An Archive of Girl-Power

Hey folks, sorry its taken me so long to get this sophomore posting up. I hope in the future to post more regularly, but we’ve had some thrilling goings on ‘round these parts. Also, I'm not totally convinced that this post necessarily properly belongs to this tiny portion of the internet, because, though decidedly queer, it tends to be a little more academic in focus than I had planned. As a result, this posting has been cross-posted at my good friend/parent/exact-same-person blog, Heterocide (You thought it was dead, didn't you?). At the risk of alienating some of my readers, then, I want to take a moment to think publicly (and briefly) about Ann Cvetkovich's lecture "Queer Ephemerality and the Counterarchives," before moving on to some hopefully more interesting material. (Really though, if you want to skip ahead, I won't be offended. And even if I am, I'll probably just leave a passive-aggressive whiteboard/post-it note about it.)

Ann Cvetkovich has come to town, and left the College Park area feeling a touch of archive fever. I will first say that her lecture was fantastic. Most thrilling of all, especially for a young English major with a penchant for getting up his own ass about theory, Ann's work doesn't originate in the academic sphere, something which usefully underscores the usually vexed link between scholarship and activism.

During the lecture, Ann said something to the effect that objects/archives "take the form of labors performed on them." Apart from feeling weirdly Marxist, this suggests an implicit phenomenological undercurrent to Ann's work, or at least makes me think of Sara Ahmed, who says, similarly, that bodies tend to take the shape of their orientations to objects and spaces. I find this interplay of objects, spaces, and bodies to be quite fascinating, and perhaps we can understand (or at least theorize) bodies to be archival materials in their own right. I wonder, then, how bodies might differently enable knowledge production and might shape the conceptual contours of the archive in decidedly queer ways. As a final speculative question, what do bodies archive?

Can we then understand bodies to be affective objects in the same way that other archival objects are (Ann Cvetkovich is quite interested in recovering the affective register of archived objects)? On the one hand, I guess this seems fairly self-evident, even if deceptively complicated. People create emotional attachments to bodies (their own and others), which in turn becomes a kind of affective labor that shapes both the subject and object of said emotional attachment. (After all, aren't we the primary objects of our own emotions?) This line of reasoning seems to suggest a complicated matrix of bodies, emotions, and selves, where, at the very least, we become archives (both psychic and physical) of our own emotions. Conclusion: Bodies are weird, but neat.

At any rate, when Sara Ahmed and Ann Cvetkovich release their co-authored article/book, I expect to get an acknowledgment. And maybe some royalties. 

Alright, alright, here endeth the academic bumbling. Please accept this very funny comic as a palate cleanser. 

For those of you who caught the grammy's (I did not), I hope you saw this fantastic tribute to Aretha Franklin. Queer or not, there's too much girl power on that stage to ignore. I can even forgive Christina Aguilera for being generally tasteless, even if she is fantastic. I was pleasantly surprised by Florence, whom I absolutely adore but is generally pretty rough live. Finally, this tribute gets a little awkward at moments because Yolanda Adams might actually be a better singer than Aretha herself. I won't tell. Enjoy, folks.

                                                                                                                                   Will Danger

(Image thieved from The Guardian)