An Archive of Feelings

by Cvetkovich, Ann; Goldberg, Jonathan; Moon, Michael; Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky

• ISBN13: 9780822330769
• ISBN10: 0822330768
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-03-01
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

In this bold new work of cultural criticism, Ann Cvetkovich develops a queer approach to trauma. She argues for the importance of recognizing-and archiving-accounts of trauma that belong as much to the ordinary and everyday as to the domain of catastrophe. Cvetkovich contends that the field of trauma studies, limited by too strict a division between the public and the private, has overlooked the experiences of women and queers. Rejecting the pathologizing understandings of trauma that permeate medical and clinical discourses on the subject, she develops instead a sex-positive approach missing even from most feminist work on trauma. An Archive of Feelings challenges the field to engage more fully with sexual trauma and the wide range of feelings in its vicinity, including those associated with butch-femme sex and aids activism and caretaking.An Archive of Feelings brings together oral histories from lesbian activists involved in act/up New York; readings of literature by Dorothy Allison, Leslie Feinberg, Cherríe Moraga, and Shani Mootoo; videos by Jean Carlomusto and Pratibha Parmar; and performances by Lisa Kron, Carmelita Tropicana, and the bands Le Tigre and Tribe 8 . Cvetkovich reveals how these cultural formations-activism, performance, and literature-give rise to public cultures that both work through trauma and transform the conditions producing it. By looking closely at connections between sexuality, trauma, and the creation of lesbian public cultures, Cvetkovich makes those experiences that have been pushed to the peripheries of trauma culture the defining principles of a new construction of sexual trauma-one in which trauma catalyzes the creation of cultural archives and political communities.Also of interestFemale masulinityJudith Halberstam0-8223-2243-9 PB £13.95

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(14)
The Everyday Life of Queer Trauma	15	(34)
Trauma and Touch: Butch-Femme Sexualities	49	(34)
Sexual Trauma/Queer Memory: Incest, Lesbianism, and Therapeutic Culture	83	(35)
Transnational Trauma and Queer Diasporic Publics	118	(38)
AIDS Activism and Public Feelings: Documenting ACT UP's Lesbians	156	(49)
Legacies of Trauma, Legacies of Activism: Mourning and Militancy Revisited	205	(34)
In the Archive of Lesbian Feelings	239	(34)
Epilogue	273	(16)
Appendix: A Note on Interviews	289	(2)
Notes	291	(36)
Filmography	327	(2)
Bibliography	329	(16)
Index	345