An Archive of Feelings: Notes

Notes from An Archive of Feelings

Introduction:

• “I want to place moments of extreme trauma alongside moments of everyday emotional distress that are often the only sign that trauma’s affects are still being felt.” Pg 3.
o Is there a thread here—between the “trauma” of larger events…such as trials about sexuality/cross-dressing/and masculinity, and the everyday quotidian trauma of being out, of having a visibly deviant sexuality (this may link well to Who Was That Man)
• “I wanted the sexual cultures that AIDS threatened to be acknowledged as both an achievement and a potential loss.” Pg 5.
• “Like the dyke sexual cultures I write about the AIDS culture that compels me embraces camp, shame, and the perverse and resists therapeutic models of sickness and health.” Pg 5.
o AIDS and camp, both Who Was That Man and Velvet Goldmine embrace pre-Stonewall/pre-AIDS sexual cultures. Even when covering the AIDS epidemic…AIDS endures a curious silence
• “Idiosyncrasies of emotional life” Pg 7.
• “sites of investigation…are not intended to constitute an exhaustive survey but to represent examples of how affective experience can provide the basis for new cultures.” Pg 7.
• The relationship between new genres and trauma—genres that ‘call into being collective witnesses and publics.” Pg 7.
• “Its focus on trauma serves as a point of entry into a vast archive of feelings, the many forms of love, rage, intimacy, grief, shame, and more that are part of the vibrancy of queer cultures.” Pg 7.
• “Gay and lesbian cultures often leave ephemeral and unusual traces” Pg 8.
• “Memory becomes a valuable historical resource “Pg 8.
• Is the glitter scene evident in Velvet Goldmine similar to NYC’s lower-East side where “performance cultures and queer publics are mutually constituting.” Pg 9.
• Stress importance not only of performers, but who constitutes the audience? “Creating community.” Pg 9.
• Like Bartlett, Cvetkovich seeks to confront the problem that “gay and lesbian activist histories, which are constantly being erased by resistance and neglect.” Pg 10.
• “It is my hope that making the history of the present more strange will produce a new sense of how to approach the history of the past.” Pg 10. (Making strange—Brechtian influence?)
• “Investigation of the affective life of lesbian cultures is motivated in particular by my dissatisfaction with responses to homophobia that takes the form of demands for equal rights, gay marriage, domestic partnership, and even hate-crimes legislation. Such political agendas assume a gay citizen whose affective fulfillment resides in inclusion, assimilation, and normalcy.” Pg 11.
o Similarly, Velvet Goldmine resists this, as does Who Was That Man’s embrace of effeminacy. How do other texts fit in?
• “These queer lesbian archives and documentaries deserve a place alongside Holocaust and war memorials because they make room for the intimate histories demanded by emotion and sexuality.” Page 14.
• Does my thesis make arguments about affect and the city (London, Dublin)…I am beginning to now realize that my thesis is more about queer public cultures (glitter, theatre communities, everyday performance/visibility)
• What are each of my genres? How do they fit within other traditions?
• What about AIDS/Apocalypse? Does that re-write of Dorian Gay have a place in my thesis?

