NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

Mess: The Labor of Minoritarian Archival Performance

A DISSERTATION

SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

for the degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Performance Studies

By

Benjamin Zender

EVANSTON, ILLINOIS

September 2023
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Abstract

This dissertation is concerned with the ideologies, techniques, techniques, and

rhetorics of what I call “minoritarian archival performance.” I collect stories of archivists,

museum-makers, and librarians who maintain small, grassroots minoritarian community

sites using personal and idiosyncratic collections. Grounded in three primary case studies

of three archivists and their archives, I position minoritarian archives as key sites where

minoritarian subjects labor for what Joshua Chambers-Letson calls “More Life:” existence

beyond mere survival. Since 1979, archivist Ben Power, a white trans man, has lived

alongside and curated the Sexual Minorities Archives of Western Massachusetts after

collecting materials from a disbanding lesbian separatist group in Chicago, Illinois. Debra

Britt, a Black woman, co-founded the National Black Doll Museum of Mansfield,

Massachusetts from what originally began as a childhood collection of dolls. Choreographer

Muna Tseng, a Chinese American woman originally born and raised in Hong Kong,

administers the artistic estate of her late brother Tseng Kwong Chi’s from her NYC

apartment following a promise she made to her brother to protect his legacy. These

archivists are just three examples of minoritarian archivists who act as cultural custodians

for their community, caring for materials in cramped homes, rented storefronts, and

community centers across the United States. Responding to personal, family, and

community need, they invent idiosyncratic archival methods specific to their own

collections amidst systemic and institutional neglect. And they frequently accomplish this

work without the help of permanent staff, regular external funding, or wide public

recognition.
 3

I analyze minoritarian archival performances at each site, the acts through which

materials and spaces emerge as archives. Archival performances include interactive tours,

theatrical performances, mundane acts of curation, and moments of collecting in curators’

everyday lives. I move through ethnographic, rhetorical, archival, and textual research

methods to describe the particularities of each archivists’ entwinements with their

archives: what initially called them to collect and curate, how they developed their archival

techniques, and how they make meaning of their labor as public pedagogues and

community leaders. I draw upon multiple disciplines that theorize performance, labor, and

care from the perspectives of minoritarian life, including African American and Black

Studies (with an emphasis on Black feminist theory), Sexuality and Gender Studies, Asian

American Studies, and Rhetorical Studies. Beyond honoring the underrecognized and

under-resourced work of these archivists, this dissertation argues that each of these

disciplines share responsibility to these archivists and their labor as part of their

intellectual and ideological commitments to social justice.

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Acknowledgments

This part of the dissertation feels the most impossible, the most important, to write.

I’ve tried to stay focused long enough to notate a simple list of the people who have

indelibly shaped my approach to the world, who have helped me survive long enough to

have something to say, and who have given me the care and intention it requires to know

what it means to have a voice. I couldn’t quite name all of the names; I definitely couldn’t

tell you what you all meant to me. I offer this instead, knowing it’s not enough. I’m writing

under duress. This is the last piece of writing I must edit before submitting this whole

goddamn thing to ProQuest, and it’s due today.

To Brian Hyunsuk Lee—to put it all into the language of things—for everything

you’ve held for me, for the stuff we’ve made and destroyed and carted and bought and

repurposed and displayed and stored and appreciated and adored and neglected and

fought over, thank you for making each time you come home the best part of my home, for

being the first person I call.

Lorain Zender taught me to start and end each day with a fundamental generosity of

spirit; thank you for giving the capacity to imagine the world as a potential we nurture,

rather than an abundance we can already take for granted.

I am pleasantly surprised to say that I take Elizabeth Hartung and Lisa Moyer for

granted. Somehow we continue to grow in ways that have taken all three of us extremely

far and extremely close to where we started, and I still somehow like you both. To Liz, for

the many times you have provided me perspective and consistency, for the ways you have

kept me alive, for preparing good itineraries even when you’d like someone else to choose.

For Lisa, for the ways you have validated my ethics, for the ways you continue to learn and
 5

teach others, for knowing that anger can be one of the most ferocious ways to insist on

love. I love you both, and Petersen and Moss, and Alice and Aaron, and all of the critters

we’ve known together.

To Possum, thank you for keeping my lap warm. I miss you every day.

To Annaliese Hoehling and Anna-Claire Simpson, you wily imposters, thank you for

exercising the power of complaint, for pitching so many projects that may or may not come

to be, and for nurturing my suspicion of the academy and its cast and crew of other very

flawed people who—I guess—are mostly doing their best.

I thank my academic mentors who saw me through this project. I remember Jennifer

C. Nash looking down at my copious notes during out first office meeting, feeling my messy

anxiety about speaking up in class. “But how are YOU doing?” she said, as if academia was a

real world, but not the whole world. Your work—in its most expansive definition—is

making worlds for me and the people we love. Josh Chambers-Letson thinks and talks

quickly with a kind of sublimity that is both astounding and intimidating in its precision

and honesty. Thank you Josh, for seeing me through to the end. I am still a little scared of

you, but you continue to make me smarter and more accountable in every way I wanted to

be. Charles M. Morris III didn’t know me from any other student when I enrolled in his

graduate seminar as a non-matriculated undergraduate while working at Syracuse

University. But at so many crucial junctures, when my body and my confidence failed me,

he made sure I had physical and virtual space in the seminar, the journal, the convention

center hotel, the Skype session. Amidst a cast of deeply hurt and competitive and resentful

co-workers, Suzanne Daly somehow remained a teacher—the best kind of teacher—who

somehow—in the middle of all this nonsense—remained honest, astute, and frequently
 6

wicked in her gossip. Paola Zamperini, I wish I could tell you this in your own rhythm—so

full of linguistic flowers, so devoid of falsity, so kind, so slow: I will always remember how

you stood up for me, for us, when we are all so scared and angry and resourceless; thank

you.

Syracuse University—especially the Department of Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and

Composition—provided me a home for so many years as I healed: Thank you Robin Riley,

for seeing me as something more than the person who opened the gym on time, and for

trying so hard to keep me out of academia; thank you Margaret Himley, for opening up new

theoretical worlds once I insisted on being there. Emily Dressing, Collin Brooke, Lois

Agnew, Patrick Berry, Krista Kennedy, Eileen Schell, and Kristi Johnson—did y’all know

that I really thought I was worth nothing when I met you, that I had never felt the kind of

belonging you offered me from the terrible mid-century bomb-shelter you call your offices?

Minnie Bruce Pratt… Fuck. What do you say to the person who not only helped you learn

how to write but also gave you certainty that you must? I cannot reckon with the loss of

you.

Lots of places at Northwestern University and beyond gave me money, and I needed

that to eat, which was a very necessary part of writing this. Many of these also provided the

rooms and the structure and the catering for communion and sustained intellectual

conversation beyond the walls of my department. To the staff and faculty across who have

offered colloquia, fellowships, research programs, and food at places like Northwestern’s

Gender and Sexuality Studies Colloquium, Northwestern’s Dissertation Proposal

Development Program, the Newberry Library, the Rhetoric Society of America, Feminisms

and Rhetorics, the Kinsey Institute, the Smith College Archives, etc., etc., etc.—thank you for
 7

your work and your passion. Eliot Colin—what an amazing surprise to find a friend and

comrade next door when I was trying so hard to be jaded about the whole enterprise!

Thank you, Marissa Croft, for craft nights and a thwarted journey to the tiki bar. Thank you

Eric James and Maddie Dennison for letting me borrow your decks. Thank you Claire

Arnold, Allena Berry, Bright Gyamfi, Kevin Irakoze, Yujie Li, Kenneth Pass, Sangi

Ravichandran, Catalina Rodriguez, Angela Tate, Benjamin Weissman, Leslie Harris, Kitasha

Sharma, Gideon Cohn-Postar, and Anjini Amin for your insights, creativity, and passionate

investments into your intellectual work. Thank you, Christofer Rodelo, Cameron Cook,

Raffaella Taylor-Seymour, Shinjini Chattopadhyay, Maria De Simone, Margaret Mauk, Anna

Weerasinghe, Ashley Ngozi Agbasoga, Ella Wagner, Deanna Ledezma, Katie Apsey, Niki

Herd, and Suzanna Krivulskaya. Stephanie Kung, in an alternate universe with different

timing, I know we would have kept meeting at that coffee shop. Jessy Bell: I don’t know

what I did to find someone who holds me in such high esteem, but I know I am

continuously comforted by the reality that world couldn’t be that bad if there are people

like you in it. Ashley Ferrell, I’m sorry; I still mean every superlative I ever gave you. I

worked with so many other teachers and students and staff across each of the institutions

where I’ve worked and studied; I cannot name you all, but I am working to remember you.

Courtney Rabada: we’ve rehearsed the origin story of our friendship so many times

but let me say it again: you have convinced me, over and over, that the only way to act is in

good faith, even with all of the risks that might entail. Cara Dickason: there are still days I

ask myself, “What would Cara do?,” and somehow I am stronger and calmer because I had

you as a friend and co-conspirator. Danielle Ross: I will always remember the last of year of

writing this dissertation as the year of our friendship; we fucking did this, babe!
 8

Rebecca Lorimer Leonard was the best introduction to writing centers; I never quite

articulated how much I learned from you about praxis, of how you taught me to take

empathy and theory and a political standpoint and actually improve people’s lives.

Elizabeth Lenaghan, you created an environment full of legitimately committed and

passionate people; you gave me a place at Northwestern where I felt the freest to be myself.

Clay Cogswell offered sustained feedback during the years I was most certain I would fail!

Alicia Hernandez. Fred Hosken, Lara Feldmeyer, and Liz Laurie—it was a pleasure to work

alongside you, to watch you support your peers with aplomb. Skye Strauss, do you

remember how hard I took your feedback during our first orientation session? Did you

think we would have such fruitful conversations about pedagogy so many years later?

Dylan Rollo, you sent me sexually explicit animated gifs that remain disgusting and

titillating today. In the final months of writing this dissertation, Sarah Lingo tried to

imagine exactly what I would need to succeed, and then gifted it to me. You might have had

the largest impact in transforming what I wrote into what I meant, and I look forward to

the next personality test. There are the folks in my own writing groups who showed up

every week to learn how to be better versions of themselves from each other: Claudia

Garcia Rojas, Kacey Grauer, Susanna Sacks Ado Rivera, Laura Garcia, Julia Fernandez, Maïté

Maricano, Tricia England, Laura Acosta Gonzalez, Marie Laperriere, Rachel Russell, Elena

Weber, Tricia England, and Hayana Kim. Do you know how rare it is to have the chance to

have your work read with such care? Beka Bryer, thanks for showing up on time, ready to

process my insecurities about being a leader, ready to horrify me with stories of the

mentorship you have received. Which museum should we visit together next?
 9

Performance Studies—my ever-ambivalent home—you are full of potential; you are

full of assholes. You are also full of some of the most brilliant and courageous people I’ve

ever met. Misty De Berry, Andrea Micu, Didier Morelli, Patricia Nguyen, Ashlie Sandoval,

Mlondolozi Zondi, Tarek Benchouia, Ali Farah, Michell Miller, Rashayla Brown, Nathan

Lamp, Madeleine LeCesne, Ethan Fukuto, Gregory Manel, Malú Machuca Rose, Yaqulin

Morales, Cordelia Rizzo, Chaunesti Webb, and so many others—I hope you continue to

carve out room for shared tenderness, to imagine better worlds, and to build community

that can hone your ferocity and artistry; I hope see you soon. Kelly Chung, you swept in—

cape and empathy in full display—during two crucial moments of self-doubt and insecurity.

Eddie Gamboa, you don’t know the many ways I learned how to think and communicate

from you; thank you especially for that one day at the thrift store but also for the ways you

mix anger and humor and care in truly cringy facebook posts. Pepe Álvarez—we once spent

an evening thinking about the best way to remove the United States flag from your butt; it

was serious work, and I’m glad you took my suggestions. Gervais Marsh, there were times

when the only thing keeping me from implosion was knowing I could always look to you in

annoyance and roll our eyes together. Marcela Fuentes, thank you for remaining reluctant

about administration, for being an advocate, and for taking the work of learning from

students so seriously. Thank you, D. Soyini Madison, for reminding me that sincerity and

beauty and advocacy remain political options even as we theorize ourselves into inaction.

Dina Walters, you welcomed us all so warmly; you remained a steadfast supporter as we

struggled. Shayna Silverstein, you wrote a beautiful book, and I thank you for letting me

live so deeply in it, for trusting me so much with your ideas.

Thank you, Debbie, Muna, Ben, and Helen.

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A final note to those who may happen upon these words: I’ve been keeping a list of

people I don’t particularly like or respect who shaped this work, often unwittingly. In the

interest of transparency, and pettiness, feel free to write to me if you read these words and

want to gossip. It takes a village, and villages are complicated places.

