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

ABSTRACT

This 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.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Marika Cifor is a Consortium for Faculty Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies at Bowdoin College. She earned her PhD in Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2017. Her research interests include affect, community archives, bodies and embodiment, and digital cultures. Together with Anne J. Gilliland, Cifor guest edited a special issue of Archival Science on ‘Affect and the Archive, Archives and Affects’. Her work has been published in Transgender Studies Quarterly, The American Archivist, Archival Science, Library Trends, and InterActions.

Notes

1. Men who have sex with men and who are sexually active are still banned from donating blood in the United States out of AIDS-related fears (Bennett 2009).

2. Full names are included in the File. To protect their privacy, I have omitted last names of subjects in this article.

3. As a term, trade sometimes also is used to indicate a conflict between sexual orientation versus sexual activities engaged in.