EVERYWHERE ARCHIVES

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Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Julian Carter, Rebekah Edwards and Don Romesburg for their transformative contributions to this article. Any errors are the author's alone.

Notes

1. See, for instance, Lee Edelman's No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), a psychoanalytic examination of the cultural assignation of queerness to negativity.

2. It might be useful to compare the ways in which race is and is not marked on YouTube with other Internet sites of exchange. Juana Rodriguez's (2002) ‘Confessions of a Latina Cyber-slut’ recounts a number of identitarian misapprehensions on an online chat site. Notably, the chat site and the troubles to which she refers involve only textual exchanges; there are no photos or video. Thus, the Internet itself encompasses a variety of economies of signification involving text, image, and video.

3. I refer here to Adrienne Rich's noted use of the term, in which she refers to the transnational politics of racial location in the context of the United States and its implications for feminism, specifically the societal (predominantly white, middle-class) location from which American feminisms were being dominantly shaped. See Rich (1986).

4. Renée M. Sentilles (2005) considers the complexities of the Internet as a possible resource for archival research and as a kind of ‘archive of archives’. She ends by settling the question of the Internet with a return to her preference for and belief in the superior experience of physical repositories: ‘[i]t is that human response to tangible artifacts that I have seen time and again in my students as well as myself that convinces me that virtual archives will never serve as more than a place to begin and end the research journey; never as a place to dwell’ (2005, 155).

5. See Wahng (2003) for a performative reading of Asian transgendering and for an examination of the combinatory possibilities that occur in multiple narrations of gendering.

6. It is notable that the US ‘Asian’ archive has its own priorities, to the tune of East Asians. Its representative centre is constituted by stereotypes about Chinese and Japanese gender systems in particular, while tending to bypass Filipino and South Asian genders. For a refreshing recent study of Filipino tomboy identity in relation to the co-production of Filipino masculinities in global transit, see Kale Bantigue Fajardo (2008).

7. See http://malepregnancy.com/ and its associated website, http://www.rythospital.com/2008/

8. The question seems to remain, in an economy of gender appropriateness both within and without racialised identity categories, how far is too far; when does troubling categorial edges slide into appropriation, and then what ethics are called for? A recent controversy erupted in the Femme Conference of 2008 in San Francisco, California, around the film Female to Femme (2006), which provocatively used the concept of ‘transitioning’ in mock interviews to describe a woman's shift in aesthetic and gender sensibility from ‘dyke’ or ‘lesbian’ to ‘femme’. Many people found the use of transition in this context offensive and trans-phobic.

9. Paisley Currah (2008) connects responses to Beatie's story to the recent debates about the status of transgender people in the formation of the US proposed bill, the Employment Non-discrimination Act (ENDA), which seeks to prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. After much controversy among activists and lawmakers about the inclusion of gender identity in a bill that was envisioned to address a core constituency of non-transgendered gays and lesbians, in 2009, for the first time in its years of attempted passage, ENDA included protections for gender identity as well as sexual orientation. However, despite bipartisan support at a September 2009 congressional hearing, the bill remains sidelined as of the time of writing of this article. The back and forth of the status of gender identity vis-à-vis sexual orientation suggests the uncertain political, epistemological, and affective position that ‘gender identity’, and/or ‘transgender bodies’, hold on the stage of national politics, mainstream LGBT organisations, and the US legal framework.