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Table of Contents

Abstract _____________________________________________________________________________________________ 2
Acknowledgments __________________________________________________________________________________ 4
Table of Contents __________________________________________________________________________________ 11
List of Tables, Illustrations, Figures, and Graphs ________________________________________________ 13
Introduction: “I’m Sorry for the Mess” ____________________________________________________________ 15
Precarity and Institutionality _______________________________________________________________________ 23
Archival Performance ________________________________________________________________________________ 26
Performance and Disappearance ___________________________________________________________________ 30
The Humanities and “The Archive”_________________________________________________________________ 38
Black Feminist Theory _______________________________________________________________________________ 46
(Even More) Notes on Method ______________________________________________________________________ 51
Chapter Outline________________________________________________________________________________________ 55
I: Ben Power, the Bulldog at the Door: Belonging at The Sexual Minorities Archives _________ 58
Tedium, Yearning; Or, “What’s in a Name?” _______________________________________________________ 60
Identification, Projection, Trepidation; Or, The Bulldog and the Gatekeepers _____________ 67
Un/welcome, Dis/comfort, Reverence; Or, Who Belongs Here? _______________________________ 79
Loneliness, Devastation, Communion; Or, The Time of Community __________________________ 87
II: The Hold in Three Variations; Or, Debbie Britt and the Black Doll Museum ________________ 98
The Deadline: Labor and Serendipity _____________________________________________________________ 103
The Stage: Historical Reenactment and Memory _______________________________________________ 112
The Lesson: Pedagogy and Emancipation ________________________________________________________ 122
Coda; or Staying Alive _______________________________________________________________________________ 129
III: Archival Responsibility: Muna Tseng and Tseng Kwong Chi’s Estate _____________________ 133
The Gang’s All Here __________________________________________________________________________________ 133
SlutForArt, or Archival-Emotional Processing ___________________________________________________ 151
Responsibility ________________________________________________________________________________________ 163
Conclusion: Nonetheless: A Women’s Ashes, A Soldier’s Finger, A Desiccated Mouse ________ 176
Punctum: Ashes ______________________________________________________________________________________ 183
Punctum: Finger ______________________________________________________________________________________ 187
Punctum: Mouse ______________________________________________________________________________________ 190
Dead Stuff______________________________________________________________________________________________ 192
Appendix A. Scales of Personal-Public Custodianship and Precarious-Institutional Security 197
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Appendix B. Sexual Minorities Archives Timeline ______________________________________________ 198

1970s ___________________________________________________________________________________________________ 198
1980s ___________________________________________________________________________________________________ 198
1990s ___________________________________________________________________________________________________ 199
2010s ___________________________________________________________________________________________________ 199
Bibliography _____________________________________________________________________________________ 200
Vita _______________________________________________________________________________________________ 211
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List of Tables, Illustrations, Figures, and Graphs

Figure 1. Plastic water bottles, wrapped in fabric, waiting to become dolls. (digital
photograph by author, Mansfield, Massachusetts) ................................................................... 16
Figure 2. Ben Alwin Power stands in his living room in Northampton, Massachussetts in
front of a 1988 portrait (phtographer unknown) of Ben in leather gear. (photograph
by K.J. Rawson, June 21, 2013, Sexual Minorities Archives, Northampton,
Massachusetts) ......................................................................................................................................... 70
Figure 3. Final Letter from Ben Power to Lou Sullivan. (November 29, 1990) .......................... 93
Figure 4 Debbie announces closure of the National Black Doll Museum on the Museum’s
Facebook page. (screenshot by author, June 17, 2020) .......................................................... 98
Figure 5. Dolls displayed in exposed wall studs. (photograph by author, August 9, 2017,
National Black Doll Museum, Mansfield, Massachusetts) ................................................... 109
Figure 6. Debbie’s footprint in paint. (digital photograph by author, August 19, 2017,
National Black Doll Museum, Mansfield, Massachusetts ..................................................... 110
Figure 7 The Hold. Digital photograph by author. 2017 .................................................................... 117
Figure 8. Main exhibit room. Digital photograph by author. 2017. ............................................... 120
Figure 9 Bathroom signage. Digital photograph by author. 2017. ................................................ 121
Figure 10. Debbie invites two visitors to participate in a “tasting of the four elements”
during a tour of a Black wedding traditions exhibit. (digital photograph by author,
August 10, 2017, National Black Doll Museum, Mansfield, Massachusetts) ............... 127
Figure 11. Puck Ball (The Gang’s All Here). (photograph by Tseng Kwong Chi, 1983) ......... 133
Figure 12. The siblings in Hong Kong, 1956. (photographer unknown, by courtesy of Muna
Tseng Dance Project, Inc.)................................................................................................................. 139
Figure 13. Before our first interview, Muna bookmarked several pictures. Here, she flips
through a book on Keith Haring to show me Art After Midnight (photograph by
Tseng Kwong Chi, 1985) soon after my arrival, another portrait of Tseng Kwong Chi
and his friends in the 1980s Manhattan art scene. (digital photograph by author,
August 20, 2019, West Village, New York City) ....................................................................... 141
Figure 14. Muna maintains a wall of books featuring Tseng Kwong Chi photographs. The
wall obscures her bed from the view of archive visitors. “One day” she tells me with
a grin, “my nightmare is that I’m going to get crushed by books.” (digital
photographs by author, August 20, 2019, West Village, New York City) ..................... 146
Figure 15. Muna, blurred from excitement, shows me her mother’s fur coat. (digital
photograph by author, August 20, 2019, West Village, New York City) ....................... 172
Figure 16. My view of two of boxes from the “Helen Sclair Papers” from the reading room of
the Newberry Library. (digital photograph by author, October 3, 2019, Newberry
Library, Chicago, Illinois) .................................................................................................................. 179
Figure 17. Image of Helen Sclair’s tombstone from a point and shoot camera, possible taken
before her death, lying on a table in the Newberry Library reading room.
(photograph, author uncertain, date unknown, Chicago Bohemian Cemetery,
Chicago, Illinois) .................................................................................................................................... 181
Figure 18. Some of Helen’s remains, wrapped in a note from her daughter Lu Helen Sclair,
sealed in a sandwich bag, sitting on top of a manilla folder. (digital photograph by
author, February 20, 2019, Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois) ................................... 185
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Figure 19. Cover image for Performing Remains (photograph by Rebecca Schneider, June 4,
2005, Lincoln, Rhode Island) ........................................................................................................... 188
Figure 20. My grandparent’s basement, after the cleaning. (digital photograph by author,
March 27, 2017, Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio) ....................................................................................... 191
Figure 21. Personal-Public Custodianship: The personal relationship between archivists
and their objects mean they care for these materials differently than collections
owned by communities, government entities, and private organizations. ................. 197
Figure 22: Precarious-Institutional Security: The techniques of institutionality may be
imagined in a dialectical relationship with systemized insecurity. Institutional
promises to bestow public recognition, reliable funding, permanent staffing, and a
more secure future for archival collections. ............................................................................. 197
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Introduction: “I’m Sorry for the Mess”

In the summer of 2017, I spent three days with Debra (Debbie) Britt, founder of the

National Black Doll Museum of History and Culture, then located in two storefronts on the

main street of Mansfield, Massachusetts. I had come to observe other visitors moving

through the space and to hear stories from Debbie about its creation. On our third day

together, Debbie invited me into the storage space underneath the Museum. Fading

newspaper clippings and event posters covered the hallway leading to the basement. At the

crest of the stairs, Debbie asked, “Are you sure you really want to see this?”1 When I smiled

and nodded, her shrug seemed to rejoin, “You asked for this.” She wasn’t warning me of any

specific horror; she was just pretty certain it would be a waste of time. She led me into the

stone basement underneath the museum.

“I’m sorry for the mess,” she said, as I surveyed the scene.2

But I didn’t witness the spectacularly shameful mess she promised. Yes—upon

assorted shelving units on each wall, in plastic bins, in archival boxes and plastic shopping

bags—objects filled the small space. Some were carefully stored and labeled with the date

of their last exhibition, while others were sorted for evaluation and classification. In

varying states of disrepair, dolls awaited their fate: would they be cleaned, resewn, or

culled? Among these museum objects proper were the expendable materials of the

museum’s labor: packing tape, craft glue, all-purpose cleaner, and printer paper. Each

assemblage invoked another memory that Debbie shared with me. Three huge glass-sided

1 Debra Britt, interview by author, Mansfield, MA, August 8, 2017.

2 Britt.
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bins were overfull with hundreds of armless doll bodies: recovered plastic soda bottles

covered in felt. Likely once merchandise displays at a now bankrupt department store, each

repurposed bin held bodies of different felt skin colors: one for tan, one for brown, one for

black (see Figure 1). I thought of Debbie’s stories of her mother, bent over in an easy chair

attaching felt to bottles, illuminated only by soap opera. I grinned.

Figure 1. Plastic water bottles, wrapped in fabric, waiting to become dolls. (digital photograph by author,
Mansfield, Massachusetts)

We were, of course, reperforming our way through social scripts that preceded us.

In her apology, she revealed the nakedness of sharing disorganization: it was her job not

only to hide the mess from me but to be embarrassed by it. I in turn promised not to judge.

Even though she had already offered stories of her life with the Museum for the past three

days, there was still something qualitatively different for both of us in inviting this “mess”

to my close examinations. In making our way down the stairs, we both broke a tacit

agreement about normative behavior in a modern museum, rules that frequently obscure
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the labor of making a museum from the museum visitor.3 Instead, by inviting me into the

mess, she highlighted the sheer amount of work of transforming a personal collection of

dolls and heaps of raw materials into a vibrant celebration of Black girlhood and Black

diasporic struggle, resistance, and invention.

In this dissertation, I collect stories of archivists, museum-makers, and librarians

like Debbie who maintain small, grassroots minoritarian4 community sites using personal

and idiosyncratic collections. They act as cultural custodians, caring for materials in

cramped homes, rented storefronts, and community centers across the United States.

Responding to personal, family, and community need, they invent idiosyncratic archival

methods specific to their own collections amidst systemic and institutional neglect. And

they frequently accomplish this work without the help of permanent staff, regular external

funding, or wide public recognition. In highlighting the work of producing these archives,

my interlocutors illuminate not only the necessary labor of maintaining these spaces but

also make explicit their commitments to honor minoritarian life as members of these

communities.

I primarily focus on three archivists who protect sites of minoritarian knowledge

outside of larger, publicly held, and well-funded museums and archives. Each represents a

3 One such museum behavior, for example, is the practice of viewing a distinctly framed and annotated piece of

art on a wall in relative quite solitude. I will offer more robust depictions of normative museum behavior in Chapter 1,
where I describe contemporary cultural assumptions about the racial, gender, and class background of the “typical
museum visitor.” Across Chapters 1 and 2, I will offer a rhetorical analysis of the ways that minoritarian archivists
describe large research institutions as hostile to minoritarian experience because of these norms, including the
admonishment to “look and not touch.”
4 Performance theorist José Muñoz uses the term “minoritarian” to “index citizen-subjects who, due to

antagonisms within the social such as class, race, and sex, are debased within the majoritarian public sphere.” José
Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers Of Color And The Performance Of Politics (Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press,
1999), 56.
 18

relatively precariously situated contemporary U.S. site that will allow me to consider

multiple minoritized identities, whose practices as grassroots archivists represent a range

of what I will define in this introduction as institutionality. Since 1979, trans archivist Ben

Power, a white trans man, has lived alongside and curated the Sexual Minorities Archives of

Western Massachusetts after collecting materials from a disbanding lesbian separatist

group in Chicago, Illinois. Debbie Brit, a Black woman, co-founded the National Black Doll

Museum of History and Culture (Mansfield, Massachusetts) from what originally began as a

childhood collection of dolls. Choreographer Muna Tseng, a Chinese American woman,5

administers the artistic estate of her late brother Tseng Kwong Chi from her New York City

apartment following a promise she made to her brother to protect his legacy. Each of these

archivists have transformed personally held collections into public archives, staging

historical materials as the grounds from which to build community. Power, Britt, Tseng,

and many others offer us a vision of minoritarian archivization as a durational

5 As I will explore in Chapter 2, Muna’s own self-identification in terms of race and ethnicity is often at odds with
the ways that I and other theorists of minoritarian identity might describe her. Part of this is her family’s history of
political exile. Muna was originally born in Hong Kong, where here parents had escaped from Shanghai following the
Maoist revolution in 1949. In 1966, the family moved to Vancouver, Washington. Muna and her brother moved to New
York City in1978 to pursue their artistic careers. Melissa Ho, “Performing Ambiguity: The Art of Tseng Kwong Chi,”
Smithsonian American Art Museum, accessed June 23, 2022, https://americanart.si.edu/blog/tseng-kwong-chi-
photographs. Amanda Davis, “Tseng Kwong Chi Residence & Studio,” NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, May 2022,
https://www.nyclgbtsites.org/site/tseng-kwong-chi-residence-studio/#.
 19

performance.6 With prolonged tenacity, they collect, curate, and care for the collections to

ensure the conditions of “More Life”7 for the people they love.

I analyze minoritarian archival performances at each site, the acts through which

materials and spaces emerge as archives,8 including interactive tours, theatrical

performances, mundane acts of curation, and moments of collecting in curators’ everyday

lives. I write as part of tradition within queer-of-color performance studies that uses the

word “minoritarian” to describe not only a state of social marginalization but the

“strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public

sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform

to the phantasm of normative citizenship.”9 As I will explore, the precarious conditions of

6 By naming these strategies as durational performance, I am making two simultaneous moves. Firstly, I adjust

the time of my analysis: thinking of the field of minoritarian archival performance as an ongoing worldmaking project
rather than a discrete series of acts. Secondly, I am stressing the labor of this long endurance; these archivists doggedly
perform in the face of systemic neglect and violence that does not guarantee their own survival or the survival of their
archives.
7 In an interview with Noa/h Fields, Joshua Chambers-Letson thought alongside C. Riley Snorton to define the

concept of “More Life” from his recent book After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life. “In the face of devastation
and great loss, people often turn to performance and ritual, putting performance to work to make what C. Riley Snorton
calls ‘still life’ possible. In performance, still life (still being alive) becomes the grounds on which one improvises More Life
into reality. The tradition of the oppressed, though marked by defeat and great sadness, is also the tradition of
transforming still life into More Life. I don’t know if that’s hopeful: it’s just a fact. Despite the ravages of colonialism, white
supremacy, heteropatriarchy and capitalism, the persistence and extraordinary beauty of minoritarian life is a testament
to this fact. And while we must demand more than just ‘still life,’ hope and performance can be powerful tools in the
struggle to realize such demands. Noa/h Fields, “More Life: An Interview with Writer and Performance Theorist
Joshua Chambers-Letson,” Scapi Magazine, December 4, 2018, https://scapimag.com/2018/12/04/more-life-an-
interview-with-writer-and-performance-theorist-joshua-chambers-letson/; C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A
Racial History of Trans Identity, 3rd ed. edition (Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2017); Joshua Chambers-
Letson, After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (New York: NYU Press, 2018).
8 I use the terms archives as an umbrella for various sites built on our relationships to collections of objects,

including “archive,” “museum,” and “library.” In doing so, I recognize that readers may picture something different when I
use one term over another, that they are not connotatively identical. Using the term museum, for instance, may seem to
highlight the collection’s relationship to public pedagogy, colonial histories of display, and a certain kind of viewing
public. My argument is not that these words are interchangeable, but they are instead highlighting specific components of
the wider social field I call archive. Each are different forms of curating, caring for, and publicizing material objects as part
of a larger social scene of meaning-making I call the Archive.
9 Muñoz, Disidentifications, 4.
 20

minoritarian archival labor have required minoritarian archivists to forge epistemic,

ideological, and practical techniques that don’t resemble the curatorial practices of larger,

highly resourced public archival institutions. Many academics and activists have rightly

called for revolution within major research institutions, demanding that they decolonize

and diversify their collections, demands that have been met with highly visible public

campaigns at major research institutions.10 I expand and challenge these efforts by drawing

critical attention to archivists who have been engaged in revolutionary work for decades,

caring for materials that have often been deemed undeserving of public care and

maintenance.

