Duval alias Nielsen File, found in the Charity Organization Society Papers at the Butler Library, University of Columbia. As a shorthand, I refer to this as the Forbes–Nielsen archive.

2. These gender assumptions were racialised specifically with differing expectations attached to different racial groups; tropes of white femininity and white masculinity were produced as the hegemonic ‘norm’. While sexual perversion functioned as one of the central fulcrums for the animation of multiple deviancies as deployed in various contexts, the social consequences differed greatly, depending on racialised categories.

3. Spivak has noted that the term ‘subaltern’ has a specific meaning within post-colonial criticism that does not stretch to include any oppressed or marginalised group, as it is frequently (mis)used in current critical work. I use this term here for two reasons: first, to draw on the tradition of archival criticism within post-colonial theory, which has focused on the particular problem of recuperating subjects with agency from within the archive that has formulated and repressed them as non-subjects; and second, to engage with the body of recent critical work that uses ‘subaltern’ in the very manner that Spivak critiques, that is, when discussing archives of various oppressed and marginalised groups. See de Kock (1992).

4. In a letter dated 31 August 1906, to Charles F. Weller, Esq. General Secretary for the Associated Charities Washington DC, Forbes explained that Nielsen ‘came to notice about a month ago’.

5. Forbes' focus on the ‘unnaturalness’ of Nielsen's embodiment may also suggest that an imbedded premise of the methodological practices of police identification was that a crime was always, in some way, about questions of fraudulence, authenticity, and deception; that the ‘criminal’ body was, then, necessarily duplicitous.

6. The Oxford English Dictionary lists the earliest English use of the term as 1887 in a text by L.C. Smither. In 1901 Havelock Ellis uses the term systematically in his discussion of female inversion, which includes a long passage on the high ‘frequency of homosexual acts among prostitutes’ (1901, 148).

7. Forbes believed Nielsen had a sexual relationship with Harrison and that she was extorting money from him. Given the implication in Forbes' letter that Harrison might still be engaged with Nielsen—either willingly or because she was blackmailing him—it is possible that he passed Forbes' threat onto her.

8. When Nielsen sued Forbes, the lawyers for the NYCOS hired other lawyers not connected to the NYCOS to represent Forbes; a sign, perhaps, that the organisation was nervous about being connected to the case.

9. In December 1909 Forbes opened his own agency, ‘The National Association for the Prevention of Mendicancy and Charitable Imposture’. Forbes continued to be cited in newspapers as an expert in mendicancy and graft as late as 1914. However, he had difficulty raising money for his work. Over the next few years, potential financial contributors, aware that Forbes was no longer ‘supervised’ by the NYCOS, did not donate money to his charity.

10. Susan Schweik (re)discovered this file while conducting research in the NYCOS charity case files, which are now housed in the Butler Library at Columbia University. I thank her for encouraging me to work this archive.