An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures

Series Q

by Ann Cvetkovich

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. An Archive of Feelings 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. She 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, Cherrie 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.

Genres: Queer, Nonfiction, Theory, LGBT, Feminism, History, Lesbian

368 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Ann Cvetkovich is Ellen C. Garwood Centennial Professor of English and Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. She is the author of Depression: A Public Feeling, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures, and Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism; a coeditor of Political Emotions; and a former editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.

Reviews

[TJ · Rating 2 out of 5]

An Archive of Feelings opens with gushing praise for Le Tigre/Kathleen Hanna and Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, which meant that I was wondering from page one if I could take seriously a work about trauma that is brazenly uncritical of sites of significant transmisogynistic trauma such as MichFest. Especially when it casts those sites as arenas where some rituals of healing for (a certain kind of) lesbian trauma survivor can occur. Cvetkovich describes a scene at trans woman exclusionary MichFest in which audience members mosh gleefully while Lynn Breedlove, wearing a dildo, 'castrates' herself on stage. I felt nauseous reading Cvetkovich's insistence that this performance held healing power for survivors of sexual trauma. It's hard for me to read the performance of 'mock castration' in a trans woman exclusionary space as anything other than a violent show of transmisogyny. Cvetkovich even included photos for us, and I felt extra, extra nauseous reading the caption to one of them: 'Let's play gang castrate.' This work is an archive, sure, but a limited one, and one that excludes many lesbians.

Aside from the transmisogyny, I was consistently underwhelmed by her analysis. She often seemed to be offering little more than a synopsis of the texts and films included in the work, and maybe that was just the book performing the work of the archive, but in any case it wasn't the most engaging reading. I just wanted more! Instead she'd move on from a piece of analysis just as I was ready to like, hear what she really had to offer me from it. In amassing an archive, here, something was lost, and I don't know if it necessarily had to be that way.

An Archive of Feelings is at its best with its oral history, which is a little funny given Cvetkovich's ambivalence toward oral history itself. But the project of documenting the lives of lesbians involved with ACT UP and their contributions during the crisis years of AIDS is so important. I still wish she'd done better, but I have to credit her some for having done it at all. It was clearly a failing that she only interviewed one woman of color, and no lesbians of color, and it left a sour taste in my mouth that she tried to excuse herself for this by highlighting that she interviewed some Jewish women and some women from working class backgrounds. She wrote that she thought "some of the pitfalls of ethnographic research could be avoided by sticking close to home [Manhattan] and interviewing people like me," but she doesn't go on to explain what these 'pitfalls' are, and it feels like a weird excuse to not even try to include voices of people who aren't 'like her' in a way that is non-tokenizing and as true to their experiences as they possibly can be, filtered through her ethnographic standpoint. I mean, throwing your hands up and saying 'I can't!' because you're a white researcher and thus excluding lesbians of color from your oral history project is just as much of a 'pitfall' as mishandling their histories. Right? She frames interviewing Marina Alvarez as a 'risk,' which is gross, and then uses Alvarez's one interview to claim that "Alvarez debunked any presumption that ACT UP was exclusionary by enthusiastically claiming a sense of kinship." Sounds like you're making a big claim out of one WOC's experience, Cvetkovich. I'm sure she would have found testimonies to the counter if she'd looked a little harder for them, but I have a feeling she didn't want to find them.
There was still a lot that was fascinating about the oral histories, as limited as they were. I especially liked that she didn't see interpersonal relations and dynamics as historically insignificant, and really loved reading about romantic relationships formed between ACT UP's gay men and lesbian women. The last chapter, which dealt most directly with archives, was one of the stronger chapters, too. It was a nice mini-history of gay and lesbian archives, especially the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and her writing about the importance of ephemera for gay and lesbian archives was great.

I don't even know how to tackle the epilogue, it was a bit of a mess and nicely (awfully) bookended the transmisogyny in the introduction. I mean, the whole thing is a great example of that tendency in lesbian communities to ""accept"" trans men in that fucked up, backwards way they do -- at least recognizing their existence and humanity. Like, even if Cvetkovich was sorta subtly 'claiming' Brandon Teena as a lesbian, she was at least recognizing the trauma of his death. That is much more than can be said of her position of absolute silence towards the existence of trans women. In context, her silence becomes sinister.