Sharing stories of how these archivists were drawn to archive, I ask what we can

learn about minoritarian life and archives by analyzing the unique histories, aesthetics, and

labor and curatorial practices of minoritarian archives. Their stories demand that we think

critically about assumptions of provenance, value, and labor that undergird larger research

institutions. I’ve named my project “Mess” to think beyond the intellectual and affective

detachment implied by the manila folders and demarcated reading rooms of these

institutions. Like anthropologist Martin Manalansan, I “[depart] from the planned coherent

borders of the ‘archival’ and [deploy] a sustained focus on the seemingly trashy, dirty,

10 For example see Molly Enking’s report on protests to decolonize the Brooklyn Museum in 2018, the

Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2020 statement on anti-racism and diversity, and Jo Lawson’s 2022 ArtNet article revisiting
several major museums two years after they publicly committed to addressing diversity and equity. Molly Enking,
“‘Decolonize This Place’ Protesters Disrupt Brooklyn Museum, Condemn ‘Imperial Plunder,’” Gothamist, April 30, 2018,
https://gothamist.com/news/decolonize-this-place-protesters-disrupt-brooklyn-museum-condemn-imperial-plunder;
“Our Commitments to Anti-Racism, Diversity, and a Stronger Community,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, accessed
June 5, 2023, https://www3.metmuseum.org/blogs/now-at-the-met/2020/the-mets-plans-for-anti-racism; Jo Lawson-
Tancred, “Two Years Ago, Museums Across the U.S. Promised to Address Diversity and Equity. Here’s Exactly What They
Have Done So Far,” Artnet News, September 5, 2022, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/museum-dei-plans-2022-
2161690.
 21

disgusting, and untidy disorganization of bodies, things, and emotions.”11 My methodology

theorizes from affective and intellectual surplus rather than tidy divisions between

archivist, archive, object, and researcher. By mess, I mean: the capaciousness of what we

might call the minoritarian archive, the unruliness and unknowability of minoritarian

narratives that exceed state-sanctioned histories, and the improvisational, durational, and

frequently maligned labor required to sustain minoritarian life. As I will detail below in

“Notes on Method” I move promiscuously through ethnographic, rhetorical, archival, and

textual research methods to describe the particularities of each archivists’ entwinements

with their archives: what called them to collect and curate, how they developed their

archival techniques, and how they make meaning of their labor as public pedagogues and

community leaders. This is a quirky archive of archives, partially reflecting my own process

of coming to know each archivist by word of mouth along my own professional and

personal journey. Yet, I mean for these case studies to be read alongside each other as part

of a larger narrative about minoritarian life in the U.S.

Beyond honoring the underrecognized and under-resourced work of these

archivists, what do we—as minoritarian subjects and theorists—owe them? In these pages,

I ask about our shared responsibilities to these archivists and their labor. To name these

responsibilities, I draw upon multiple disciplines that theorize performance, labor, and care

from the perspectives of minoritarian life, including African American and Black Studies

(with an emphasis on Black feminist theory), Sexuality and Gender Studies, Asian American

11 Martin F. Manalansan IV, “The ‘Stuff’ of Archives: Mess, Migration, and Queer Lives,” Radical History Review

2014, no. 120 (October 1, 2014): 94, https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2703742.

 22

Studies, and Rhetorical Studies. I engage in each of these fields following their respective

“archival turns,” early twenty-first century reinvestments in ontological questions about

the formation of the Archive and critical questions about the ethics of archival research.12

As part of recognizing understandings of archival power in terms of “the Archive” while

referring to a singular archival collection as an “archives.” This simple terminology—

including the addition of the “s” on the singular noun “archives”—belies some important

distinctions between these fields who largely engage with archival materials as the texts of

our theoretical analysis and fields that theorize the creation and maintenance of archives

from the perspective of professional pragmatism.13 Critical theories in the humanities have

been foundational to my conception of the Archive as the “troubled […] location of our

‘always failed efforts’ and our critical desires, rather than a space of singular truth;”14 yet,

they are not fully sufficient for understanding the actual labor and worldmaking processes

of minoritarian archivists. While the humanities have robustly analyzed the formation of

12 For more on the archival turns of these overlapping disciplines see Kate Eichhorn’s The Archival Turn in

Feminism Ian McLean’s “The Archival Turn in Art,” Charles Morris III’s “The Archival Turn in Rhetorical Studies, and Jason
Maxwell’s “Mapping the Archival Turn in English Studies.” Kate Eichhorn, The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order
(Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: American Literatures Initiative, 2014); Ian McLean, “The Archival Turn in Contemporary
Art,” Law & History 6 (2019): 83; Charles E. Morris, “The Archival Turn in Rhetorical Studies; Or, the Archive’s Rhetorical
(Re)Turn,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9, no. 1 (2006): 113–15, https://doi.org/10.1353/rap.2006.0027; Jason Maxwell,
“Chapter 3. Mapping the Archival Turn in English Studies,” in The Two Cultures of English: Literature, Composition, and the
Moment of Rhetoric, 1st edition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 92–130.
13 As Information Studies scholar Michelle Caswell argues, the feminization and devaluation of actual archival

labor allows humanist to abstractly theorize power within “the Archive” in ignorance of the critical contributions of
workers and Archival Studies scholars who have labored to produce those spaces. M. L. Caswell, ““’The Archive’ Is Not an
Archives: On Acknowledging the Intellectual Contributions of Archival Studies”,” August 4, 2016,
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7bn4v1fk.
14 Quoting from Jennifer Morgan’s writing on the archives of trans-Atlantic slavery, Jennifer Nash writes about

the ways that Black feminist writing and thinking have afforded scholars critical methods of writing alongside, against,
and in excess of the violence of the Archive. Morgan, Jennifer L., “Accounting for “The Most Excruciating Torment: Gender,
Slavery, and Trans-Atlantic Passages.,” History of the Present 6, no. 2 (2016): 187. Quoted in Jennifer C. Nash, “Writing
Black Beauty,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 45, no. 1 (September 2019): 106,
https://doi.org/10.1086/703497.
 23

archives from the perspectives of colonial power and research methodology, our theories

of archival power are often grounded in our experiences as researchers in large, highly

resourced institutions. Likewise, there has been significantly less attention on the often

underpaid or free labor of producing material repositories outside of major archival

institutions. By limiting our analytical perspective to archival researchers in elite

institutions, we frequently ignore the worldmaking15 labor of those whose materials,

histories, and praxes have been systematically marginalized.

Precarity and Institutionality

I have chosen relatively small, idiosyncratically personal, and materially precarious

collections than might be traditionally described as institutional archives. Precarity in this

sense describes a systemic social condition of systematized insecurity or vulnerability.

While precarity is frequently associated with socioeconomic class, I use precarity in a wider

sense to describe the perils of minoritarian existence as is it subjects to alternating circuits

of surveillance and neglect. A small number of people protect these archives without the

benefits of public support. In these sites, my interlocuters live and work closely with their

collections and are instrumental to their day-to-day functions. They have intimate

relationships with their collections that may not at first glance appear to have much in

15 My use of worldmaking is indebted to Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s conception of a “queer
counterpublic” as “an indefinitely accessible world conscious of its subordinate relation” to broader U.S. culture. For
Berlant and Warner the queer world is made in moments of inchoate, fleeting, and dispersed intimacy rather than the
kind of self-evident permanence implies by terms like “community.” In Chapter 1, I will look at what the idea community
accomplishes in minoritarian archives, including Miranda Joseph critiques of community as an organizing framework for
contemporary identity politics. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (January 1,
1998): 578, https://doi.org/10.1086/448884. Miranda Joseph, Against the Romance of Community, First Edition
(Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2002).
 24

common with, for example, the working relationship between a curator and a collection at

a national archives. For each of my interlocutors the potential longevity of their institutions

thus directly correlates to the material conditions of their lives. In the face of archival

precarity, institutionality is a cultural strategy that promises to confer social legibility,

longevity, financial security, and the reproduction of cultural capital. As Roderick Ferguson

has argued, institutionality often benefits from the strategic incorporation of cultural

differences, strategies that deploy rhetorics of identity politics at the cost of actually

marginalized communities.16 By posing institutionality as a foil for precarity, I highlight a

tension in the drive for secure archival futures: the techniques of institutionality are often

imagined as a solution to systemized precarity, but frequently pose a threat to the original

ideologies and community needs that called for these sites.

By documenting how each archivist’s life is intimately entangled with their

collection, my study allows me to understand how archival ideology and rhetorics emerge

dialectically with systematized precarity. The mortgage of Ben Power’s home and the site

of the SMA, for instance, is paid by the non-profit that sustains SMA: fundraising for the

SMA is simultaneously an act of making the rent. Muna Tseng strategically limits access to

her brother’s artistic work to obtain royalties that will sustain her own studio work and

housing in New York City’s West Village. The National Black Doll Museum arose not only

through Britt and her sister’s desires to create an educational cultural site, but also as a

16 “As power has negotiated and incorporated difference, it has also developed and deployed a calculus by which

to determine the specific critical and ruptural capacities of those forms of difference. We may call this incorporation of
modes of difference and the calculus that seeks to determine the properties and function of those modes as a will to
institutionality.” Roderick A. Ferguson, “Administering Sexuality; or, The Will to Institutionality,” Radical History Review
2008, no. 100 (January 1, 2008): 163, https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2007-027.
 25

way of using a non-profit institution to partially cover the immense costs of obtaining,

housing, and restoring a collection of dolls that had already filled each of their personal

homes. When the NBDM could no longer collect visitor donations or purchases at height of

the COVID-19 Pandemic, Debbie’s family was tasked with relocating those materials back

to temporary storage in bins that currently cover Debbie’s yard and living space. Much like

their simultaneous overlapping commitments to family and public, it is impossible to

extricate these archivists’ lives from the archives they build. Within each of my case

studies, I analyze how this inextricability between archives and archivist differentiates

their labor from that of workers at larger public institutions.

I think of these case studies against a backdrop of more institutionalized and less

personal archives and museums, including the Lesbian Herstory Museum, the Gerber/Hart

Library and Archives, the Digital Transgender Archives, and the Smithsonian’s National

African Museum of History and Culture. Each holds a collection dedicated to minoritarian

experience, but they are much less personal and precarious that the three archives at the

center of my study. In comparison, each of which has achieved relatively high stability,

composed of advisory boards and boards of directors, official institutional housing, and

reliable funding streams. In recording stories of navigating structural precarity through

appeals to institutionality alongside institutions that have been deemed successful, I

attempt to identify the conditions under which individualized, activist labors of caring for
 26

objects become the responsibility of communities, institutions, and/or national

government entities.17

I use this comparative approach to develop a robust understanding of the demands

of “institutionality” by tracing its effects across each of these sites. My work thus runs the

risk of reinforcing a binary between the work of minoritarian archives and monolithic

understanding of large, impersonal, state-sanctioned institutions. However, my interest in

this dissertation is naming the techniques, values, aesthetics, and historical precedents of

precarity and institutionality rather than drawing a strict ontological boundary between

different kinds of archives and museums. Nor am I interested in maligning minoritarian

performance in the sites of actual archival institutions of any size. Instead, I ask what

possibilities occur when we attempt to think beyond institutionality as the only strategy to

which all archivists should aspire. The Lesbian Herstory museum, for instance, operates as

a possible third path on this continuum between the precarity of a personal collection and

the full embrace of institutionality: as the world’s largest and oldest collections of materials

“by and about lesbians and their communities,” it has achieved provisional stability without

accepting funds or labor outside of the communities it serves.18

Archival Performance

Throughout this dissertation, I use the term “archival performances” to describe the

labor and social acts through which archives are accomplished: the creative and reiterative

17 In Appendix A I’ve offered two spectrums that might highlight these differences in terms of custodianship (on

a scale from personal to public) and long-term health or security (on a scale from precarious to institutional).
18 In Chapter 2, I will speak more about this difference between institutionality and precarity as rhetorical

structure that helps shape the ways we think of urgency and power in the space of minoritarian museums.
 27

acts through which materials and spaces take on socially useful archival meanings. This

expansive notion of performance accounts for a range of acts through which objects are

made legible as archives. I apply this understanding of performance across disparate acts,

from traditional archival research to aesthetic performances inspired by archival materials,

to mundane acts of object management. For example, I view each of the acts of my

interlocutors as performances through which archives emerge: Ben Power labelling a

manilla folder using a classification system he learned from a lesbian separatist archives;

Muna Tseng’s multiple performances that feature her family’s clothing and archival

ephemera; and Debbie Britt clearing her dining room table in preparation for a Zoom

workshop on doll-making. I use performance, therefore, as heuristic of approaching

archives that recognizes the precarious contingency of minoritarian archives. Sustained

through ongoing acts of often unpaid and unrecognized labor, frequently under the

protection of a small group of people, it is much easier to see how minoritarian archives are

dependent on labor than larger and more-resourced institutions where precarity and labor

are obscured. As I will demonstrate more directly in the conclusion of this dissertation,

however, the precarity and contingency of minoritarian archives only dramatize the reality

of all archival labor in the face of the certainty of material loss.

My decision to approach these acts as performance is an explicit commitment to

honor the actual labor and material conditions of the people who curate and care for

archival materials rather than a matter of ontological definition. Performance scholar

Richard Schechner discusses the difference between the ontological argument that

something is performance vs. the methodological possibilities of treating that act as

 28

performance.19 For Schechner, approaching an object as performance is to ask questions

that more fully account for the staging and effects of a performance event: “What is

happening, what is the sequence of how it’s happening? How has it been prepared for? Has

it been rehearsed? What do people wear or how is the space decorated?”20 Rhetorician

Kenneth Burke’s dramatist pentad of “act, agency, purpose, scene, and agent,” offers a

similar series of analytical viewpoints from which we can understand the overlapping

motivations and effects of a singular performance.21 Approaching Power’s act of labelling a

folder as performance, for example, I ask: What is he producing in this space? What does

this act reveal about organization and classification in the Archive? What overlapping

motivations does he have for this folder, and how does this motivation respond to the

conflicting desires of the Sexual Minorities Archives’ multiple audiences? Finally, how did

Power rehearse this act? In other words, through what series of historical acts does

Power’s performance take on the appearance of archivization?

In developing her theories of gender and sex performativity, Judith Butler wrote of

the “constituted social temporality” of gender, an “identity that takes instated through the

stylized repetition of acts.22 In arguing that archives are performative, I likewise am

describing archives as a contingent chain of performances, or socially located instantiations

of the archival. Through these stylized, reiterated performances, archival objects—an

Performance Studies: An Introduction - Is/As Performance, 2012,

19

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SB6zTUfEODc.
20 Performance Studies.
21 Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1969).
22 Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,”

Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 519, https://doi.org/10.2307/3207893.

 29

invoice, a ticket stub, a photograph—take on the appearance of historical proof, operating

as potential evidence that a performance occurred.

