Wednesday, June 11, 2014

"Bodies That Matter": Searching for Queer Bodies in Queer Archives by Marika Cifor


It is the work of queer archives to “find and imagine an archive or collection of historical traces in spaces that have often been overlooked.”[1] The possibilities of queer archives “to conjure,” a term used by sociologist Avery Gordon to describe a “particular form of calling up and calling out the forces that make things what they are in order to fix and transform a troubling situation,” is central to creating radically open, contestable and contradictory archives that queer histories, queer people and their traces demand.[2] A (re)focus on the body has been one of queer theory’s most valuable and interesting scholarly contributions. Drawing inspiration from queer information studies scholar Jamie Lee’s working conception of a “Queer/ed Archival Methodology” (Q/M) to develop strategies aimed at ensuring that “complex, contradictory and non-normative histories have their place in society’s record” this post will look at the often overlooked place of the actual physical queer body in the queer archives. This search will point towards the larger need to conjure up the bodies and their traces that haunt the archives more broadly.[3] I ground my queer theoretical analysis in the pit stains of a t-shirt, literal traces of physical bodies of the gay leathermen that haunt the ONE National Lesbian and Gay Archives.
            The white cotton t-shirt in my hands features in small size on right breast and in large scale on its back the logo, a cowboy hat emblazed with the word “Stud” riding atop the classic black leather motorcycle boot, of the Stud.[4] The Stud on Melrose was a Los Angeles bar serving the gay male leather community until it was sold and renamed in 1988.[5] The gay leather community has a long history in Los Angeles, the home of the Satyrs Motorcycle Club, the first gay motorcycle club in 1954 and many of the earliest leather bars in America. This t-shirt, one of many hundreds in ONE’s expansive t-shirt collection bears the physical marks of its history, twin yellow stains of perspiration creep out from the armpits, marking this as an artifact that has lived a life beyond safety of the Hollinger box in which it now resides.[6] These perspiration marks are evidence not only of past wear, but also ask us to reckon with in the words of archival studies scholar Verne Harris “more than evidence of what is past,” in the artifact and archives there is also always story, imagination and future to consider within the trace that remains.[7]
            The story, the mostly unknown provenance, of this t-shirt begs me to imagine the queer body that wore it, that marked its surface, as well as the queer bodies that have touched in its second life in the archives. It calls for me to queer, to consider an object beyond what is considered normal, normative, legitimate, proper, or expected, my understandings of the place of bodies in archives.[8] Like Lee I see queering as a verb “working on and within the archive” intervening in the conventional, the proper and hegemonic power dynamics of many archives and archival practices.[9] According to Lee, “as a methodology, queer must relate to the epistemological and world-making endeavor of archives built specifically to represent voices and peoples that are often excluded from what is considered proper, professional, and traditional archives.[10] The ONE is such an archives founded to collect and preserve materials related to LGBTQ topics, issues, communities and individuals.[11] There are concerns about the cleaning up queer history, making it confirm homonormative values. Looking at and collecting the history of queer bodies, particularly the bodies of gay leathermen, ensures that queer history was never and will never be proper. The leathermen who challenged with their bodies, desires, and relations the legitimate, the normal and the normative deserve a queer consideration in the archives.
I use a queer method to argue that archives are haunted by the slippery presences and absences of physical bodies, of those the documented and undocumented, and of those who perform archival labors. Used to colloquially to describe the lingering, the poignant and evocative presences that make difficult to either ignore or forget them the idea of hauntings is central to queer archives and to my examination of the Stud t-shirt. A more theoretical take on haunting by Gordon in her seminal work Ghostly Matters describes it as “an animated state of unresolved social violence is making itself know, sometimes very directly, sometimes more obliquely.”[12] Thus hauntings for Gordon are the feelings or senses that something is happening out there that we cannot see or that altogether fails sight; ghosts are then the empirical proof of such hauntings, “that special instance of the merging of the visible and the invisible.”[13] She uses “ghost stories” as the means through which we make ghosts visible and by which we actually make worlds by narrating ourselves into a particular account of the world. Bodies, while not usually physically present in archival collections or our descriptions of them, nevertheless haunt them and creating a particularly queer kind of connection that transcends normative bounds of space and time, signaling towards an archives that is always still becoming.[14]