[Liz · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely amazing. I had read selected chapters from this before and was impressed, but reading the entire book just solidifies my initial reaction. Cvetkovich is a genius, and her ideas have influenced the way I work with trauma and will influence my future scholarship for sure.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

In An Archive of Feeling (2003), Ann Cvetkovich explores trauma through an archive of lesbian artifacts and interviews with lesbians. She is particularly "interested in how these lesbian sites give rise to different ways of thinking about trauma and in particular to a sense of trauma as connected to the textures of everyday experience" (3-4). For Cvetkovich, trauma isn't a single one-time event (such as September 11), but rather part of lived experience. Additionally, part of her goal is to understand trauma as something that can be foundational for public cultures, or "for creating counterpublic spheres rather than evacuating them" (15). Rather than psychologizing or medicalizing trauma, Cvetkovich sees trauma "as a social and cultural discourse that emerges in response to the demands of grappling with the psychic consequences of historical events" (18). Part of this includes, importantly, understanding trauma as not solely a private issue, but rather something that is part of public culture (here, queering the public/private distinction) (32).

Chapter 2 discusses butch-femme writings that "[trouble:] the ease with which negative assumptions about penetration ground a similarly negative sense of trauma that seems to go without saying" (52). Femmes, Cvetkovich argues, are not passive recipients of penetration from their butch partners, but rather active; she notes the impoverished language we have for sexuality and power that leads us to believe there is simply an active and a passive partner (59). Through public writings, butch-femme cultures have created ways of coping with trauma that isn't supported by dominant culture (81-82). Part of Cvetkovich's project is to question the rather straightforward ways in which standard therapeutic and political responses to trauma have attempted to cure trauma: "no simple prescription . . . can heal it" (117). Chapter 4 explores this in a transnational context, arguing that queering our understanding of trauma allows us to understand that the trauma of immigration does not have to "be 'healed' by a return to the 'natural' nation of origin or assimilation into a new one" (121). Rather, trauma can be a resource for creating new cultures (122).

Chapters 5 and 6 discuss her interviews with lesbians who have worked with AIDS activism. She draws on Laura Brown's work, which describes "insidious trauma" as "the ways in which punctual events, such as rape and sexual abuse, are linked to more pervasive and everyday experiences of sexism" (163). Chapter 7 discusses gay and lesbian archives as archives of affect and emotion.

Cvetkovich closes in her epilogue with some broader questions, including asking "Whose feelings count?" in national culture (278). Rather than a liberal, inclusive model that asks that lesbian feelings be included equally with others in national discourse, she in a way asks how feelings count. For example, she'd like to see responses to September 11 that don't respond by trying to heal trauma with dichotomies (us vs. them) and patriotism, but rather transnational responses.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is really an excellent book, and very teach-able. It, or individual chapters from it could be used in courses on on Holocaust or trauma studies, affect theory, psychoanalytic reading of popular culture, as well as GLBTQ, transnational culture, social movement history, /or gender pop culture more generally. Cvetkovich accessibly presents complicated and nuanced readings of a variety of texts and connects these readings to the way they are part of public cultures of feeling that we all live with.
Although Cvetkovich is not a historian, her chapter on AIDS activism could be very useful for historians who might be interested in the role that emotions play in politics. I thought her work on the archive and the politics of archives was the only weak one (I am usually annoyed by the somewhat dramatic or arch way that lit people write about "the archive" because they read Foucault or Derrida, even if they don't have extensive experience actually using archives or doing historical research. Historians might induce similar annoyance if they started writing about the importance of "the metaphor" or some other basic literary term.) That aside, her work on messy feelings that disrupt easier activist narratives, whether they are about incest survival, butch-femme experience, or even the Holocaust, is vital and important.

[Manuela g-a · Rating 5 out of 5]

quizá pueda sonar un poco exagerado decir que la lectura de este libro me ha cambiado la vida pero genuinamente soy una persona muy distinta a la que era antes de leerlo y también pienso mi identidad de una manera muy diferente.
no sé, pienso que nos lo deberíamos de leer todas y tener conversaciones muy largas sobre el y pensar en lo que dice porque es precioso y doloroso, importante y pequeño, punzante y suave al mismo tiempo.

[Franziska · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just found the ground work for my master’s thesis 💚

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

I decided to check this book out, after reading about how an article by Cvetkovich helped to inspire Le Tigre to write the song "Keep On Living".