Chapter 1

• “Trauma and modernity thus can be understood as mutually constitutive categories; trauma is one of the affective experiences, or to use Raymond Williams’ phrase, “structures of feeling,” that characterizes the lived experience of capitalism. Other Marxist theorists, most noticeably Walter Benjamin, have taken up the category of shock as a way of describing modern life, particularly in urban contexts, in an effort to character its effects on the sense.” Pg 17.
• “I’m concerned with trauma as a collective experience that generates collective responses.” Pg 19.
• Borrowed from critical race studies, trauma passed down through generations (how does this work in the geneology of texts generated by Wilde-obsessed writers and artists?) Pg 20.
• “Unpredictable surges of feeling.” Pg 20.
• Is Who Was That Man? Solo-performance-esque? “Forced to draw on memory and personal experience to construct an archive in the wake of a dominant culture that provides either silence of homophobic representations of their lives, queers have used solo-performance as a forum for personal histories that are also social or cultural ones.” Pg 26.
o Of what other genres is this true? Look at Who Was that Man.
• “A notable feature of the project of examining national history as trauma history is the emphasis on the role of personal memory in the construction of public histories and memorials.” Page 37.
• “The turn to memory is also a turn to the affective of felt experience of history as central to the construction of public cultures.” Pg 37.
• Queer performance gives expression to the cultural memory that is otherwise lost to amnesia.” Page 41.
• ‘Even though Butler doesn’t name it as such, the normalization of sex and gender identities can be seen as a form of insidious trauma, which is effective precisely because it often leaves no sign of a problem.” Pg 46.
• “An important agenda for queer studies, then, is an inquiry into the nuances and idiosyncrasies of how people actually live their sexual and emotional lives.” Pg 47.
• “As Sedgwick and others have noted, the reclamation of shame constitutes an alternative to the model of gay pride, carving out new possibilities for claiming, queer, gay, and lesbian identities that don’t involve a repudiation of the affects brought into being by homophobia.” Pg 47.
o I am really interested in this idea…might this relate to all of my texts?

Chapter 2

• Based on Dinshaw: “There are resonant juxtapositions between past and present whose explanatory power is not causal or teleological; instead, the affective charge of investment, of being “touched” brings the past forward into the present.” Pg 49..
• “To be emotionally touched, like being traumatized, is to be affected in a way that feels physical even if it is also a psychic state.” Pg 51.
• Touch, a “breach of bodily boundaries, it creates a continuum between the physical and the psychic, between the sexual and the emotional.” Pg 51.
• “Literary publics.” Pg 52.
• On butch/femme writings, “Without being essentializing, they use the body as a ground for negotiating social relations, finding, for instance, within the sexual intimacy of the couple practices that address the experiences of homophobia, shame, and abjection in the public world.” Pg 56.
• Discussion of receptivity as active, potentially interesting to think of when talking about the gay femme sexualities in my work.
• “If anything is traumatic, it is lack of sexual attention; getting fucked serves as an antidote to fears that one’s sexual desires are perverse or inappropriate.” Pg 59.
o Think about this in relationship to Arthur in Velvet Goldmine, also, Curt Wilde’s response to incest.
• “Distinctions between being opened and being closed are connected to those between feeling and not feeling, and are mapped onto the body by symbolic processes; physical touch becomes emotional touch, but the body also serves as the materialization of social processes.” Pg 70.
• “Emotional style.” Pg 71.
• “Emotional literacy.” Pg 76.

Chapter 3

• “Too often, lesbian subcultures that focus on healing from abuse and those that encourage sexual exploration have been constructed, and constructed themselves, as mutually exclusive, repeating anew the schism between pleasure and danger, and ignoring the fact that one of the most interesting things about sex is it so frequently refuses that distinction.” Pg 88.
• Develops an approach to how queerness may be a positive response to incest/sexual abuse.
• “Breaking the silence” as a queer process. Pg 92.
• “The work of breaking the silence about sexual abuse, like coming out, has to be understood as an ongoing process and performance, not as a punctual event.” Pg 94.
• Relationship between pleasure and power. Pg 103.
• “[Dorothy Allison’s] stories are per formative; they seek to do something, not merely to name or represent, and thus as performances, they are able to enact this necessary transformation.” Pg 110.
• What is queer about sexuality other than the gender of one’s object choice?