The queer body is an important focus for queer people, practices, lives and their archives. While not reducible to bodies and their desires, queerness often is lived in and articulated through physical bodies. In addition to intellects and affects, it is through their physical bodies and their excretions that many gay leathermen expressed their desires, sexualities, and in the coming together of bodies in spaces like the Stud built communities, identities, stories, and futures. The choices of these men to express through their bodies queer forms of masculinity, to have and to live out their non-normative, both within and outside of the gay community, desires, fantasies and practices calls needed attention to the urgency of documenting complex, contradictory and non-normative (queer) histories in the archives. These are stories that can sometimes only be told through bodies and their traces. Queer studies has always had a significant focus on bodies in their various states. These engagements range from the queer responses to neglect, dismissal, and erasure of our histories by dominant cultural forces to reclaiming a queer past and producing queer histories that account for the complex, non-normative, and even the contradictory.[15] Particularly notable is the work on sexology and its bio-political strategies for the control, management and disciplining of bodies and their non-normative desires and identities.[16] From the initial construction of modern homosexuality in the 19th century, the body has been central to both scientific and popular constructions.[17] The body’s features were examined, identified, measured and mapped to classify sexual deviance according to various typologies and to find the distinguishing features of same-sex desire.[18] Many queer historians’ efforts have reclaimed the examinations of the queer body for queer people. Other notable engagements with bodies include the work of queer theorists such as Judith Butler in Bodies that Matter on examining how the power of heterosexual hegemony forms the “matter” of bodies, sex, and gender arguing that power operates to constrain sex from the start, delimiting what counts as a viable sex and furthering her work on “performativity.” Bodies, and particularly queer ones, have been neglected in archival studies and practices.
The story of physical bodies and archives is underexplored territory for archival studies despite the central importance of the body in lived experience. The primary work on the relations of bodies and archives has been done scholars of performance, particularly dance and including queer performances. This work by scholars such as Diana Taylor, Laura Griffiths and Andre Lepecki has argued that in the context of performance the living physical body can even serve as an “archival document”, where the “lived, embodied traces of performances do not disappear but reside in the bodies…of those who encountered the performance.”[19] In addition to this work, there is a long history in archives of the contending with and of the collecting realia including certain bodily remnants and remains such as locks of hair, often kept and given as mementos of particular lives as was fashionable in the Victorian era.[20] More recently archival discourse has engaged with the idea of tattoos as archival records that cannot exist independently of the bodies they mark and as archival records challenging the norms of Western notions of archives.[21] The physical bodies and their roles in performing archival labors, doing research, processing, or providing access are also often ignored outside of the contexts of practical concerns such as the leaving of finger prints on the surface of archival photographs. Queering the archives opens it to new understandings and examinations of the physical, intellectual and affective dimensions of archival labors. Some queer stories are told through bodies be they in performance, bodies that suffer, or bodies that survive and leave their traces. Bodies, their remains, traces, and excretions tell unique and important stories the lived experiences of queer lives. Sanitizing queer histories of bodies by refuse the presence of bodily excretions point to the places where conformity to archival norms, though necessary at times, can also be “treacherous”[22] The catalog records for the t-shirt collection at ONE for example point to the sizes, colors, and inscriptions of the t-shirts, but ignore the bodies that once occupied them and the traces that remain. The absences of bodies, through sanitary efforts or benign neglect, point to other failings of the archives and archival descriptions to live up to their potentials. Bodies are also central to exploring the affective potentialities of the archives. It is through bodies and our slipping by and bumping up against other bodies, broadly defined, that we experience affect. Queer theorist Ann Cvetkovich has compellingly argued that “gay and lesbian history demands a radical archive of emotion in order to document intimacy, love, and activism—all areas of experience that are difficult to chronicle through the materials of the traditional archive.”[23] A deep consideration of bodies is needed to build queer archives.
Those two misshapen, yellowed and creeping stains of perspiration, those traces of queer bodies and their excretions are the ghosts that haunt the queer archives. It is high time to reopen the Hollinger box. By searching for the ghosts that haunt us, by conjuring up bodies and their traces we can queer, radically opening the archives. Opening the archives to queer bodies as evidence, and to stories they tell as well as the possibilities for the future they open up allows for an understanding of the archives that is always queer and always becoming.[24]