This book deals with the many intersections between the queer community and the current discussions in trauma theory. It especially delves into issues with "confessing" versus "witnessing", and how the queer community's experiences with coming out create a more positive model for trauma survivor's to tell their stories and heal, contrasted with past models from the feminist movement and psychotherapy.

The writing is dense and heavy on theory, and is equally rich in its interpretation of literary and artistic works. I'm into that sort of thing, so I thought it was great. Honestly, this book covers so much ground related to trauma and sexuality that I wouldn't be doing it justice to even pretend to give a full overview. I'll just say that if you're interested in the topic, you should definitely read this book.

[homoness · Rating 2 out of 5]

transphobic in content, underachieving in theoretical ambition.

[Sof · Rating 5 out of 5]

<3 the queer wannabe gender studies / lit scholar’s bible

[Lauren Printy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have to give an archive of feelings 5/5 of the sheer scope and enduring nature of Ann cvetkovich’s writing. I first read this book around 10 years ago and I felt it resonated more with being older and having more ‘life experience’. I love the idea that archives are not static, when they are finished they are just beginning; they are live entities gathering richness through shifting contexts, landscapes and time. I have so many more thoughts to pen here about this book once it has resonated once again. Definitely worth a read and revisit again and again.

[Pierre-Luc Landry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely interesting book of queer cultural studies that I wish I had read a long time ago. There are obvious blind spots (including a refusal to address the transmisogyny of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival) and some outdated terms, but all in all it is an inspirational piece of cultural critique as well as an effective gateway into lesbian public cultures in the US of A. It is easier to traverse than Butler, less verbose than Sedgwick, and the repetitions can help readers keep on track.

[Sinta · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found some of the chapters revelatory (the initial chapter giving an overview of trauma studies, butch-femme lesbianism and incest and lesbianism). Cvetkovich is strongest when she stays close to her core specialty (lesbians and trauma... particularly sexual trauma). It is also an area where an affective approach is particularly insightful, given the very very direct relationship between sex and affective experience. This also re-appears in parts of the chapters on AIDS that focuses closely on emotional relationships and death.

Where she moves away from this, the theory quickly feels 'thin'. I found these sections to be filled with more motherhood statements, and focus more on the method of affective theory, and therefore try to prove the value of the approach through explicitly re-iterating the value of method rather than letting the insights it delivers speak for themselves (like they could in the chapters mentioned above). That, or she just delivers synopses of other media (especially in the transnational trauma chapter) that left me wondering where the actual analysis was

In saying all that, Cvetkovich's thesis is strong and well-made: that focusing on affective experience of trauma can be the source of public (or counterpublic) creation, and can open up new ways to think about living traumatic and "post-traumatic" lives that are not purely therapeutic / pathologised. I can see ample evidence of this in my own life. I have been happiest not when I've been trying to grapple with traumas through therapy or its prescriptions (e.g., everything from CBT to journaling, meditation, exercise) but when I situated it in its social / cultural context and connected with others from that context. This was the true healing impact of experiences like law school and participation in queer activism - not the class mobility necessarily, but the connections and understandings that grew from those social webs.

Quotes:

survival is as simple and as elusive as being able to ‘‘taste that sweet sweet cake.’’




The music helps return the listener to the pleasures of sensory embodiment that trauma destroys




name for experiences of socially situated political violence, trauma forges overt connections between politics and emotion




affective experience can provide the basis for new cultures.




Because trauma can be unspeakable and unrepresentable and because it is marked by forgetting and dissociation, it often seems to leave behind no records at all. Trauma puts pressure on conventional forms of documentation, representation, and commemoration, giving rise to new genres of expression




Queer performance creates publics by bringing together live bodies in space, and the theatrical experience is not just about what’s on stage but also about who’s in the audience creating community. 6 I am determined not to underestimate the power of such genres and publics. They act as a guard against fears about the displacement of political life by affective life and the conversion of political culture into a trauma culture.




