An archive of feelings Book

I wanted to read this on the strength of the article that later formed the chapter "in the archive of lesbian feelings", which deals explicitly with grassroots queer archives and the differences between grassroots and institutional archives. in this chapter, Cvetkovich claims that queer archives -- considered in the broadest sense as queer individuals' or communities' attachments to objects/artefacts -- are often formed of attachments to seemingly arbitrary or even homophobic things -- like old pulp novels with queer villains. that is, within a homophobic society, where overt queer representation might surface only rarely, the death of the author and the primacy of the reader's interpretation becomes a necessary assumption for psychic survival. that's why all your gay friends insist that louis and harry are totally doing it. what does it mean to preserve queer history when the most important artefacts for queer people -- especially queer women -- often aren't overtly queer in any way? what's the connection between this arbitrariness and the arbitrariness of traumatic associations like PTSD triggers? affective attachment in general? queerness is about feelings. how do you create an archive of feelings? cool question.

I was also really into the chapter on butch/femme identities and sexual practices, particularly the discussion of butch impermeability/imperturbability in Stone Butch Blues as a model of dealing with trauma that doesn't mandate that you "let it all out". I've been thinking a lot lately about how feminist activists and theorists can honour and centre trauma survivors and survival strategies without minimising trauma and violence, casting survivors as fundamentally broken, or, crucially, demanding complete openness to public scrutiny of traumatic experiences, and this was a helpful way to begin thinking about this.

So aspects of this book kind of blew my mind. My major criticism is of the complete absence of trans women. Like, this is a book that's very much about lesbian communities and the lesbian public sphere, and that deals extensively with the question of gatekeeping in lesbian communities, not to mention talking about the fucking Michigan Womyn's Music Festival (notorious for its explicit refusal of entry rights to trans women) in glowing terms. Not every book has to address everything, but in the context of longrunning struggles over the place of trans women in lesbian communities, this absence takes on the character of deliberate erasure.