Works Cited

Calano, Mark Joesph. “Archiving bodies: Kalinga batek and the im/possibility of an archive,” Thesis 11 112, No. 1(October 2012): 98-112.

Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003.

Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

DeSilvey, Caitlin. “Art and archive: memory-work on a Montana homestead.” Journal of Historical Geography 33, 7 (2007): 878-900.

“GAR0876.” ONE T-Shirt Collection, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, USC Libraries, University of Southern California.

Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination.
Mankato: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Griffiths, Laura. “Between bodies and the archive: situating the act.” International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media 9, No. 1 (2013): 183-195.

Harris, Verne. “Genres of the Trace: Memory, Archives and Trouble.” Archives and Manuscripts 40, No. 3 (2012): 147-157.

Lee, Jamie. “Beyond Pillars of Evidence: Exploring the Shaky Ground of Queer/ed Archives and Their Methodologies.” In Research in the Archival Multiverse edited by Anne Gilliland, Andrew Lau, and Sue McKemmish, Forthcoming.

Los Angles Leather History. “Los Angeles Leather History Timeline.” Accessed June 5, 2014. http://laleatherhistory.weebly.com/la-leather-history-timeline.html

Lutz, Deborah. “The Dead Still Among us: Victorian Secular Relics, Hair Jewelry and death culture.” Victorian Literature and Culture 39 (2011): 127–142.
Marcus, Sharon. “Queer Theory for Everyone: A Review Essay,” Signs 31 (1) (2005): 191-128.
ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives. “History.” Accessed June 5, 2014.

Terry, Jennifer. “Anxious Slippages between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’: A Brief History of the Scientific Search for Homosexual Bodies.” In Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture, edited by Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. 129-169.

Wright, Kirsten. “Recording ‘a very particular Custom’: Tattoos and the Archive.” Archival Science 9 (2009): 99–111.




[1] Jamie Lee, “Beyond Pillars of Evidence: Exploring the Shaky Ground of Queer/ed Archives and Their Methodologies,” from Research in the Archival Multiverse, Anne Gilliland, Andrew Lau, and Sue McKemmish, eds. Forthcoming, 26.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid, 6.
[4] GAR0876, ONE T-Shirt Collection, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, USC Libraries, University of Southern California.
[5] The Stud was sold to new owners who named it The Zone, which became Griff's about six months later and stayed open for 5 years. It was sold in 1993 and re-opened as The Faultline in 1994.” Los Angeles Leather History, “Los Angeles Leather History Timeline.”
[6] The author is indebted to Rebecka Sheffield’s off-chance mention of stains on another t-shirt in the collections of the Canadian Gay and Lesbian Archives that sparked this search.
[7] Verne Harris, “Genres of the Trace: Memory, Archives and Trouble,” Archives and Manuscripts 40, No. 3 (November 2012), 153.
[8] Lee, 6.
[9] Ibid., 11.
[10] Ibid., 6.
[11] ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, “History.”
[12] Ibid., 18.
[13] Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Mankato: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 24.
[14] Lee, 7.
[15] Lee, 2; Sharon Marcus, “Queer Theory for Everyone: A Review Essay,” Signs 31, no. 1 (2005), 201.
[16] Lee, 15.
[17] Jennifer Terry, “Anxious Slippages between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’: A Brief History of the Scientific Search for Homosexual Bodies,” in Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture eds. Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 129.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Laura Griffiths, “Between bodies and the archive: situating the act,” International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media 9, No. 1 (2013), 186.
[20] Caitlin DeSilvey, “Art and archive: memory-work on a Montana homestead,” Journal of Historical Geography 33, 7 (2007), 878-900; Deborah Lutz, “The Dead Still Among Us: Victorian Secular Relics, Hair Jewelry and death culture,” Victorian Literature and Culture 39 (2011), 127–142.
[21] Kirsten Wright, “Recording ‘a very particular Custom’: Tattoos and the Archive,” Archival Science 9 (2009), 99–111;  Mark Joesph Calano, “Archiving bodies: Kalinga batek and the im/possibility of an archive,” Thesis 11 112, no 1(October 2012), 98-112.
[22] Lee, 13.
[23] Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings:  Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 241.
[24] For more on the archives as always in a state of becoming see Jacques Derrida, Archive fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 11, 91.