Even finding names for this other meaning of culture as a ‘‘way of life’’— subcultures, publics, counterpublics—is difficult. Their lack of a conventional archive so often makes them seem not to exist




The particular ways in which new documentaries create affective archives are instructive for the ongoing project of creating testimonials, memorial spaces, and rituals that can acknowledge traumatic pasts as a way of constructing new visions for the future




Wendy Brown speaks about identity politics as a politics of ressentiment in which claims on the state are made by individuals and groups who constitute themselves as injured victims whose grievances demand redress




Mark Seltzer writes about a wound culture, describing the cultural obsession with serial killings and other sites of violence that produces a ‘‘pathological public sphere




this book and the public cultures it documents do take as a starting point ‘‘the nation as a space of struggle,’’ seeking to illuminate the forms of violence that are forgotten or covered over by the amnesiac powers of national culture, which is adept at using one trauma story to suppress another




Douglas Crimp, for example, writes about the trauma of aids for gay men as residing partly in its invisibility as such to the national culture




trauma can be used to reinforce nationalism when constructed as a wound that must be healed in the name of unity




unpredictable forms of politics that emerge when trauma is kept unrelentingly in view rather than contained within an institutional project




Medical anthropologist Allan Young locates the origins of trauma discourse in the phenomenon of ‘‘railway shock’’: the accidents that were the inevitable by-product of the new technology of the train produced in some victims symptoms of nervous distress that had no apparent physical basis




Trauma and modernity thus can be understood as mutually constitutive categories; trauma is one of the affective experiences, or to use Raymond Williams’s phrase, ‘‘structures of feeling,’’ that characterizes the lived experience of capitalism




I treat trauma instead as a social and cultural discourse that emerges in response to the demands of grappling with the psychic consequences of historical events




Caruth’s influential definition of trauma as ‘‘unclaimed experience’’ shifts attention away from the specificity of the traumatic event to its structural unknowability




From feminism comes an interest in bridging the sometimes missing intersections between sexual and national traumas, and the sense of trauma as




everyday; from critical race theory, especially African American studies, comes an understanding of trauma as foundational to national histories and passed down through multiple generations; from Marxism comes a dialectical approach to the intersection of lived experience and systemic social structures and to trauma’s place in the social history of sensation; and from queer theory comes a critique of pathologizing approaches to trauma and an archive of examples from lesbian public cultures




Can a trip to Auschwitz be something other than another version of a trip to an amusement park, where history’s terrors are domesticated into safely consumable artifacts and emotions




Does Lisa’s aging and blind father delight in roller coasters out of some version of Freud’s repetition compulsion, seeking to replicate extreme terror in order to master it




the lived experience of homophobia and its manifestations in family rituals that don’t quite know what to make of queer children, even if they don’t overtly exclude them




Avery Gordon’s concept of haunting, which offers a compelling account of how the past remains simultaneously hidden and present in both material practices and the psyche, in both visible and invisible places




There is a significant tradition of ‘‘sensational’’ Marxism, one that includes Benjamin and Georg Simmel, and more recently, cultural theorists such as Michael Taussig and Fredric Jameson




Trauma, like Avery Gordon’s conception of haunting, is a form of mediation, ‘‘which occurs on the terrain situated between our ability to conclusively describe the logic of Capitalism and State Terror, for example, and the various experiences of this logic, experiences that are more than not partial, coded, symptomatic, contradictory, ambiguous




Judith Butler’s notion of gender identification as located in melancholic repudiation of the other gender along with her account of abjection’s role in the formation of both individual and collective identity places trauma at the origins of subject formation. 57 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




Bersani sees it as the undoing of politics in part because of his commitment to a conception of sexuality as fundamentally traumatic and hence anticommunal


Nobody wants to be made to feel the turtle with its underside all exposed, just pink and folded flesh. . . . In the effort not to feel fucked, I became the fucker, even with women. In the effort not to feel pain or desire, I grew a callous around my heart and imagined I felt nothing at all.—Cherríe Moraga, Loving in the War Years




touch can be so affecting as to be traumatic




Trauma is present in the association of penetration with domination, the assumption that anal penetration constitutes not only emasculation but annihilation of the self, and the construction of rape as sexualized power




In Freud’s model of perception as penetration, all forms of sensation carry with them the trace of trauma




They suggest that making penetration meaningful is not a mistaken displacement of psychic and social processes onto the material body but a significant vehicle for working through traumatic histories. 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 experiences of homophobia, shame, and abjection in the public world




It was butch women who made it right to give by responding rather than reciprocating, to make love by moving beneath them instead of using my tongue or hands




Perverse’’ because Bersani’s professed desire to argue for the value of ‘‘powerlessness’’ is intended as a theoretical challenge to what he dubs ‘‘pastoral and redemptive’’ sex-positive theories