Sitting in the prototypical reading room of an institutional archive, for example, is

not simply a solitary and original act, but is enabled by a dizzying proliferation of previous

performances. Highly structured, hierarchized, and undervalued labor has produced,

curated, and protected the objects of an archives long before a researcher pores over a file.

Material realities of funding, time, geography, and social capital enable the researcher’s

physical and mental presence in each space, framing what will be available to them and

how they will be permitted to engage. Researchers enter the archive already disciplined by

academic conventions that shape what counts as knowledge, including which texts may

count as reliable sources and which methods of reading them will be accepted. With each

conversation with an archivist, each conference talk, each manuscript, and each

theorization of the Archive, they help to remake each of these frameworks once again. In

describing acts of archivization in terms of how they are (re)produced performatively

across repeated acts I build upon the work of scholars within and beyond performance

studies.23

23 For example, see Peggy Phelan’s discussion of Sophie Calle’s photographs of missing paintings in “The
Ontology of Performance: Representation without Reproduction,” John Berger’s discussion of visual rhetorics in the
documentary Ways of Seeing, Fred Wilson’s “Mining the Museum” critical curation project at the Contemporary Museum
of Baltimore, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s work with Jewish and Holocaust heritage museums in Destination Culture:
Tourism, Museums, and Heritage, and Jennifer Tyburczy’s practice of “queer curation” in Sex Museums: The Politics and
Performance of Display. Peggy Phelan, “The Ontology of Performance: Representation without Reproduction,” in
Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, 1st edition (London ; New York: Routledge, 1993), 146–66; “Ways of Seeing,”
television documentary series (British Broadcasting Corporation, 1972); Fred Wilson, Mining the Museum: An Installation,
ed. Lisa Graziose Corrin (Baltimore, New York: New Press, 1994); Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture:
Tourism, Museums, and Heritage, First edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Jennifer Tyburczy, Sex
Museums: The Politics and Performance of Display (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2016).
 30

Performance and Disappearance

Within Performance Studies more specifically, the Archive has frequently been

described in terms of its material durability in relationship to the ephemerality of

embodied performance. Amid academic debates about the ontology of performance, Peggy

Phelan argued that performances are characterized by disappearance. “Performance is the

attempt to value that which is nonreproductive, nonmetaphorical.”24 For Phelan,

performance occurs in demarcated space with a live and located audience, resisting

documentation as commodification; these are the specific qualities that make performance

valuable in comparison to other cultural genres.

Writing after Phelan, Diana Taylor argued against Phelan’s emphasis on

disappearance. Taylor most famously described an opposition “between the archive of

supposedly enduring materials (i.e., texts, documents, buildings, bones) and the so-called

ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice/knowledge (i.e., spoken language, dance,

sports, ritual).”25 Taylor argued that the traditional assumed objectivity and stability of

historical artifacts reinforces the hegemony of Western knowledge, especially in the

context of indigenous performance in the Americas. At stake for Taylor is survival and

resistance: if a cultural group is denied the right to author, curate, and access their own

historical knowledges because of the reification of specific institutional and state-

sanctioned archives as the entirety of socially useful information, they have been denied

24Phelan, “The Ontology of Performance: Representation without Reproduction,” 152.

25Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Second Printing
edition (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2003), 19.
 31

the right to memory: “If performance does not transmit knowledge, only the literate and

powerful could claim social memory and identity.”26 Instead of focusing on performance as

disappearance, Taylor instead describes performances as “vital acts of transfer” rather than

disappearing acts.27

Taylor argued that “[a]rchival memory works across distance, over time and space”

by “separating the source of ‘knowledge’ from the knower.”28 Taylor’s understanding of

archival memory assumes that archival materials are collected under the auspices of state

authority, centralized in state-sponsored institutions outside of their original contexts, and

made available to the interpretative power of credentialed historians. How does this

understanding of the archive position minoritarian activist-archivists who attempt to share

knowledge, resist commodification, and build more sustainable life-worlds through their

archival labor?

I look to the lasting effects of performance to honor the ways my interlocutors

transfer culture despite the forces that seek to eradicate their histories and their continued

existence. I do not, however, grant that their collections can be separated so easily from

their own acts of care and interpretation, or that these materials can outlast their

collectors. In the context of larger institutions, minoritarian archives are alternately

granted and denied provisional authority as sites of archival knowledge precisely because

they emerge from minoritarian communities and have a vested interest in preserving

26 Taylor, xvii.
27 Taylor, 2.
28 Taylor, 19.
 32

minoritarian life. Likewise, in separating the “knower” from the “knowledge,” Taylor

assumes the stability of archival documents without accounting for the acts of

interpretation and care that allow for these materials to continue to exist. With their

collections, minoritarian activist-archivists frequently see the evidence of everyday

minoritarian life as treasures worth curating, maintaining, and publicizing rather than

merely the detritus of history. Their materials persist precisely because they—sometimes

only they—deem them worth protecting.

Rebecca Schneider, likewise, emphasizes what she calls performance’s “remains.”

For Schneider, remains are both the material traces of past performance and incitements to

reperform. Performing remains, we make past performance socially meaningful in the

present despite “our long-standing thrall . . . to the notion that live performance

disappears.”29 Drawing attention to a range of aesthetic, ritualized, and everyday

performances, Schneider points to the labor of historical reenactment,

bodies striking poses, making gestures, voicing calls, reading words, singing
songs, or standing witness. Such acts of labor over and with the past might
include a body sitting at a table in an archive, bent over an “original”
manuscript or peering at a screen, interacting with history as material traces
positioned as evidence.30

Viewing these archival acts as both labor and performance can help reconcile some of the

tensions inherent in thinking of performance in binary poles between disappearance and

survival. I understand the active, contingent, exhausting labor of minoritarian archivization

29 Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, 1 edition (Abingdon,

Oxon ; New York: Routledge, 2011), 29.

30 Schneider, 33.
 33

as a matter of durational performance. To borrow Taylor’s terms, their work allows me to

describe the repertoire of the minoritarian archive.

Minoritarian Archival Performance

The Archive is thus not a dead set of objects that sit, waiting for us to reclaim,

uncover, edit, curate, and interpret; instead, the Archive is a social field, an outcome

contingent on active labor in the present. In conducting oral histories with grassroots

archivists and museum-makers, I use ethnographic performance methods to describe this

social field. Theories of minoritarian performance allow me to view the public-facing work

of my interlocutors in context with their lived experiences of marginalization. In

Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, José Muñoz offered a

theory and a method of understanding how technique is forged through the shared

experience of cultural marginalization.31 His use of minoritarian refers to simultaneously a)

those subjects who have been systemically exposed to violence due to their interpolation

within formations of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality, as well as b) the various

patterned ideologies and strategies that these subjects forge within these communities to

nonetheless survive and thrive. Minoritarian repertoires are learned, rehearsed, and

shared in the constrained space of what Muñoz called the “phobic majoritarian public

sphere.”32 Enacting constrained agencies in the tight spaces of mainstream representation,

minoritarian subjects are tasked with strategically and artfully making do with the detritus

of sensationalisms, misrepresentations, misrecognitions, and absences that constitute the

31 Muñoz, Disidentifications.
32 Muñoz, 4.
 34

normative public sphere. Muñoz called such strategies “disidentifications”: ways of

working with, in spite of, in resistance to, and with ironic attachment to dominant

ideologies and representations.33

For Muñoz, minoritarian subjects deploy what he calls the “utopic” toward an

imagination that simply must do more than reiterate the violences of the present.34 Such

moments can operate both as critiques of the present and incitements toward a “queerer”

future.35 For Joshua Chambers-Letson, performance is likewise a force through which

minoritarian subjects “survive the present, improvise new worlds, and sustain new ways of

being in the world together.”36 In After the Party, he narrates stories of artists who

“mobilize performance in both the realm of the aesthetic and the everyday to sustain the

fugitive flight and revolutionary fight to produce freedom and More Life in the face of

subordination, exploitation, annihilation, and negation.”37 By attending to the life histories

of each artist, Chambers-Letson draws connections between their quotidian experiences of

violence and their aesthetic practice, demonstrating the ways that minoritarian

performance often operates as a drive to enact freedom.

Saidiya Hartman further elucidates the time and affects of minoritarian creativity in

relationship to the Archive: “a history of the present strives to illuminate the intimacy of

33 Muñoz, Disidentifications.
34 Jose Esteban Munoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU Press, 2009).
35 “This temporal calculus perform[s] and utilize[s] the past and the future as armaments to combat

the devastating logic of the world of the here and now, a notion of nothing existing outside the sphere of the current
moment, a version of reality that naturalizes cultural logics such as capitalism and heteronormativity.” Munoz, 12.
36 Chambers-Letson, After the Party, 5.

37 Chambers-Letson, 5.
 35

our experience with the lives of the dead, to write our now as it is interrupted by this past,

and to imagine a free state, not as the time before captivity or slavery, but rather as the

anticipated future of this writing.”38 Hartman’s “archive fever”39 operates with the kind of

utopianism offered by Muñoz, whereby the imagination of a “then and there” of freedom is

what enables one to see and reject the imaginative limits of the “here and now.” This is an

insurgent utopianism: rather than performing a vacuous hope that will ensure her

complicit silence and stillness, it is a demand that compels Hartman to return to the site of

trauma. Ann Cvetkovich argues that trauma “challenges common understandings of what

constitutes an archive.”40 In constructing an “archive of feelings” Cvetkovich likewise

returns to sites of sexual and national trauma, extending archives beyond the “content of

the texts themselves [to] the practices that surround their reproductions and reception.”41

Cvetkovich follows affective lines of flight to create an archive of lesbian experience that

exceed the folders and reading rooms of sexual minorities archives. I too am interested in

cataloguing the affective accesses of the material archive by paying close attention to the

performances through which the archives of my project emerge. Across tours and

workshops, moments of purchasing and repurposing, redeployments of everyday skills of

38 Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (June 1, 2008): 4,

https://doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1.
39 Derrida describes “archival fever” in psychoanalytic terms: “It is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest,

interminable, from searching for the archive right where it slips away. It is to run after the archive, even if there’s too
much of it, right where something in it anarchives itself. It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the
archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place
of absolute commencement.” Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (University of Chicago Press, 1996),
31.
40 Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke

University Press Books, 2003), 7.

41 Cvetkovich, 7.
 36

survival, public celebrations, and acts of critical curation, my interlocutors work to produce

archives for the express benefit of their families and communities.

Chambers-Letson is, however, cautious about an approach toward performance that

too quickly equates all performance undertaken by minoritarian subjects with the

enactment of freedom. Chambers-Letson extends Muñoz’s reflection that minoritarian

performance always proceeds under forms of duress, arguing that

[p]erformance is work. Hard work. And when performance is reduced to

work for the minoritarian subject, it comes with what [Muñoz] describes as a
‘mandate to perform for the amusement of the dominant power bloc…
Performance, from the positionality of the minoritarian subject, is sometimes
nothing short of forced labor.’42

By paying close ethnographic attention to the material differences that distinguish the lived

experiences of my interlocutors, I seek to avoid both a critical approach that would deny

them agency amid social and economic precarity and a purely celebratory approach that

ignores the embodied reality of contingent labor.

I likewise do not use minoritarian archival performance to refer merely to the

modes of “preservation” or “recovery” that we might name as normative archival goals.

That minoritarian archival performances often occur under states of duress that often

require subjects to produce disappearance, misdirection, and silence in the archives.

Writing on “queer ephemerality” José Muñoz argued that Performance Studies too

frequently equates the disappearance of performance with a death of culture or a loss of

agency. Instead, he honors the ways that queer and other minoritarian subjects willingly

42 Muñoz, Disidentifications, 187; Chambers-Letson, After the Party, 44.

 37

produce the “ephemerality” of queer evidence as a form of resistance against homophobic

violence.43

For minoritarian subjects, archival disappearance can be an intentional effect of

their own agentic interventions against the physical and mental violences of state

surveillance whereby visibility constitutes another form of social death.44 Muñoz’s

configuration of willed queer ephemerality mirrors Dwight Conquergood’s discussion of

practices of Black U.S. citizens such as Zora Neale Hurston in the first half of the 20th

century. Responding to white researchers and state officials who sought to simultaneously

document and domesticate the experiences of Black people in the post-Reconstruction-era

U.S., these citizens deliberately obscured the reading practices of these

intruders. Offering precisely enough information on the surface to satiate the officials’ need

to describe and dominate, while revealing very little about the actual reality of Black life in

the U.S., these subjects use tactical performs of misdirection to respond to state-sanctioned

strategies of epistemological domination.

The theory behind our tactics: “The white man is always trying to know into
somebody else’s business. All right, I’ll set something outside the door of my
mind for him to play with and handle. He can read writing but he sho’ can’t

43 Instead of being clearly available as visible evidence, queerness has instead existed as innuendo, gossip,

fleeting moments, and performances that are meant to be interacted with by those within its epistemological sphere—
while evaporating at the touch of those who would eliminate queer possibility.” José Esteban Muñoz, “Ephemera as
Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (January 1,
1996): 6, https://doi.org/10.1080/07407709608571228.
44 In using the term “social death,” Orlando Patterson spoke of two ways through which the slave is

“desocializ[ed] and depersonalize[ed].” By extending the concept of social death to all minoritarian subjects, critics refer
to the processes through which subjects are denied humanity by being deemed simultaneously dangerously foreign and
undeserving of any form of participation in the social. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Harvard University
Press, 1982).
 38

read my mind. I’ll put this play toy in his hand, and he will seize it and go
away.”45

In willful acts of obfuscation, Black citizens thus actively produced the official state-

sanctioned archive differently, performing in the constrained spaces of official surveys and

hegemonic historic narratives using what I have here called minoritarian archival

performance.

The Humanities and “The Archive”

Julietta Singh has written writes on the fungibility of the term “The Archive” within

the humanities: sometimes we are imagining a quite literal place, the “brick and mortar”

building where records are filed away for the use of researchers, but the Archive might also

be a “body of literature” (perhaps specific to one’s individual research project or of

canonical importance to a field of thought) or maybe any collection of things—thoughts or

ideas or experience—that become more meaningful when grouped together.46 Ultimately,

Singh grounds her own understanding of the Archive in the anxieties and impostures of

graduate students, who understand the promise of the Archive with the urgency of

economic precarity. They know that their ability to secure a tenure line position—imagined

as the only path toward material and spiritual sustenance—is contingent on finding their

own Archive and making something, quickly.