Thursday, June 5, 2014

Whither Diversity?: The Society of American Archivists and the Racial Divide



Notwithstanding efforts to the contrary, the archival profession continues to suffer from the ongoing marginalization of change and difference due to its unrecognized or under-recognized aversion to disinterring the normative whiteness that continues to lie at the heart of its motivations. Despite rolling out the proverbial welcome mat for ‘diversity’ in some of its programs and policies, and exhibiting an enthusiastic tolerance for difference, representative organizations in the United States, such as the Society of American Archivists (SAA), continue to maintain structural change at arms length. Anecdotal evidence of the lack of non-white bodies within the profession and at organizational events was recently corroborated by a Membership Needs & Satisfaction Survey published by SAA in the Spring of 2012 which revealed that among individual respondents, only 3% were Latino, 3% were Asian, 2% were African American and 1% were Native American, with zero representation from Pacific Islanders or Alaskan Natives, and a shocking 89% self-identified as white/Caucasian.[1] Not only was this not addressed as a point of concern in the “Conclusions and Recommendations” section of this report but the only comment associated with these racial disparities is located in the section detailing loyalty to the organization which was difficult to measure given the low numbers of representative minorities.
The failed interest in the ramifications of this finding found parallels in the recent debate over the lack of consideration for the inclusion of diversity as a primary goal for SAA in a draft of its 2013-2018 strategic plan.[2] After several years of foregrounding it as a stated priority, the authors of the revised plan now argued that diversity was implied in its other goals and designs for the profession, and did not need to be explicitly stated. Under pressure from members,[3] SAA had to reconsider its oversight and included diversity as a core goal in a revised version of the plan.[4] Nevertheless, given the stated figures depicting a profession dominated by whiteness, it is not surprising that diversity, and particularly racial diversity, should be overlooked. In a socio-cultural and political environment purportedly experiencing a “post-racial” renaissance in which it is hardly necessary to give much consideration to racism and its concomitant structural disparities, SAA’s move to remove diversity as a stated goal and agenda item is unfortunately not surprising. Equally, organizational leadership’s belief in the ability to address diversity, in all of its manifestations, from within other points in its agenda, is further evidence of this investment in the idea of a society not in need of policies and practices that attempt to directly address its inequalities. Although SAA subsequently conducted an online survey soliciting membership opinion on “diversifying the archival record,”[5] the endemic whiteness of the profession will only continue to condemn it to committing the same mistakes if the organization’s, and, in turn, the profession’s own racial disparities are not addressed. Yes, you have efforts such as the Mosaic Scholarship, the Diversity Committee and the Harold T. Pinkett Minority Student Award,[6] all of which seek to redress this imbalance by funding the studies of students of color and fostering diversity initiatives. But, as Adrian Piper notes, these liberal gestures of nobility do little to address the primary reasons there are few people of color represented in the ranks of American archivists.[7]
            But what are the factors that contribute to this disparity and which continue to support whiteness as an archival norm? Of the sparse online comments to the aforementioned survey on “diversifying the archival record,” several noted the need for the archival profession to critically interrogate itself and its praxis, and to do the hard work of looking at its own socio-cultural and racial homogeneity.[8]  In addition, in what could have been a comment on participation in the survey itself, one individual noted attending a session on diversity in the profession at an SAA annual conference, only to find the room less than half full.[9] This rampant disinterest and lackadaisical, if passing, engagement with issues of diversity, and specifically racial diversity, is demonstrative of an inability to envision what is problematic about 89% of your colleagues being white. If whiteness is normative, if its privileged beneficiaries are unaware of the ways in which they are complicit and in positions of great advantage (that more than likely increase their prospects in the profession), then how is it possible to honestly contend with the issue of increasing diversity and changing the very system that suppresses it? Indeed, if one is vested with unquestioned power, why disrupt the structures that hand you that power and ultimately benefit you throughout your career? Are most archivists even aware of how whiteness ferries their lives and enables their success?