In its most colloquial form, Bersani’s underlying premise is that ‘‘most people don’t like [sex],’’ and that its value lies in its ‘‘anticommunal, antiegalitarian, antinurturing, antiloving’’ aspects




Bersani recommends getting fucked for its capacity to produce ‘‘self-shattering,’’ which is not strictly reducible to the physical experience of being penetrated but is a more profoundly psychic experience




What’s required instead is a sex positivity that can embrace negativity, including trauma. 32 Allowing a place for trauma within sexuality is consistent with efforts to keep sexuality queer, to maintain a place for shame and perversion within public discourses of sexuality rather than purging them of their messiness in order to make them acceptable.




Ultimately, the exchange of power seems more important than the actual physical acts. Although Nestle seems to be describing digital penetration, what is more important than the actual body parts is the ‘‘appropriation of the human body’’ (to use David Halperin’s phrase) to signify the intersubjective dynamics of giving and taking




Feeling is contrasted with numbness; even pain is preferable to no feeling at all. Nestle’s formulation here resembles Freud’s imagery of numbness and sensation. The femme who allows herself to be vulnerable removes the layer of toughness or the cortical shield that she might carry in the face of a homophobic culture that declares her desires to be shameful or does not recognize the beauty of her queer femininity. Her lover’s attention destroys the numbness created by an inability to express desire. Submission to the demands of her lover’s touch involves a difficult admission of Nestle’s own desire




Joan Nestle’s essay ‘‘The Gift of Taking




Judith Halberstam challenges such views by noting the distinctiveness of stone butch sexuality as a form of sexual desire that is expressed in terms of limits or as an articulation of what one does not want or will not do sexually




I’ve long been interested in an apparent paradox of butch sexuality: that the butch who, in Nestle’s words, takes ‘‘erotic responsibility’’ for her partner’s sexual pleasure could, in her eagerness to tend to another’s desires, as easily be considered feminine as masculine




Thus, if the poem’s references to butch lack of expression seem negative, it is important to remember that it is also a valorization of femme emotional styles, such as an ability to display feeling without shame.




One of the powers of butch-femme relationships is the femme’s sensitivity to the possible wariness or untouchability of butches. Mykel Johnson says that ‘‘loving a butch woman also meant learning the places she held back, recognizing her hesitations with regard to receiving my caresses




Being femme for me is linked to my treasuring of butch women, to my deep erotic need and hunger for the qualities that have banished her. To be femme is to give honor where there has been shame.’’




She traces her butch Chicana lesbian identity to the myth of Hernán Cortéz’s mistress La Malinche/Malintzin, who supposedly betrayed the indigenous peoples by allowing herself to be sexually seduced and hence dominated. Also known as La Chingada, ‘‘the fucked one,’’ La Malinche’s role as a sexualized emblem of colonization is consolidated by the symbolic significance of penetration as traumatizing.




the body is an imaginary locus of meaning rather than a stable ground, although it is also a powerful vehicle for the materialization of symbolic meanings




in denying her body in order to avoid feminized feeling, she is denying her racial identity as well




Edna’s femme power lies in her ability to see that beyond the showof stone that Jess and other butches present to the public world and even to their lovers, they are extremely vulnerable




butch bonding facilitated by Jess’s ability to give him sympathetic attention without saying anything. (Femme receptivity and butch silence are interestingly similar




The sign of intimacy is not having to say everything, being granted the dignity of refraining from the trauma of rehearsing the pain and humiliation again. Theresa offers her the sanctuary of not having to expose herself in the way that she is too often forced to do publicly




the serial killer as social type is also linked to the homosexual, another category of the perverted self that comes into being in the late nineteenth century when particular acts, such as sex and crime, become the basis for categories of identity




The serial killer becomes the representative of a pathological self that cannot stand to be wounded




Trauma and penetration are still linked, but numbness and fears of feeling or vulnerability are complex modes of response and resistance rather than pathological




The ‘‘violence’’ of Tribe 8’s performance, and the physical release that the mosh pit enabled, can be understood as a ritualized repetition that transforms earlier scenes of violence




Indeed, the power of the notion of safe space resides in its double status as the name for both a space free of conflict and a space in which conflict and anger can emerge as a necessary component of psychic resolution




Too often, lesbian subcultures that focus on healing from abuse and those that encourage sexual exploration have been constructed, and have 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 that it so frequently refuses that distinction




The subversive possibilities of repetition with a difference, which have been valorized in discussions of butch-femme, drag, and other queer cultural practices, therefore provide the basis for healing rituals and performances




As someone who would go so far as to claim lesbianism as one of the welcome effects of sexual abuse, I am happy to contemplate the therapeutic process by which sexual abuse turns girls queer.