Chapter 4

• “The fetishization of objects can be one way of negotiating the cultural dislocation produced by immigration.” Pg 118.
• “Queer sexualities can disrupt cultural and state nationalisms that presume and enforce heteronormativity.” Pg 121.
• “Cultural reception and production as a means of moving beyond “imagined communities.” Pg 121.
• Queer exiles.
• “Like so many minoritarian autobiographies, Claudia’s specific and personal story is also a collective one.” Pg 126.
• “Not only print culture, the medium of the eighteenth century public sphere, but film and video, as well as the internet link people across disparate geographies, histories, and identities”—resulting in cultural visibility. Pg 132.
• “Cultural texts not only represent a transnational queer public life but actually bring it into being.” Pg 133.
• “Cultural texts and their authors provide the foundation for publics, yet they can also be tokenized so that a single work of person substitutes for a range of experiences.” Pg 133. is there a way, especially in Velvet Goldmine, that a single text allows for the expression of a vast range of experiences? Structure? Glam rock juxtaposed against the quotidian interviews of former lovers? A continuum. Furthermore, is it possible that this is what is so brilliant about my Wilde archive? Despite their linkage by Wilde, each of my texts is incredibly different. Is this the location of the “gross discrepancies”
• Ann Cvetkovich writes that the film Kush “seek[s] to be itself erotic, not just to be about the erotic.” Pg 137…
• Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet—something has meaning by virtue of being a secret. Pg 145.
• “The exposure of a sexual secret, whether lesbianism or incest, is connected to trauma.” Pg 146.
• “She emphasizes how Tyler’s queer capacity for identification leads him to elicit Mala’s history and bind it to his own.” Pg 154…. link this to both Who Was That Man and Velvet Goldmine
• “She makes room for an emotional vocabulary that goes far beyond the notion of the happily assimilated or pathologically unassimilated migrant in order to articulate the possibility of cultures that remain livable even when transformed by trauma.” Pg 155.
Chapter 5

• “The AIDS crisis, like other traumatic encounters with death, has challenged strategies for remembering the dead, forcing the invention of new forms of mourning and commemoration.” Pg 156.
• “When is it important to move on and when is it useful, if painful, to return to the past?” Pg 156.
• “Sturken focuses on the Vietnam War and AIDS as defining moments that generate ‘cultural memory,’ a process of politicized history making in which the nation uses representation in order to work through trauma.” Pg 161.
• “It may be a necessity, rather than a luxury to consider trauma’s impact on sexual life or how its effects are mediated through other forms of oppression such as homophobia.” Pg 163.

Chapter 6

• “Memoir has the potential to explore motional terrain that is harder to get at through interviews; the sanctuary of writing, its privacy and deliberateness, potentially offers an arena for emotional honesty that is different from the live performance of an interview.” Pg 210.
• “queer dimension” pg 213.
• Phelan—“the social death of homophobia.” Pg 236

Chapter 7

• “Lesbian and gay history demands a radical archive of emotion in order to document intimacy, sexuality, love and activism—all areas of experience that are difficult to chronicle through the materials of a traditional archive. Furthermore, gay and lesbian archives address the traumatic loss of history that has accompanied sexual life and the formation of sexual publics, and they assert the role of memory and affect in compensating for institutional neglect.” Pg 241.
• “Central to traumatic memory is what Toni Morrison, in the context of remembering slavery, has called emotional memory, those details of experience that are affective, sensory, often highly specific, and personal.” Pg 242.
• “As another legacy of Stonewall, itself an important and elusive subject for the archive, gay and lesbian archives have sought to preserve not only the record of successful efforts to combat homophobia and create a public gay and lesbian culture, but also the evidence from periods ‘before Stonewall” of many different forms of sexual public cultures.” Pg 242.
• “The archives should share the political and cultural world of its people and not be located in an isolated building that continues to exist while the community dies.” Quoted from Nestle, Pg 250.
• “The archivist of queer culture must proceed like the fan or collector whose attachment to objects is often fetishistic, idiosyncratic, or obsessional.” Pg 253.
• Nexus
• “post-memory” pg 261
• “The importance of fantasy as a way of creating history from absences, so evident in queer documentary and other cultural genres, demands creative and alternative archives. In the case of both traumatic and gay and lesbian histories, grassroots archives and the archives preserved by cultural forms move pas the impossibility of the archive articulated by Derrida toward collections of texts and objects that embody the sentiments and obsessions of archive fever” Pg 271.

Epilogue

• Crossover success of films such as Boys Don’t Cry suggests “when trauma arrives in the national public sphere, it leaves its queer dimensions behind…When the lesbian, queer or transgendered becomes simply the human, something important is lost.” Pg 277