[I]n other words, “archive” in graduate school simply means what you are
studying, and calling what you study an “archive” gives it heft, grants it the
status of an intellectual pursuit. Your archive is an expected declaration – a

45 Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men, Reprint edition (New York, NY: Amistad, 2008), 3. as quoted in Dwight

Conquergood, “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research,” TDR/The Drama Review 46, no. 2 (June 1,
2002): 145–56, https://doi.org/10.1162/105420402320980550.
46 Julietta Singh, No Archive Will Restore You, 1st edition (Santa Barbara, CA: Punctum Books, 2018).
 39

pronouncement that makes manifest your worth and belonging in the great
halls of higher learning. The archive, it must be noted, is also your enabling
fiction: it is the thing you say you are doing well before you are actually doing
it, and well before you understand what the stakes are of gathering and
interpreting it.47

Beyond projecting myself onto Singh’s graduate anxieties, her writing on the archive

provides me a different path toward restating one of my central interdisciplinary

interventions in this project, especially in terms of the affect of labor. As I posited in the

opening pages of this introduction, research is central to the ways that humanists conceive

of the Archive. The archive (as opposed to an archives) is the name we use to describe that

something—greater than its parts—that is worth studying, examining, and experiencing as

we seek deeper understandings of the world. When we conceive of a group of things as

something we call “the Archive,” we are also articulating what analytical work remains to

be done to those objects of study, even as we alternately imagine that something as

slippery, violent, absent, unwieldy, or underwhelming. And I would argue that many of our

most foundational theories of the Archive are at least partially autoethnographic accounts

of the feelings of responsibility we bring to that project in the face of its limitations, even

when not named as such.

As an example, consider Jennifer Morgan’s critical rereading of Carolyn Steedman’s

“Dust: The Archive and Cultural History” in the afterward for a special issue on recovery in

the archives of slavery. Morgan focuses on Steedman’s story of a historian (Steedman

herself, described in second person) who is stupefied by the sheer number of texts that

47 Singh, 23.
 40

have proliferated in the colonial archive.48 Steedman reflects not only on the

historian’s/her limitations of time and energy, but of the insufficiency of “the Archive”

itself: “You know perfectly well that the infinite heaps of things they recorded, the notes

and traces that these people left behind, constitute practically nothing at all.”49 With careful

appreciation for Steedman’s work, Morgan describes a different kind of affective response

to the colonial archive, “the numbing process of turning page after page of a record book

from a seventeenth-century probate court scanning for the word negro or woman in a kind

of a stupor that threatens to render you intellectually dead.” In these two accounts, we find

what might appear to be different modes of theorizing archival research, one that

rhetorically universalizes a shared experience of encountering the “flotsam” of “the

Archive,”50 and one that describes a feeling of absence that Black historians of transatlantic

slavery might feel and theorize with a different kind of embodied specificity. Both share an

investment in describing the way archival labor feels from the perspectives of the

researcher; each critic argues that we can do with the Archive is co-constitutive of what the

Archive does with us.

48 By “archive,” Steedman means “[a] particular kind of archive, instituted by state (or quasi-state) organisations

since the late eighteenth century, in England and France… used by social and cultural historians like myself, and a small
and parochial example of a longer and larger collection of the documents of world history, by churches and temples,
schools and colleges, monarchs, princes and other kinds of absolutist ruler, and departments of government, within and
without Europe, long before the eighteenth century” (ix). Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New
Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2002), ix.
49 Steedman, 18.

50 Steedman emphasizes that her archive is actually quite specific: “The Archive in which Dust is found and with

which this book also deals, is a particular kind of archive, instituted by state (or quasi-state) organisations since the late
eighteenth century, in England and France.” Nonetheless I would argue that the use of second person achieves presents
Steedman’s highly located and specific research encounter as something with which any reader encountering this tome
would identify. Steedman, ix.
 41

To illustrate further, I am reminded of Charles E. Morris III’s “Archival Queers,” a call

to arms within the field of Communication and Rhetorical Studies to “utilize the tools of

rhetorical criticism and theory to enhance navigation of archives and produce rhetorical

histories of archives that will warrant and arm our queer scholarship, pedagogy, and

activism.” He begins with an account of looking for the open secret of J. Edgar Hoover’s

sexual and gender deviance in the FBI archives. With sardonic aplomb, Morris recounts the

cruel pleasure the FBI archivists seem to take in disrupting his inquiry, even resorting to

outing his scholarship to another stranger in the reading room:

For my own part I confess were I not confident in the FBI’s reputation for
candor, cooperation, and commitment to the Freedom of Information Act, not
to mention its heartening history, begun with Hoover, of championing the
GLBTQ (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered, Queer) community, I might
have interpreted my archival experiences there—the arctic temperature in
the so-called reading room, the mysterious disappearance of an index to the
files, the redacted documents, the photocopies that the “assistant”
continually but, of course, inadvertently handed to the historian sitting next
to me—as in some important sense politically motivated.51

Morris’s larger point in this short essay is articulating the need for critical methods of

finding queerness in the Archive. Perhaps more importantly, he emphatically demands an

ethical and political commitment from his colleagues to do this work. But I return to this

piece nearly 17 years later as an account of archival labor. Here Morris not only offers us an

account of his personal and professional experience in the archives as a queer rhetor, but

also begins to stage the ground for a performance analysis of institutionality. Fully realized,

this analysis might look to the desires and life histories of the archivists of the FBI, making

51 Charles E. Morris, “Archival Queer,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9, no. 1 (2006): 145.
 42

sense of their ridiculous behavior with close attention to how their life histories informed

those particular encounters with that young queer scholar.

Critical theories in the humanities of “the Archive”—especially those we might

group under the larger field of minoritarian knowledge production—have analyzed the

replication of archival power through acts of curation, institutionalization, research, and

writing. I continue in this vein by attending to my own experience of doing in research in

these pages. Yet even as individual scholars like Steedman, Morgan, and Morris describe

the visceral experience of archival research with reflexivity and rigor,52 the larger scene

and cast of their archival performances are not typically given the same kinds of critical

attention within the larger field of humanistic thought. The archivists who appear in these

stories are there to fulfill their role as institutional gatekeepers, wielding their power to

determine not only what the Archive may say but also who may be given the privilege to

hear it.53 These accounts flatten the social field as an encounter between a solitary

individual researcher and their texts, where the institution and its workers can only figure

as helpful or obstructive agents but never quite as co-performers in the meaning-making

process. In the context of minoritarian archives specifically, these accounts also run the risk

of reproducing the largely undertheorized binary between institutional archives and

grassroots sites of community identity. I don’t deny that my archival engagements at many

52 For example, see the edited collection Beyond the Archives: Research as Lived Process, which offers an

expansive account of research in and beyond the institutional archives. Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan, eds., Beyond the
Archives: Research as a Lived Process, First Edition (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008).
53 In the words of Michelle Caswell, “[w]hen archivists are acknowledged, they are seen as mindless bureaucrats

who hinder rather than aid access to records.” Caswell, ““’The Archive’ Is Not an Archives.”
 43

specific sites have been frustrating encounters with individual archivists who seem

strangely invested in protecting their archives from what I might do with them.54 I am

instead, however, describing a broader pattern where a limited kind of research become a

self-evident metaphor for our broader understanding of “the Archive.” This, in short, limits

the ways we can conceive of the worldmaking labor of minoritarian archivists.

With this admittedly broad characterization, I am calling for an intervention into the

way we think about archival labor and the fuller co-performative social field of the

Archive.55 By this I mean that a performance analytic should focus on the material reality of

the cast of characters that perform the Archive into being, rather than only theory built on

more dispersed and abstract understandings of politics and history or the embodied

experiences of solely the researcher. I turn to humanistic archival theory to make meaning

of the affect and labor of archival performance, imagining both the work of academic

research alongside the labor of my archivist interlocuters as archival performance. Rather

than simply rehearsing the ways that academic fields have deconstructed the production of

54 Nor do I disagree that minoritarian archives—who produce archives specifically for their own communities—

can feel much more welcoming, intimate, and hopeful when places in stark comparison against monolithic research
institutions. Those feelings, however, deserve sustained critical attention, especially in terms of understanding how
belonging and welcomeness operate as rhetorical and affective structures in the production of minoritarian identity. In
my work with the Sexual Minorities Archives I endeavor to do some of this analytical work.
55 By this I do not mean that others have not already begun the work that I am describing, but I am pointing to a

lack of sustained focus on their critical contributions of Archival Studies and performance ethnography when it comes to
our broad conception of the Archive. I place my work alongside other archival ethnographers such as performance
scholar Ramón Rivera-Servera, who described his experiences as a “queer man of color” at a Smithsonian Celia Cruz
exhibition History; performance scholar Jennifer Tyburczy, who conducted ethnographies at four sex museums in North
America; and archival studies scholar Karen F. Gracy, who defines “archival ethnography” as “a form of naturalistic
inquiry which positions the researcher within an archival environment to gain the cultural perspective of those
responsible for the creation, collection, care, and use of records.” Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, “Exhibiting Voice/Narrating
Migration: Performance-Based Curatorial Practice in ¡Azúcar! The Life and Music of Celia Cruz,” Text and Performance
Quarterly 29, no. 2 (April 1, 2009): 131–48, https://doi.org/10.1080/10462930902774841; Tyburczy, Sex Museums;
Karen F. Gracy, “Documenting Communities of Practice: Making the Case for Archival Ethnography*,” Archival Science 4,
no. 3–4 (December 2004): 337, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-005-2599-3.
 44

archival power, I seek to build a more robust understanding of how these humanistic

theories of the Archive hinge on the specific circumstances of our labor.

In the polemic "The Archive" is Not An Archives: Acknowledging the Intellectual

Contributions of Archival Studies,” information scholar Michelle Caswell argued that that

“[t]his omission is not the result of chance, but […] a result of the construction of archival

labor as a feminine service industry and archival studies (if it is ever even acknowledged as

existing) as imparting merely practical how-to skills).”56 The humanities, according to

Caswell, has theorized the Archive in willful ignorance of the contributions of the field of

Archival Studies:

Since Derrida's Archive Fever hit the presses in 1995, tomes of humanities
scholarship have been dedicated to critiquing "the archive." "The archive"
has been deconstructed, decolonized, and queered by scholars in fields as
wide-ranging as English, anthropology, cultural studies, and gender and
ethnic studies. Yet almost none of the humanistic inquiry at "the archival
turn" (even that which addresses "actually existing archives") has
acknowledged the intellectual contribution of archival studies as a field of
theory and praxis in its own right, nor is this humanities scholarship in
conversation with ideas, debates, and lineages in archival studies.57

The humanities, it seems, has much to learn from the field of Archival Studies. My own

project is not primarily about the application of humanistic archival theory to archival

documents. But neither is it really about delivering on the promise Caswell articulates of

true interdisciplinary engagement between humanistic and Archival Studies theory and

praxis, even as I cite archival scholars through this document. Instead, my joint experiences

in archives—as a critical theorist in intersecting fields of the humanities with vested

56 Caswell, ““’The Archive’ Is Not an Archives.”

57 Caswell.
 45

interested in the Archive, as an ethnographer of actually existing archives within

performance studies, and as an archivist in a brick-and-mortar archives—lead me to argue

that we’ve all largely neglected the worldmaking labor of minoritarian archivists in our

theories of the Archive. My work with archivists seeks to bridge robust critiques of the

Archive with a sustained focus on the people who produce archives. I am interested in

extending critical conversations in the humanities to the labor of my interlocutors, asking

how these archivists too “cruise the archive,”58 “critically fabulate” narratives of

dispossessed lives,59 follow the “streams” of scant historical evidence,60 forge historical and

affective intimacies across the ravages of capitalism and the ruptures of diaspora,61 and

conceive of communal memory beyond the sites of archival institutions.62 And my

experience in archival studies heightens my ability to name the stakes “of the various

material processes—acquisition, appraisal, collection management, description, indexing,

58 For discussions on apprehending archival queerness, see Charles Morris’s “Archival Queer” and Charles

Morris and K. J. Rawson’s “Queer Archives/Archival Queers.” Morris, “Archival Queer.” Charles E. Morris and K. J. Rawson,
“Queer Archives/Archival Queers,” in Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric, vol. 9780809332113 (Southern Illinois University
Press, 2013), 74–89, http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84887992719&partnerID=8YFLogxK.
59 See Saidiya Hartman’s writing on “critical fabulation” in “Venus in Two Acts” and “The Dead Book” in Lose

Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” June 1, 2008; Saidiya Hartman, Lose
Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).
60 See Royster, Jaqueline Jones. Traces of A Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women.

.Jaqueline Jones Royster, Traces Of A Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women, 1 edition
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000).
61 Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).

62 See Martin Manalansan’s “The ‘Stuff’ of Archives Mess, Migration, and Queer Lives,” Alexis Gumbs’s M Archive,

Rebeka Sheffield’s “The Bedside Table Archives,” and Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley’s “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic.” Martin
F. Manalansan, “The ‘Stuff’ of Archives Mess, Migration, and Queer Lives,” Radical History Review 2014, no. 120
(September 21, 2014): 94–107, https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2703742; Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive: After the
End of the World (Durham ; London: Duke University Press Books, 2018); R. T. Sheffield, “The Bedside Table Archives:
Archive Intervention and Lesbian Intimate Domestic Culture,” Radical History Review 2014, no. 120 (October 1, 2014):
108–20, https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2703751; Omise’Eke Natasha Tinsley, “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer
Imaginings of the Middle Passage,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 14, no. 2–3 (2008): 191–215,
https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2007-030.
 46

preservation, oxidation, and deaccession—that affect the corpus of historical records,”63 as

well as the theoretical, personal, political, and profession energies of archivists committed

to this labor.