I’m convinced that there are disproportionate numbers of lesbians in the ‘‘helping professions,’’ including nursing, therapy, public interest law, teaching, and alternative healing practices such as massage




There is a growing and important body of feminist work by scholars such as Linda Alcoff, Laura Gray, Vicki Bell, and Janice Haaken who take seriously the limits to the value of revealing secrets, even as they explore the transformative power of disclosure for both survivors and their audiences




imaginative work that may bear an oblique relation to the actual event of sexual abuse can ultimately be more ‘‘healing’’ than an explicit rendering of the event




More important than the details of what her grandfather did may be the bodily memory of her own physical sensations. Her photographs serve as a record of an emotional and physical process, but not as a narrative of an event




Cathy Caruth observes that trauma challenges conventional understanding of experience because ‘‘the greatest confrontation with reality may also occur as an absolute numbing to it’’ and ‘‘immediacy, paradoxically enough, may take the form of belatedness.




The obstacle to retrieving the memory of trauma is not necessarily that it has been repressed but that due to dissociation, for example, it was never experienced in the first place. Or given the overwhelming nature of physical and emotional stimuli, the memory of trauma may not give rise to a conventional narrative; it may instead consist of a series of intense and detailed, yet fragmented, psychophysical experiences




I was ashamed of myself for the things I thought about when I put my hands between my legs, more ashamed for masturbating to the fantasy of being beaten than for being beaten in the first place. I lived in a world of shame. I hid my bruises as if they were evidence of crimes I had committed. I knew I was a sick disgusting person. I couldn’t stop my stepfather from beating me, but I was the one who masturbated. I did that, and how could I explain to anyone that I hated being beaten but still masturbated to the story I told myself about it?




To call these fantasies masochistic in a simply derogatory sense, or to consider them the ‘‘perverse’’ product of sexual violence, is to underestimate their capacity to provide not only pleasure but power




But in order to possess this power, she must be unafraid to make her own painful experience the source of agency and pleasure

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ann Cvetkovich puts forward the idea of Archives of Feeling, queer, gay and lesbian cultural texts as repositories of feelings and emotions, but also of practices and reception. The vibrancy of rage, grief, shame and more. This also emphasises an approach to history, where we take the sources of the every day life: oral history, personal photographs and letters and ephemera – in order to insist that every life is worth of preservation. More than that, it gives a proper voice and narrative to people. I particular liked the example of a young woman's green sweater:

'I’m wearing a green sweater. It’s made of some synthetic material and it's mine. I’ve been wearing it for two days straight and have no plans to take it off right now.’ Years later her mother sends her the sweater wrapped in mementoes of immigration, her Cuban passport, family photos… The fetishisation of objects, a way of negotiating cultural dislocation. Fear and incomprehension materialised.

I found hers a very empathetic and thoughtful narrative voice that draws in Cvetkovich's personal experience of migrant parents and their complex lives. Her holocaust survivor father is described vividly, the desire to continue with life, in a space where that choice was taken.

I really liked how she drew in the work of others, David Wojnarowiscz's desire to remember loved ones lost to AIDs and Dorothy Allison's advocacy for Oral history:

‘That our true stories may be violent, distasteful, painful, stunning, and haunting, I do not doubt. But our true stories will be literature. No one will be able to forget them, and though it will not always make us happy to read of the dark and dangerous places in our lives the impact of our reality is the best we can ask of our literature.'