Well-intended as some archivists are, the very fact that the profession is predominantly white forecloses the possibility of having a dialogue about racial diversity, for example, due to the fact that the engine of homogeneity driving the profession is not perceived as a problem. As V. Chapman-Smith has pointed out, although population trends indicate that by 2050 the United States will be a majority minority nation, the pipeline currently feeding the archival profession, and its future leadership, stems from fields that are among “the whitest in the United States.”[10] Therefore, the profession will remain immune to change, and increased racial difference, as long as this remains the case. Moreover, Chapman-Smith astutely notes that rampant drop out rates among minorities, lack of early engagement with archives or other historical sources, and an educational system that places the bulk of minorities at a disadvantage, all contribute to keeping access to the archival profession limited.[11] Unless the profession and its leading organizations are willing to confront this fact, and develop and/or participate in policy initiatives and progressive political movements that address these structural problems, as roots of its lack of racial diversity, then the field will continue to be woefully absent of non-white bodies. Laudable as initiatives such as the Harold T. Pinkett Minority Student Award and the Mosaic Scholarship are, they regrettably only attend to the small fraction of people of color that have been able to overcome the structural obstacles that may have stood between them and higher education.[12]
Recognizing the link between educational and economic disparities, and the whiteness of the profession, is to also acknowledge how committing to diversity as a core organizational goal necessitates the examination of structural inequalities and one’s role in perpetuating them. So long as this is not done, the profession will continue to remain as homogenous in 2050 as it currently is. Of course, this is assuming that white archivists are willing to make the necessary changes and reflect upon their own privileged status. As noted before, given the systemic advantages of whiteness, it is an open question as to whether there is much impetus for change and/or self-interrogation within the profession. Are archivists and organizations such as SAA willing to push past a benign interpretation of diversity and prioritize a disruptive engagement with difference that undergirds their own position in the archival hierarchy? Will they ever help promote the growth of alternative perspectives, such as social justice and Critical Race Theory, which seek to question the method and madness, the whiteness, of the profession?
As noted earlier, the ongoing and increasing homogeneity of archivists is certainly a factor, but moreover it is the ideological fall out of this homogeneity, and blind spots engendered by its representative whiteness that act as barriers to the profession moving beyond its current approach to diversification. Rather than supplying facile solutions to what is a product of systemic racism and classism, can the profession commit itself to addressing its role in perpetuating these –isms and in pondering how and where it could intervene to diminish their impact on the make up of its membership? Moreover, instead of framing this as an enforced agenda that is outside the central concerns of archivists, can we begin to reify the notion that archivists are of the world and not somehow removed from it? How do we remind archivists that being an archivist does not somehow absolve them of also being a product of society, and therefore subject to its prejudices and assumptions? All of these questions and issues have ramifications for archivists’ interactions with donors, colleagues and researchers, and deeply inform their perspectives on the needs and direction of the profession.