Black Feminist Theory

My own case studies of this labor represent a wide range of racial, ethnic, gender,

and sexual identities, and I use minoritarian theories grounded in the specific experiences

of these communities in each chapter. However, Black feminist thought—envisioned as a

joint project between scholars and activists from multiple identity categories—is a

sustained thread across this dissertation. This citational practice evidences not only my

ethical and intellectual commitments but also my own disciplinary location at the

intersections of queer-of-color performance studies, sexuality studies, feminist studies, and

ethnic studies, each have which have forged common ground in the theoretical

interventions of Black women and Black feminists. Black feminist theory has been a fertile

ground for my analysis of institutionality and labor;64 subjectivities that can never be

theorized on a singular axis of oppression, privilege, or identity;65 the emotional as data

63 Wendy B. Sharer, “Disintegrating Bodies of Knowledge: Historical Material and Revisionary Histories of

Rhetoric,” in Rhetorical Bodies, ed. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press,
1999), 124.
64 Ferguson, “Administering Sexuality; or, The Will to Institutionality”; Jennifer C. Nash, Black Feminism

Reimagined: After Intersectionality, 2019; Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); Robyn Wiegman, Object Lessons (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books,
2012).
65 See, for instance, how the authors of the “Combahee Statement” articulate intersecting axes of oppression and

coalitional politics; how E. Patrick Johnson used his homophobic grandmother’s pronunciation of “quare” to interrogate
the implicit whiteness and geographic and class privileges of certain strands of queer theory, and of Cathy Cohen’s
reassertion of intersectional identity politics in “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens.” Demita Frazier, Beverly Smith,
and Barbara Smith, The Combahee River Collective Statement (Combahee River Collective, 1977); E. Patrick Johnson,
 47

rich for theory and world-making;66 and archival invention as intervention.67 I follow with

deep gratitude for the scholarship and mentorship of Jennifer Nash, who argues for a

“broad conception of black feminism—and black feminists—precisely because of [her]

commitment to tracing black feminist theory’s expansive intellectual, political, ethical, and

creative reach, one that [she] sees as always transcending attempts to limit the tradition by

rooting it in embodied performances.”68

Black feminist theories of the Archive have provided historical, political, and

affective specificity to archival performances of Black women and femme in specific, but

also offer a standpoint from which to name the normative operations of all archives. In

“Venus in Two Acts,” to offer an extended example, Saidiya Hartman writes about the trans-

Atlantic archive as a series of effacements, transfigurations, and spectacularizations that

present ethical, emotional, and intellectual challenges for researchers.69 Hartman’s account

begins with the specificity of her work as Black woman doing archival research on Black

“‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know about Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother,” Text and
Performance Quarterly 21, no. 1 (January 1, 2001): 1–25, https://doi.org/10.1080/10462930128119; Cathy J. Cohen,
“Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?,” in Sexual Identities, Queer Politics, ed.
Mark Blasius (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 200–228.
66 See essays by Audre Lorde, especially “The Uses of Anger” and “Uses of the Erotic,” Sarah Ahmed’s genealogy

of Black feminist thought in her articulation of the “angry black woman” as an “affect alien,” and both Christina Sharpe’s
and Joshua Chambers-Letson reflections on death and loss in In the Wake and After the Party. Audre Lorde and Cheryl
Clarke, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Reprint edition (Berkeley, Calif: Crossing Press, 2007); Sara Ahmed, The
Promise of Happiness (Durham NC: Duke University Press Books, 2010); Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and
Being, Reprint edition (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2016); Chambers-Letson, After the Party.
67 Consider, for instance, how scholars like Saidiya Hartman, Pauline Alexis Gumbs, Barbara Wekker, and

Omise'eke Tinsley have each invented new methodology and forms of writing in their engagement with the death of
stories of Black women and femmes in the archive of trans-Atlantic slavery. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small
Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 26 (2008): 1–14, https://doi.org/10.2979/SAX.2008.-.26.1; Gumbs, M Archive; Gloria
Wekker, “The Mati Work,” in The Politics of Passion: Women’s Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora (Columbia
University Press, 2006); Tinsley, “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic.”
68 Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined, 5.

69 Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” June 1, 2008.

 48

women in chattel slavery. She searches for Venus, a woman named exactly once in the

historical record as one of two murdered enslaved Black women in a legal indictment

against a slave ship captain. The colonial archive is nonetheless rife with instantiations of

Venus: depictions of silenced Black women who operate merely as metonyms for

misogynoirist violence.70 Hartman asks Venus, in her magnified non-presence, to account

for the fact that no women or girls who survived Middle Passage have produced written

records that we can access today: not only do “no dead girls speak,”71 but the Archive

seems to be predicated on the violence that annihilates them. Within what Jacques Derrida

calls the “consignation of signs,”72 the Archive houses, protects, and reproduces narratives

of everywhere-nothingness. In the grouping of these stories of violence, in the reduction of

women to archetypes, and the macro-economics of compiled ledger lines,73 the Archive

accomplishes a lingering conquest over the possibilities for their afterlives. For Derrida the

Archive is the site where power is consolidated through hermeneutic method. The right to

put into place is the right to interpret, and vice versa: a power replicated through the

simultaneity of naming, knowing, and consignation.74 Michel Foucault likewise thinks of the

70 Moya Bailey coined the term “misogynoir” in a Crunk Feminist Collective blog post to describe the “co-

constitutive, anti-Black, and misogynistic racism directed at Black women, particularly in visual and digital culture.” In
combining “misogyny” with “noir,” Bailey speaks not only of the specific violences targeting Black women but also intends
a double usage of “noir” to references technologies of film and media: misogynoirist violence is frequently accomplished
through technologies of representation and surveillance. Moya Bailey, “They Aren’t Talking about Me…,” March 15, 2010,
https://www.crunkfeministcollective.com/2010/03/14/they-arent-talking-about-me/. Moya Bailey, “Misogynoir in
Medical Media: On Caster Semenya and R. Kelly,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 2, no. 2 (September 21,
2016): 1–31, https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v2i2.28800.
71 Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” June 1, 2008, 12.

72 Derrida, Archive Fever, 3.

73 For fuller discussion of how chattel slavery reduces life to mere flesh, see Hortense Spiller’s “Mama's Baby,

Papa's Maybe.” Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2
(1987): 65–81, https://doi.org/10.2307/464747.
74 Derrida, Archive Fever.
 49

Archive as “the general system of the formation and transformation of statements,”75

which “establish[es] statements as events (with their own conditions and domain of

appearance) and things (with their own possibility and field of use).”76 Rather than simply

preserving history or recovering lost statements for future citation, it is the Archive that

provides the possibility for “things” to operate performatively as historical artifacts (what

he calls their “enunciability”), but it also is that which ensures that some things speak

loudly and others cannot speak at all. This same framework77 makes it inevitable that

Hartman will find “Harriot, Phibba, Sara, Joanna, Rachel, Linda, and Sally” everywhere in

“[t]he barracoon, the hollow of the slave ship, the pest-house, the brothel, the cage, the

surgeon’s laboratory, the prison, the cane-field, the kitchen, [and] the master’s

bedroom.”7879 Middle Passage operates anagrammatically80: the power of the Archive is to

simultaneously name, interpret, and put into place, not only to organize what has been said,

but to constrain the very possibility of enunciation. To speak of archival silences is not

simply to say that narratives have been rewritten, censored, destroyed, and forgotten; it is

75 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge: And the Discourse on Language (New York: Vintage, 1982),
145.
76 Foucault, 146.
77 Here, Derrida’s “topo-nomology” and Foucault’s “statements” describe similar formations. Derrida, Archive
Fever; Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge.
78 Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” June 1, 2008, 1.

79 Spillers discusses how the U.S. national project requires such consignations: “’Peaches’ and ‘Brown Sugar,’

‘Sapphire’ and ‘Earth Mother,’ ‘Aunty,’ ‘Granny,’ God’s ‘Holy Fool,’ a ‘Miss Ebony First,’ or ‘Black Woman at the Podium’: I
described a locus of confounded identities, a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of
rhetorical wealth. My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented.” Spillers, “Mama’s Baby,
Papa’s Maybe,” 65.
80 In In the Wake Christina Sharpe discusses how blackness operates as an “anagrammar”, rearranging the

meaning of words and symbols: “So, blackness anew, blackness as a/temporal, in and out of place and time putting
pressure on meaning and that against which meaning is made.” Sharpe, In the Wake, 43.
 50

also to claim that a structure of what can and cannot be said is the precondition for the

Archive itself.

“Venus in Two Acts” thus moves from the autoethnographic analysis of Hartman’s

own desires for Venus toward an ethics and methodology of thinking, writing, and feeling

through the Archive that she calls “critical fabulation.” Hartman describes the

inseparability of the structural disappearance of Black history, the felt experience of

archival labor, and the necessity of alternate modes of representing the past. Hartman’s

essay could certainly operate as a rejoinder for what I would call universalizing theories of

the Archive—theories that generalize the experiences of presumably white, middle-class

academics working in primarily Western institutional archives. Yet, my argument is that we

should not arrest the possibilities of Black feminist theory in what Rachel Lee called their

“diversifying function,” the ways that Black feminist and women of color of theory has been

called on to critique and rectify the racial, class, and nationalist paucities of mainstream

academic white feminism.81 Instead, I work from this tradition because of the ways that

Hartman and many other Black feminist writers have offered expansive methodological

possibilities for understanding and representing the Archive in terms of affect, labor, and

ethics. The theorists I cite throughout this dissertation offer me modes of thinking, feeling,

and writing about the Archive that imagine a horizon of justice from the specificity of

81 Lee writes in the specific context of Women’s Studies programs where courses in “women of color” feminism

are simultaneously represented as the cure to the ills of white, middle-class, Western-centric feminism but also are also
administratively relegated to the margins through the “logic of fetishized marginality.“ Rachel Lee, “Notes from the (Non)
Field: Teaching and Theorizing Women of Color,” Meridians 1, no. 1 (2000): 91.
 51

embodied of experience. Sara Ahmed talked about the epistemically reorienting pleasure of

encountering Black feminist and feminist of color for the first time.

Here was writing in which an embodied experience of power provides the

basis of knowledge. Here was writing animated by the everyday: the detail of
an encounter, an incident, a happening, flashing like insight. Reading black
feminist and feminist of color scholarship was life changing; I began to
appreciate that theory can do more the closer it gets to the skin.82

I engage in this tradition as a scholar of archival performance, emphasizing the contingency

of the Archive by describing the alchemical process where “encounters,” “incidents,” and

“happenings” become “archives,” whereby people become archivists.

(Even More) Notes on Method

My project builds upon a tradition of performance ethnography within performance

studies, including oral history and participant-observation. I use performance ethnography

to analyze the ongoing embodied performances through which each archives continuously

emerges. Like Gender and Sexuality scholar Ann Cvetkovich, I think of archives in

expansive terms, not only as the “content of the texts themselves [but also] the practices

that surround their reproductions and reception.”83 In these pages, my performance

ethnographies describe how material objects become archival through the co-performances

of curators, visitors, and researchers, including myself. 84 Performance scholar D. Soyini

Madison’s mentorship at Northwestern has had an enduring impact on my understanding

82 Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, Illustrated edition (Durham London: Duke University Press Books, 2017),
10.
83Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings, 7.
84 Madison developed the idea of co-performative witnessing alongside her own mentor, Dwight Conquergood.
Conquergood, “Performance Studies”; Dwight Conquergood, Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis, ed. E.
Patrick Johnson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 276.
 52

of ethnography as a method of inquiry and as a form of advocacy. According to Madison, a

critical performance ethnography not only deploys standard ethnographic methods of

immersion and deep description, but it also recognizes the role of the ethnographer in co-

producing the performance.85 Critical ethnography demands that a research name the

productive force of the research performance itself in the name of ethical responsibility.

Performance ethnography, for Madison, is a means of achieving this responsibility by

engendering one’s “response-ability,” honing the skills of deep listening, introspection,

analysis, and representation to ethically meet one’s visceral desire to “make a difference in

the world.”86

Madison works within a tradition of feminist and African American ethnography

that uses personal reflexivity as a means toward advocacy, as opposed to ethnographic

traditions that might attempt to eliminate personal bias and feeling in the attempt to

describe cultural performance outside the influence of the detached observer. In my

performance ethnographies archives, my “field notes” described not only what I witnessed

at each archives but also how the archivists and I navigated what we understood as our

desires for the research encounter. I follow each performance to ask how archives are

actively created as the players in each scene—archivist, researcher, and visitors—bring

their social histories to productive force in the live space of social performance. I conduct

oral history interviews with each of the archivists of my study during these site visits,

85 D. Soyini Madison, Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance, 2 edition (Thousand Oaks, Calif:

SAGE Publications, Inc, 2011).

86 Madison, 97.
 53

situating their archival labor in the context of their lived experience. Performance scholar E

Patrick Johnson, another scholar of Madison, draws on insights of Black vernacularists and

folklorists to describe oral histories in terms of performance: “This view of performance

necessarily takes into account the physical setting in with performances occur, as well as

the relationships between performer and audience and performer and self.”87

For example, Muna Tseng literally pulled back the curtain between her personal

living space and her brother Tseng Kwong Chi’s archives during my first visit to her

apartment, sheepishly sharing a closet full of her mother’s dresses. Muna shared how the

clothing had inspired Stella (2011), one of a trio of dance pieces in which Muna

remembered family members through their archival ephemera. As I will discuss in Chapter

3, this exchange led not only to a deeper understanding of the way Muna conceived of

performance as a means of keeping her family alive, but also led me to meaningfully

describe my responsibility as an ethnographer reporting on her archival labor. By

conducting performance ethnographies alongside these oral histories, I thus encourage my

interlocutors to turn to archival materials, offer impromptu tours, and think about previous

acts of labor in the context of the life histories than initially called them to collect and

perform. As I will explore in each of my case studies, these oral histories sometimes

challenge my interlocutors to adjust their sense of what is valuable to a researcher and an

academic audience. While they often seek to rhetorically separate their own intimate lives

from their public-facing archival personas, I am most interested in dwelling at this

87 E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham N.C.: Duke

University Press Books, 2003), 11.

 54

intersection where public and private collide within the space of minoritarian archives.

Performance ethnography allows me to approach these archives with a more capacious

understanding of archival performance that accounts for the specific exigencies of

minoritarian archivization and the ways that they frequently operate at the intersections of

community, family memory, and public pedagogy. And as I explore in each case study, these

engagements have required me to articulate my own felt sense of responsibility to my

subjects, my overlapping desires for the research encounter, and the ways that we each

bring our personal histories and social interpolation to bear in our intimate encounters.

Yes, as I will explore in each chapter, my methods were indelibly shaped by the

conditions of doing research during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of my stories of the

Sexual Minorities Archives occurred long before this project took shape. As a result,

Chapter 1 deploys rhetorical analysis, archival research, and speculation in ways I had not

originally imagined when I proposed ethnographic project. In applying performance

analysis to texts, I offer a method based in the phenomenology of turning to the archive to

bridge separations of time. I ask: how does archival research “feel” in my longing to

describe life, and how can that enable us to describe the “structures of feeling”88 in the

minoritarian archive? For instance, in Chapter 2 I write after the physical closure of the

National Black Doll Museum during the first wave of the pandemic. My time with Debra

Britt was arguably the most traditional form of performance ethnography, entailing a

three-day-long period of in-situ analysis where I observed museum visitors, participated in

88 Raymond Williams, “Structures of Feeling,” in Structures of Feeling (De Gruyter, 2015), 20–26,

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365481.20.
 55

doll-making workshops, and conducted multiple oral history interviews. Yet, the Museum’s

closure presented a challenge to my analysis and writing, so I turn to traditions of what

Jennifer Nash has called “beautiful writing” within Black feminist studies to not only name

loss but the enduring afterlife of Black women’s creative production.89 Thus, even as the

National Black Doll Museum could enable a critic to make academic interventions within

multiple disciplines that theorize race, gender, and performance pedagogy, my writing is

reflective of a desire to advocate as a response to the urgency of loss. Finally, in my

conclusion—my most direct engagement with contributions from the field of Archival

Studies—I use the occasion of lost digital “data” to theorize archival loss as a precondition

for the minoritarian archive, turning to theories of temporality that neither foreclose the

possibility of an enduringly vibrant past nor guarantee life in the future.