I was reading this mainly for the historical approaches (I really think alternative sources like clothe and other objects, as well as the chance to speak in the archive, have so so so much meaning) but I was really drawn in by the rich descriptions of the lesbian experience and memory. Really great book :)

[Eve · Rating 5 out of 5]

an important look at trauma from a queer/lesbian perspective. it was very affirming to the ways in which trauma has positive effects within personal and cultural contexts, as well as the negative and the neutral. some of the oral history stuff was really fascinating, and told stories rarely heard even in queer contexts. i had not considered the feelings created by the trauma of AIDs with regards carers and particularly queer/lesbian carers, and the consequent effect on the community's trauma narrative. it was intersting to me as an activist to hear accounts of activism as both healing and as a traumatic event in itself, that rings very true. the urgency of AIDs activism, and the death inherently entwined in AIDs activism was made apparent through testimony of those within the movement, with both survivor guilt and loss as major themes. i learned of cultural texts that i had not heard of, and will be looking up. particularly interesting was the way in which the author explored intersectional traumas throughout, and also the queer ways of looking at trauma that were explored within texts. i especially enjoyed discussions around a film that was made about the death of somebody's dog, and queer ways of loving including love for animals as a source of familial love. discussions around whether mainstreaming traumatic narratives was a strengthening or a weakening of feelings archives occured, and was a debate worth having. i have never read anything like this before, and i am glad i did. at times it was very academic and i struggled through bits of it, but it was well worth the effort.

[Madeleine · Rating 4 out of 5]

cvetkovich's text took a while to get started, but after sifting through the first few chapters, it really blew me away. while she begins with a rather repetitive framework, it also helps make the text accessible to those who may have less exposure. i loved several of the chapters in this book though, particularly cvetkovich's really singular analysis of butch-femme relationships in chapter 2, which argues for a necessary convergence of trauma and desire, debasing notions of active/passive binaries. also this text is really incredible as a lesbian archive, and the sheer mass of material that cvetkovich compiles into her archive filled me with so much joy, giving me a long list, beyond the obvious, of folks to read and wonder about. there is a celebration of the lesbian archive here that is lovely in its compilation of such varied forms of affect and existence. i would say though that cvetkovich really does not deal with any potential shortcomings of a purely lesbian analysis and begins her text with an earnest reflection on the Michigan Womyn's Festival--which she takes up later in the text, broadly gesturing to "controversies" but never articulating the festival's binaristic/reactionary/transphobic approach to gender or wondering how that might problematize her argument for an accessible and shared public culture.

[Anjali · Rating 4 out of 5]

In parts I think this book is fantastic, gorgeous, and amazingly done... then at times I get frustrated and think there are so many fissures and incomplete sentences.

I guess my main issues would be (1) the use of trauma as an analytic category without a clear context for how she is talking about power... namely, who has more access to trauma? and correspondingly (2) do we try to then describe the shape of oppression through the lens of trauma-- doesn't this pathologize race, gender, sexual, class oppressions? relegate these experiences to the realm of they psyche? and (3) um, what about dealing with race?

but the book, even still, is innovative and provokative and i like the interdisciplinarity of it!

[Ai Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredibly engrossing, quick read--although it's ~300 pages, I finished it in less than a day. Highlights for me included the chapter on butch-femme touch and trauma, and the oral histories of lesbian AIDS activists. Cvetkovich does an incredible broad sweep of a number of lesbian public cultures and readings of things that are really valuable for establishing a framework of how trauma studies might interact with other fields to be truly interdisciplinary. For a book with a somewhat imposing title, I will say this was incredibly accessible, and again- I just couldn't put it down. Looking forward to thinking more about it, and finding ways to think about its framework as related to my own work.

[Max · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm frustrated with the effusive praise Cvetkovich repeatedly gives Michfest - she even devotes an entire section to the "controversies" of Michfest without once mentioning that it excludes trans women, which I wouldn't have thought would even be possible - and I'm also a bit uncomfortable with the way she talks about Brandon Teena in the epilogue. So, on the whole, not the most trans-friendly book, but I'm still giving it four stars because it was a really good, really cathartic read. A lot of what she says are things I really, really needed to hear.

[Ezra · Rating 4 out of 5]

ok, at first reading I was excited about this book but wished it was less academic language. now I'm working on this project that is about queer archives and yiddish archives and this book is SO HELPFUL and relevant so yay I'm so glad this book exists!

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has some categorical problems. HOWEVER, it is really excellent (and innovative) with regard to its treatment of trauma and archives. Both very personally and academically impactful.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

love all the parts about the Lesbian Herstory Archives

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

"To deny sickness and death is to deny the reality of the present."

"Every life is worthy of preservation."

[ND · Rating 4 out of 5]

brilliant!

[amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The frame story as I understand it is interpreting trauma as generating an enormous range of affects as well as archives that capture, represent, run on, and themselves continually (re)produce affects. Cvetkovich aims to reshape at least two definitons. 1) Trauma is not only clinical, or defined by its global or national scale, but also part of everyday experience. 2) Moving away from thinking about archives as strictly institutional or a matter of "general logic" (bye, Derrida) and towards a definition that includes public cultures i.e. overlapping categories of production and participation like art, memoir, oral history, activism, popular culture.

This gave me ... pause: "The archivist of queer culture must proceed like the fan or collector whose attachment to objects is often fetishistic, idiosyncratic, or obsessional" (p. 253). First reaction: This is what's already wrong with institutional archives; I want no part of it anywhere.  Next thought: What bothers me most is when people are idiosyncratic or obsessed but claim to only be following archival "best practices" and refuse to recognize the downstream effects of their choices. And, even those of us who refuse to romanticize archives or archival work might have a data migration or other white whale that seems to take over our entire lives, even as we insist it's necessary. It's important to recognize and negotiate these commitments as the personal investments they are, to be more honest with one another and with the public. So even though this line from the book is about a very specific form of archival work, it helpfully reminds me of the perpetual need to reorient public archives work around affect and responsibility.

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 4 out of 5]

The chapter "Trauma and Touch: Butch-Femme Sexualities" is really strong, especially the commentary on Bersani's "Is the Rectum a Grave?." The dialectic between the rigidity of the association of penetration with domination and the attempted unpairing of their contingent relation through the movement from "passivity" to "receptivity" in the femme's conceptualization of her relation to the butch is extremely helpful here. I fear previous attempts to accomplish this (Lynne Segal's Straight Sex, or Bini Adamczak's "On Circlusion," for example) fail to provide an adequate responsibility to the "giving" partner, mostly by refusing to be queer. One may ask why, once transposed onto a woman, the responsibility to be receptive to the desires of the "receiving" partner ring so much less hollow (at least for me). It was particularly gender-affirming to see women tackle this problematic in a way that cishet men never seem to do. The chapter "AIDS Activism and Public Feelings: Documenting ACT UP's Lesbians" is also fascinating, detailing lesbian participation in ACT UP, and troubling the category through probing heterosexual couplings between gay men and lesbians.

[Nic · Rating 4 out of 5]

There’s a lot I was able to learn and take from the book regarding lesbian and queer responses to trauma, the construction of public “trauma cultures,” lesbian care and activist work in ACT UP and AIDS activism more generally, butch/femme revisions on sexual practices, and of course the possibility of different objects functioning as archives of feeling, leaving traces of responses to loss, trauma, pleasure and the like.

Other reviews to this work on here brought out aspects of the text that I didn’t register, in particular some problems with an apparently TERFy lesbian music festival in Michigan and a general lack of attention to trans voices, concerns, and contributions. Not every chapter seemed to fit together for me; some of the analysis felt more like summaries or descriptions of works rather than analysis that brought out something new or revealing in the objects of inquiry. But I learned a lot, new questions were brought to mind, and I think I understand why so many found value in this work.

[i. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cvetkovich seeks to explore trauma, and in doing so, she approaches a new mode of archive, arguing that, “…trauma challenges common understandings of what constitutes an archive…[it] puts pressure on conventional forms of documentation, representation, and commemoration, giving rise to new genres of expression” (7). Trauma, through affect, produces public culture or ways of life/lived experiences that are “frequently inadequate to the task of documentation” (9); thus, an archive of feelings, “…is both material and immaterial…at the same time, resisting documentation because sex and feelings are too personal or ephemeral to leave records” (244).

[zack · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

It's hard to rate this one. My 3 stars are connected to how "useful" this read was for my thesis. It is, however, a very interesting and important topic. I would've liked to spend more time with this one, but alas, I have a master's thesis to research for, and ultimately write.

[Leni · Rating 3 out of 5]

really interesting and made a lot of unique points. I understand that this was written in 2003 but I wish trans narratives/perspectives weren’t ignored or brushed past in this book. I felt very suspicious of this when the Michigan Womyn’s festival was brought up in regards to the band Tribe 8 without ever mentioning it’s extremely trans exclusionary policies, especially since Tribe 8’s lead (Lynn Breedlove) has come out as a trans man (although to be fair, I am not sure when he came out).