[1]  Membership Needs & Satisfaction Survey, Accessed December 13, 2013, http://files.archivists.org/membership/surveys/saaMemberSurvey-2012r2.pdf.
[2] Draft, Strategic Plan (2013-2018), Accessed December 13, 2013, http://www2.archivists.org/governance/strategic-priorities/draftFY2013-18.
[3] Ibid. See comments section for select member reactions. In a move that belies his complex and contradictory relationship to difference, Mark A. Greene was one of the first individuals to critique the absence of diversity as a primary goal of the plan. He states: “Diversity of membership is not a matter of advocating for archives but of either advancing the field (by making its practitioners as diverse as the material they seek to acquire) or meeting members needs (I would argue we need (whether we know it or not) diverse colleagues to fully realize ourselves as professionals.” 
[4] Strategic Plan, 2013-2018, Accessed December 13, 2013, http://www2.archivists.org/governance/strategic-plan/2013-2018/actions.

[5] Poll: What Does Diversifying the Archival Record Mean to You?, Accessed December 13, 2013, http://www2.archivists.org/news/2013/poll-what-does-diversifying-the-archival-record-mean-to-you?.

[6] For more information, see: Mosaic Scholarship, Accessed December 13, 2013, http://www2.archivists.org/governance/handbook/section12-mosaic. Diversity Committee, Accessed December 13, 2013, http://www2.archivists.org/governance/handbook/section7/groups/Diversity. Harold T. Pinkett Minority Student Award, Accessed December 13, 2013, http://www2.archivists.org/governance/handbook/section12-pinkett. It should also be noted that I am the recipient of a similar fellowship from the American Library Association (ALA), the Spectrum Doctoral Fellowship.
[7] Piper, Out of Order, out of Sight. Vol. II. This issue also arises in the general Library and Information Studies field. Even when programs are deemed a success, the adherence to a benign desire for diversity proves challenging to maintaining them. See, Nicole A. Cooke, “The Spectrum Doctoral Fellowship Program: Enhancing the LIS Professoriate,” InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies 10, no. 1 (2014), https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7vb7v4p8.pdf. And again, Honma, “Trippin’over the Color Line: The Invisibility of Race in Library and Information Studies.” For a resounding critique of the ineffectiveness of these “diversity” programs in addressing structural problems, see again, Education, “Research Institute (AERI), Pluralizing the Archival Curriculum Group (PACG)(2011) Educating for the Archival Multiverse.”
[8] Poll: What Does Diversifying the Archival Record Mean to You?, Accessed December 13, 2013, http://www2.archivists.org/news/2013/poll-what-does-diversifying-the-archival-record-mean-to-you?. See comments by Jenny Swadosh and “astanley@athens.”
[9] Ibid., Comment was provided by “stev1084A.”
[10] V. Chapman-Smith, “Societal Trends and Archives Outreach: Constructing Roadmaps for Program Growth and Sustainability.” Presentation at the Center for Jewish History for its series of annual seminars, “Archival Leaders Advocate,” New York, NY, November 11, 2011. See Power Point presentation for further information, Accessed December 13, 2013, http://www.cjh.org/pdfs/11092011ArchivalLeadersAdvocateSeminar.pdf. For a video of the presentation, Accessed December 13, 2013, http://www.cjh.org/videoplayer.php?vfile=11112011CHAPMANSMITH.mp4&iframe&width=481&height=360.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Although not discussed here in great length, the Archival Education and Research Initiative (AERI) goes just a step further with its Emerging Archival Scholars program by recruiting and funding the attendance of potential doctoral students from diverse backgrounds to its annual summer institutes. See http://aeri.gseis.ucla.edu/fellowships.htm. Accessed April 5, 2014.