Chapter Outline

I organize the mess of this dissertation across five chapters. In this introduction,

“‘I’m Sorry for the Mess’: Minoritarian Archival Performance,” I’ve provided a theoretical

groundwork for thinking through minoritarian archives in terms of labor framed by scales

of precarity and institutionality. While naming some of the theorists who have shaped my

understanding of the violences of the colonial archives, I’ve argued for sustained attention

on archivists who maintain more personal, less resourced, and less recognized archival

sites in comparison to large, state-sponsored institutions.

89 Nash, “Writing Black Beauty.”

 56

In Chapter One, “Ben Power, the Bulldog at the Door: Belonging at The Sexual

Minorities Archives,” I follow Ben Power’s life with the Sexual Minorites Archives to their

current shared home in a Victorian house Power calls the “pink lady.” This archival

collection has morphed in scope and ideology as Power has come to understand himself

differently across time: first as a member of a disbanding lesbian separatist group in

Chicago who first started the collection as the New Alexandria Library, then as a FTM

member of a growing BDSM community, then as a disabled trans man fighting eviction, and

finally as a trans elder who secured new housing with the help of community fundraising.

As I tell this story, I recount my own story of encountering the archive across multiple

modes and times: in my archival research of the SMA’s early history, in my capacity as a

board member for two sexual and gender minority archives, as a witness to a public

fundraiser in support of the SMA, and as a young queer researcher in the home of a trans

elder.

In Chapter Two, “The Deadline, The Stage, The Lesson: The Hold in Three Variations;

Or, Debbie Britt and the National Black Doll Museum,” I offer three overlapping stories of

the National Black Doll Museum. Written primarily in the months following the Museum’s

closure during the Covid-19 pandemic, I mourn the museum even as I recognize it as-yet-

unrealized future possibilities. Each story centers “the Hold,” Britt’s restaging of the hold of

a trans-Atlantic slave ship in a storage closet at the Museum. Returning to “the Hold” three

times mirrors my own attempts to tell the story of the Museum in its multiplicity: as a

material outcome of labor and serendipity, a stage for improvised historical reenactment,

and a crucible for emancipatory pedagogies.

 57

In Chapter Four, “Archival Responsibility: Muna Tseng and Tseng Kwong Chi’s

Estate,” I write about choreographer Muna Tseng’s role in using her brother’s papers to

build a legacy with enduring value to minoritarian theorists, especially in terms of Asian

American art and performance theory. Through Muna’s labor, including her archival

curation and her aesthetic performance, Tseng Kwong Chi’s objects become archival. I view

Muna’s work as simultaneous acts of emotional and archival processing, demonstrating the

ways that her personal memory is intertwined with his public memorialization. In

analyzing Muna’s relationships to her brother, her audiences, multiple academic

disciplines, and myself as ethnographer, I theorize archival responsibility as a collaborative

process whereby each participant in the archival encounter brings a different perspective

and duty to the archive.

In my conclusion, “Nonetheless: A Women’s Ashes, A Bloody Finger, A Desiccated

Mouse,” I return to several moments of what D. Soyini Madison calls “punctum,” “break[s]

in the flow of expectation that [resist] the repetitive and hegemonic power to reinscribe

identity and value.”90 I offer these moments as experiences that persisted across my

research even as they never carved a place for themselves in the body chapters proper,

demanding attention even as they failed to coalesce into precise arguments. From these

feelings, I theorize minoritarian archival performance as a “nonetheless” in the face of the

certain loss that characterizes all archives.

90 D. Soyini Madison, Acts of Activism: Human Rights as Radical Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2010),
49.
 58

I: Ben Power, the Bulldog at the Door: Belonging at The Sexual Minorities Archives

Activist and archivist Ben Power Alwin91 curates the Sexual Minorities Archives

(SMA), one of the oldest and largest collections of materials by and for sexual and gender

minorities in the world. Likely the only trans man who directs a collection of this size,92 he

lives in a large pink Victorian home in Holyoke, Massachusetts among the SMA. As I knew

the SMA and Ben almost ten years ago in a different location, when multiple intersecting

exigencies and desires felt like they delivered me to Ben’s doorstep. Yet, despite the ways

our professional and personal lives have intersected and how his work instigated me to

follow the lines of inquiry that became this dissertation, I have never been to the SMA’s

current home, and I might never. Interrupted by personal and global circumstance, a series

of plans to visit Ben again for immersive performance ethnography and site-based oral

history never coalesced. In the pages that follow, I weave fragmentary stories of the SMA

with methodological notes about doing archival research. I wrote this chapter in the

contexts of multiple scales of archival loss: elisions in memory, conflicting standpoints,

gaps in the written archive, and even the loss of dissertation “data” in the forms of deleted

recordings, missed opportunities, and waylaid research trips.

I build theory from the detritus of my research on archivist and activist Ben Power

and the SMA: unsatisfactory archival fragments, ethnographic interviews that never

91 While I refer to Ben as a trans man, using “he” in this writing, Ben’s identity and relationship to this collection

of materials has shifted radically over the course of working with the archives. As is the case with many trans academics
and activists, his “dead name” appears throughout his earlier writing and in writing about him. I use “Ben” and “he” even
when recognizing his earlier understanding of himself.
92 K. J. Rawson, “Archival Justice: An Interview with Ben Power Alwin,” Radical History Review 2015, no. 122

(May 2015): 177–87, https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2849603.

 59

happened, memories that were never recorded in any documents, and queer community

that coalesced in ways I couldn’t predict in moments of gossip, failure, and misrecognition.

As a graduate student and archival researcher, I reexamine theories of “the Archive” across

multiple disciplines in the context of the working and surviving in the third year of the

Covid-19 pandemic. Yet, in a deeper sense I write as a gender and sexual minority who

looked for myself in the archives, what Bek Orr called “site[s] of recovery and

remembrance, [spaces] for queer worldbuilding, and [places] where dominant histories are

challenged, negotiated, and affirmed.”93 Regardless of the form I choose to articulate my

interlocking history with the SMA—which stories I choose to conceal, which I will

investigate with sustained attention, and which ultimately don’t feel quite relevant to the

genre of the dissertation—the desire to find myself in “the Archive” is a foundational part

of what attuned me to its worldmaking power.

I begin this chapter in stops and starts, relying on conflicting accounts from multiple

sources to write a provisional timeline of the Sexual Minorities Archives (SMA). My oft-

thwarted attempts to begin with a straightforward and succinct historical context have

required me to articulate some of my foundational theories of archival research. I thus

stage a meandering dialogue between archival theory and my encounters with the SMA,

often opening my analysis to questions about my emotional and methodological

investments that at times exceed the work of a single case study of the SMA. In these

narratives, I recognize my emotional investments as constitutive parts of my methodology;

93 Bek Orr, “Feminist Engagements with the Queer Archive,” Journal of Feminist Scholarship 19, no. 19 (2021),

https://doi.org/10.23860/jfs.2021.19.01.
 60

that is, I recognize emotions such as boredom, defensiveness, longing, and anxiety as what

draws to the archive and how I write theory.94 To paraphrase Anne Cvetkovich,95 by asking

how research “feels,” I attempt to investigate the underlying logics of my intellectual

inquiry. I give each section two names, narrating both the emotions I felt and the questions

they provoked me to put theory to paper.

My ultimate fear is that I end the years-long process of producing this chapter

epistemologically close to where I started. Before I even allowed myself to type, I could

already tell you what it felt like to occupy queer minoritarian space as an individual queer

and nonbinary person. Writing a dissertation seemed initially to treat this knowledge of

actual queer life as an obstacle: If only I could get the appropriate access to the correct

sources, theorize my way out of some ethical dilemmas, and see beyond myself, I would

finally be able to describe the core logics of the SMA. Yet these “obstacles”—gaps in the

archive, fraught relationships with living people, limitations on access and time and energy,

even solipsistic hand-wringing—are simply a portrait of what I already knew to be reality.

These are the words I found in the process of finding my way back to the beginning.

Tedium, Yearning; Or, “What’s in a Name?”

I begin with the tedium of trying to tell a factual narrative when I don’t yet know

why these details matter. It’s a slog, for instance, to provide even a basic accounting of

shifts in the collection’s name. The SMA is one of the largest and oldest archival collections

94 For more on the analysis of these and other “non-productive” feelings see both Anne Cvetkovic’s Depression: A

Public Feeling and Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings. Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press Books, 2012). Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007).
95 Cvetkovich, Depression.
 61

for gender, sex, and sexual minorities in the U.S. Ben has kept careful record of its own

history, using finding guides to mark epochal shifts in the collection. 96 As I will explore

throughout this chapter, however, its provenance as a grassroots, independently held

collection complicates a straightforward narrative of its historical and contemporary life.

Any account of the history of the SMA would be a story of friction and fracture; over its

four-decade existence, it has been characterized by shifts in scope, dramatic changes in

leadership and ownership, transformations in political ideology, and name changes that

reflect its relationship to broader social movements and its local community. Attempting to

provide a brief and uncomplicated timeline proved difficult (see Appendix B for a timeline

of the SMA that highlights the events referenced in this chapter).

Following slight differences among archival sources has often felt tedious and not

especially fruitful; I’ll inflict a small piece of this on you. According to a timeline on the

SMA’s own website, the collection began in 1974 when Barbara Henry (often known by her

pen name JR Roberts) curated a collection of materials by and for lesbians in the Lesbian

Feminist Collective’s Lesbian Feminist Center, calling it the New Alexandria Library for

Women.97 Tracy Baim’s 2009 history of gay community in Chicago names it the “New

Alexandria Library for Lesbian Wimmin,” 98 while the timeline on the SMA website notes

96 According to the United States National Archives, finding guides “are tools that help a user find information in

a specific record group, collection, or series of archival materials.” At the Sexual Minorities Archives, most finding guides
are catalogues lists of materials sorted by topic, published both digitally on the SMA website and physically in a catalogue
at the SMA. The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, “Finding Aid Type,” National Archives, August 15,
2016, https://www.archives.gov/research/catalog/lcdrg/elements/findingtype.html.
97 Sexual Minorities Archives, “History,” Sexual Minorities Archives, May 7, 2023,

https://sexualminoritiesarchives.org/about/history/.
98Tracy Baim, ed., Out and Proud in Chicago: An Overview of the City’s Gay Community (Chicago: Agate Surrey,

2008).
 62

multiple small shifts—the addition of “for Lesbian,” the subtraction of “women”—without

ever using the term “wimmin.” Most just a simple error, archivist K.J. Rawson skipped over

these early shifts, claiming the collection had always been “The New Alexandria Lesbian

Library” until Ben renamed it the “Sexual Minorities Archives” in 1992.99 In offering this

short history of the archives’ name, thought I had a simple task, and hours later all I had

was a browser window full of sources that felt unreliable and unsatisfying. As a scholar

who focuses on archivists and performance rather than primary sources, I’ve often

imagined myself as not quite up to the task of finding authoritative data about the names

and origins of things. While I want to report basic historical facts with fidelity, I don’t know

how ultimately useful it is to spend hours scanning unsourced archival documents to prove

that “women” was removed from the name of a community collection at some point in the

late 1970s. And, honestly, I get bored. I want somebody else to do that work!

Yet I linger, perhaps too long for my reader, knowing that the specific circumstances

of these changes do matter, even if I’m not able to precisely name them. As a former board

member of the SMA as well Chicago’s Gerber/Hart Library and Archives (another non-

profit LGBTQ archive), and a seasoned inhabitant of leftist spaces, I know these details

reveal something about the process of articulating organizations’ missions: who these

organizations can claim to represent, what they believe, and how they hope the achieve

their goals. I imagine Ben Power Alwin’s first encounter with the collection when arriving

at the collective in 1976. He came to the archives, as I did, to find himself among

99 Rawson, “Archival Justice.”

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community. Knowing himself at the time as a butch lesbian woman, Ben would assist Henry

in developing the collection at the Lesbian Feminist Center. They would do this work in the

context of exploding number of multiple overlapping mid-seventies feminist, gay, and

lesbian movements: A burgeoning post-Stonewall gay rights rebellion rife with

ambivalence about the survival of brown and Black, trans, poor, and disabled people. The

vestiges of older homophile movements like the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of

Belitis—largely white and middle class—who performed respectability and normativity in

their fight for seats at tables.100 New strands of Black Feminist critique emerging, naming

the margins of mainstream political and academic feminisms as they rearticulated coalition

as a political strategy.101 Third-world feminists and feminists of color who found common

enemies at the intersections of capitalism, racism, and sexism.102 A second wave of

mainstream feminist energy, perhaps best exemplified in the fight to past the Equal Rights

Amendment. Separatist communities of women and lesbians who sought to radically

reimagine the basic structures of survival outside of men. Each proceeding in the wake of

the fight for Black civil rights following the state-sponsored assassination of Martin Luther

100 For a richer discussion of the so-called “respectability politics” of the homophile movement, see: Martin

Meeker, “Behind the Mask of Respectability: Reconsidering the Mattachine Society and Male Homophile Practice, 1950s
and 1960s,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 10, no. 1 (2001): 78–116; Marc Stein, “Canonizing Homophile Sexual
Respectability: Archives, History, and Memory,” Radical History Review 2014, no. 120 (October 1, 2014): 53–73,
https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2703724.
101 Frazier, Smith, and Smith, The Combahee River Collective Statement.

102 Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back, Fourth Edition: Writings by Radical

Women of Color, 4 edition (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015).

 64

King Jr.103 Each offering different understandings of power and identity and imagined

intersecting and diverging paths to liberation.

When I picture the Lesbian Feminist Collective in this context, I place myself in

scenes that would be familiar to many people who have participated in leftist activist

movement work. Feminists and queers across intersecting struggles have long written

about the emotional combativity of “coming to terms” at our organizing tables: Miranda

Joseph discussing the “romance” of gay and lesbian community,104 Debbie Gould positing

the centrality of “feelings, emotion, and affect” in the 1990s New York City AIDs

movement,105 adrienne marie brown resistance against a contemporary “punitive

tendency” that “root(s) and flourish(es) withing our movements,”106 Audre Lorde on the

uses and abuses of anger in responding to the racism of mainstream feminist activism and

academia,107 and Sara Ahmed on the feminist killjoys and the “affect aliens” who we resent

for pointing out the pain in the room.108 Each of these authors offer similar stories where

intense emotions are performed by familiar casts using rehearsed strategies: For those

most empowered to speak, rooms would fill with the sound and heat of contentious, deeply

felt, sharply expressed arguments about each decision. For those granted provisional

membership, the fatigue of learning appropriate ways of thinking and speaking, and the

103 And, of course, this list could go on. What would it mean, for example, to recognize the Occupation of Alcatraz

as part of the history of 1970s gender, sex, and sexual activism in the U.S.?
104Joseph, Against the Romance of Community.
105Deborah B. Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and Act up’s Fight against AIDS (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 2009), 1.
106 adrienne maree brown and Malkia Devich-Cyril, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative
Justice (Chico: AK Press, 2020), 34.
107 Lorde and Clarke, Sister Outsider.

108 Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness.

 65

angry embarrassment of silence and misrecognition when speaking up and saying the

wrong thing. And then, of course, it seems that everyone at the table assumes the right to

speak on behalf of a host of absent and phantasmic people and call this community.109110 So

when I linger, for instance, on the word “wommin” in Tracy Baim’s Out and Proud in

Chicago, I wonder who at the table might have once fought for this term, against what other

stakeholders, and how these terms constituted their own claims for membership at the

exclusion of others. I think about the proliferation of these terms during this precise

moment of feminist history. Why not, for instance, “womyn,” a term that many have

associated with the birth of the anti-patriarchal, gender separatist, biologically essentialist

radical feminist movement?

I imagine Ben coming to self-consciousness in these spaces, hoping to find utopia in

the middle of these competing understandings of sex and gender and sexuality. Knowing

himself as a lesbian woman, as he did then, would they have valorized his masculinity, his

butchness? Was there any question that he belonged? This was years before Ben would

forge a friendship with Lou Sullivan, a pioneering activist that is credited with popularizing

the term FTM (female-to-male transexual). As he came to name himself as an FTM man, did

his old friends perceive them as threats to their movement work, or did they simply

109 As I will continue to explore in this chapter, Miranda Joseph has written on the “romance of community,” a

belief not only that something like queer, gay, or lesbian community actually exists, but that one may speak of and
advocate on behalf of it as a singular things with knowable and shared needs, desires, and understandings of identity.
Joseph, Against the Romance of Community.
110 Here I am thinking of Sara Ahmed’s work with “the table” in her writing on queer phenomenology and on the

sociopolitics of emotions. For Ahmed, the table operates as an example of a kind of phenomenological starting point from
which one senses the world. It can be the site of independent reflection from where one writes and thinks. For feminist
killjoys, it also frequently the site where one is made “alien” by voicing a political problem and then being seen as the
source of discord and strife. Sara Ahmed, “Orientations: Towards a Queer Phenomenology,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and
Gay Studies 12, no. 4 (2006): 543–74; Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness.
 66

disregard his identity? In the middle of a morass of google searches, these questions hit me

with forceful, sudden recognition. I had in some ways forgotten why I cared to be careful

about the “facts” of the names. It now feels obvious to me to argue that the importance of

names is that they are the outcomes of naming practices.111 When searching for the story of

a name, I am the looking for the story of people who hashed out the contours of community.

Who were the people of the New Alexandria Library? To borrow a term from Eve Sedgwick,

I linger in the archive because I long to “touch feeling.” I want the archive to offer its

gossip.112 Who did they love, hate, fuck, and fear? What circumstances brought them to a

rented Chicago storefront to hash out the terms of their coalition? I still don’t know these

stories. Instead, I project myself onto scant narratives, craving life where all I can touch are

disappointing documents.

In 1979, The Lesbian Feminist Collective disbanded four years after its founding.

The SMA website, in its brevity and apparent facticity, weaves a narrative of sudden

dissolution. It offers only a few facts: New Alexandria Library founder Barbara Henry

moved to Boston in October 1977 and its holdings moved to Ben Power’s Chicago

apartment.113 By February 1978, the Lesbian Feminist Collective had closed its doors,

donating the materials it couldn’t sell to the NALLW.114 Again, I beg answers from these

111 This is arguably one of the most foundational moves of the academic work of performance studies. Dwight

Conquergood is one of many who have described it: moving from “’knowing that’ and ‘knowing about’” to “’knowing how’
and ‘knowing who.”. That is, I’m less concerned that these names changes, and more invested in what the shifting of the
names reveals about the ways that lesbians and queers gathered to fight for new worlds. Conquergood, Cultural Struggles,
33.
112 Danielle Ross reminded me that “the Archive” and gossip share a common precondition: absence.
113 Sexual Minorities Archives, “History.”
114 Sexual Minorities Archives.
 67

deficient narratives. Did Henry’s move to escape away from something, or to move toward

something new? Did friends or lovers break up, and/or how did the money run out? Was its

history intertwined with other utopic lesbian feminist movements who also disbanded at

this time? As much as I want to blame the archive for its gaps, I’m also convinced that it will

offer better stories if I find better ways to ask. I feel myself getting caught up in the kind of

archival fever Carolyn Steedman names as she describes her own archival research. It’s a

strange mix. I register the limitations of the Archive as personal sleights, vacillating

between hubris and self-effacement as I assess my ability to find and say anything of value.

I project myself onto my subjects when I imagine myself in these same spaces, often with a

face hot with shame and anger as I think about the urgency and hurt of trying to be heard. I

become invested in the lives I will never know, wanting to blame them for the

responsibility I take in telling their stories. In Steedman’s words, “You think.: I could get to

hate these people; and then: I can never do these people justice; and finally: I shall never

get it done.”115 And I won’t get it done, as long as I conceive of the project as capturing the

wholeness of people I will never know. But I remind myself that this isn’t the project, even

if it’s the impulse that pushes me through the tedium.

Identification, Projection, Trepidation; Or, The Bulldog and the Gatekeepers

Instead of falling into the false promise of wholeness, I’m hoping to articulate

something about the ways that what we call “community” is negotiated in the spaces of the

minoritarian archive. I mean negotiation here in multiplicity: not only how they hashed out

115 Steedman, Dust, 18.

 68

the edges of community at the Lesbian Feminist Collective, but how they could presume

that lesbian community could be “knowable and known”116 in the first place, and how these

presumptions continue to shape our understanding of their stories in the present. The

story of the SMA is part of a broader pattern of the way minoritarian archivists narrate

queer community as both transtemporal and always at risk. As the SMA website recounts:

the collective closed; its people moved away. The sudden-ness of dissolution is integral to

Ben’s entwined history with the collection. “[I]t was by default that I took it into my

apartment, because it really would have been thrown out into an alley in Chicago. I wanted

to save it. It was an impulse to rescue the history and literature that was being collected by

lesbians, for lesbians.”117 In this story, Ben’s role as curator is foisted upon him by the force

of history: he downplays his own agency as he is called to pull the collection from the brink

of destruction. His relationship to community is key here. The archive is figured as an

accomplishment of lesbian community, evidence of not only lesbian history but of radical,

utopic organizing in the present. Yet among this entire community, only Ben is able and

willing to take on the labor of protecting the collection by bringing the materials into his

own home.

Following the dissolution of the Lesbian Feminist Collective and Henry’s move, Ben

and the Alexandria Library would move several times before finally finding a rented in

house in Northampton, Massachusetts with “2 floors, 1-1/2 baths, a full attic and basement,

116 Joseph, Against the Romance of Community, xiv.

117 Rawson, “Archival Justice,” 179.
 69

gardens and a private beach on the Connecticut River.”118 Together, they would call this

Northampton site home from 1983-2015. In 1992, Ben renamed the collection the Sexual

Minorities Archives to reflect its broadened collection of materials from multiple sexual,

sex, and gender communities. From this Northampton home, Ben spoke of the SMA’s

history in a 2013 interview with rhetorician K.J. Rawson, another trans man and founder of

the Digital Transgender Archive. 119 I quote at length from this interview in this chapter as a

source of information about the archive, but I also see it as particularly revelatory about the

ways that minoritarian community unfolds. Closely reading the text that was produced in

this dialogue between two trans archivists, in the presence of a collection that filled every

room of his home except his private bedroom, reveals glimpses of the performance

ethnography I might have done throughout to this chapter. The interview itself isn’t rife

with (auto)ethnographic specificity: Rawson edited the interview for grammatical clarity

and offers few personal or affective reflections about his time with Ben. Yet, I know both

men, and I have been in this living room, a story I will tell in more detail in the next section

of this chapter. I imagine myself sitting in this space—simultaneously a community archive

and a trans elder’s home—speculating about the intimate co-performance by these two

men that would eventually produce an academic article. Here I am suggesting that a

118 Bet Power Alwin, “Letter to Lou Sullivan,” June 30, 1988, Digital Transgender Archive.
119 Importantly, Rawson is one of a small group of theorists from the humanities who have written about
archives from the simultaneous perspectives as archivist and archival researcher. As I shared in my introduction, the
humanities are replete with stories of scholars’ encounters with actual archives, but typically from the perspective of
someone who is encountering these preexisting collections as part of the analytical work they came to do. In these stories,
archivists may appear alternately as institutional gatekeepers or helpful allies, but their labor is largely not the center of
focus as those theorists imagine the way that power functions in “the Archive.” Rawson, “Archival Justice.”
 70

performance analytic offers me adjusted perspective even as I write these words miles and

years away from the event.

Figure 2. Ben Alwin Power stands in his living room in Northampton, Massachussetts in front of a 1988
portrait (phtographer unknown) of Ben in leather gear. (photograph by K.J. Rawson, June 21, 2013, Sexual
Minorities Archives, Northampton, Massachusetts, by courtesy of K.J. Rawson)

In one moment in the interview, for instance, Ben gestures to a portrait of his

younger self wearing the “breeches and leather” gear of the gay leather community as he

talks about the SMA. Ben offers this as an image of gay and trans masculinity that

symbolizes his ability to protect the archive:

I’ve always considered myself the bulldog at the door. That photo shows it.
I am literally standing in front of the books in that photo, and I am protecting
them. So we start there with this sense of place and why this is in my home.
The other reason it’s in my home is because, financially, it was a way to be
able to keep it. I devised a way in my life to be able to provide this space
affordably and economically, by myself being the rent payer on the space. I
would go out and earn money working in the corporate world, and I brought
 71

the money back to support this archive. Also, it’s a matter of control and
being in my hands, which are transgender hands.120

Ben’s gesture and comments assume mutual recognition with Rawson. Ben—

simultaneously trans elder, leather daddy, and archival activist—invites Rawson into his

home. There’s so much I cannot know about the affective and epistemological

circumstances of their communion. Yet it feels impossible for me not to project solemnity

and duty as I read the interview. I wonder whether Rawson hears “bulldog” the way I do in

the moment, as Ben’s critical masculine revisioning of “bulldagger,” a dated term used to

ridicule the masculinity of butch women.121 I suspect, too, that he relies upon on at least

some understanding of Ben’s posture and uniform as performances of gay male leather

masculinity. Within this leather community, the leather daddy earns his dominant status

relationally; by virtue of his age, knowledge, and experience, he is a trusted and respected

member of his sexual community. Rawson knows, too, Ben’s ability to identify openly as a

trans man came at immense personal cost, costs that perhaps the younger Rawson was

spared because of pioneering activists like Ben. Ben builds on the men’s knowledge of these

codes and experiences as he offers his “trans hands”—the aged hands of a trans leather

dom daddy—as embodiments of control and ownership.122 Rather than professing a

120 Rawson, 180.

121 I suspect this is why that Cathy Cohen uses “bulldagger” in her critique of classism and racisms in queer
politics and theory, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens.” In titling the essay so without ever defining or discussing
these figures, she asks her audience to already understand the bulldagger as figure alongside the punk and the welfare
queen who is aberrant and threating to the “dominant constructed norm of state-sanctified white middle- and upper-class
heterosexuality.” Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?,” 25.
122 I am relying here on an understanding of power within the BDSM community informed by pro-sex feminist

critiques of sexual domination and queer understandings of mutually constituted sexual pleasure. Writers like Dossie
Easton and Janet Hardy, for instance, have written about the ways that BDSM practitioners critically, intentionally, and
ethically eroticize power—including forms of ownership, domination, and sadomasochism—in sexual play. Dossie Easton
and Janet W. Hardy, The New Topping Book, 2nd edition (Oakland, Calif: Greenery Press, 2003).
 72

proprietary relationship to valuable objects, his ownership of the archives is contingent on

his ability to respect and honor them by making them available to other members of his

community.123 As a bulldog, he configures his trans masculinity as an embodied

accomplishment that allows him to both confidently anticipate threat and offer warm

invitation. In this interview, Ben shared stories of how his own struggle with identity and

community allowed him to become a leader. Rawson listened intently, reporting back with

fidelity and respect.124

With Rawson, Ben shared the story of how he came to understand his cohabitation

with the archives as a political strategy. Early in Ben’s curatorial work, he learned from

another group of lesbian feminist archivists who had recently opened a lesbian community

collection in 1976: “I had a role model for having an archive in one’s home and that was the

Lesbian Herstory Archives, which was started seven months before the New Alexandria

Lesbian Library.”125 According to Herstory Archives founders, “We founded The Lesbian

Herstory Archives in the 1970s when a group of women involved in the Gay Academic

Union realized that Lesbian history was ‘disappearing as quickly as it was being made.’ Our

123 As I’ll continue to explore throughout these chapter, these claims to ownership and control are rhetorically

grounded in his relationship to his understanding of a broader community of sex, sexual, and gender minorities who
benefit from his labor but are either unwilling or unable to materially support the work.
124 In this context, I might even read the way that Rawson opts to frame the interview as part of the way he

shows reverence to Ben as part of an edited volume in Radical History Review on “queering archives.” Rawson begins the
article by offering a few pages of framing for the interview, offering readers a brief biography of the SMA beginning with
its start as the New Alexandria Lesbian Library. Here he articulates what makes the SMA unique in terms of its leadership,
curational policy, and relationship to queer and trans community. He then publishes an edited account of his questions
and Ben’s responses. In separating his brief introduction from the interview, he first authorizes Ben as a significant figure
of trans history and minoritarian archivization and then treats his Ben’s words as theoretically savvy on their own terms.
While this approach positions Ben in terms of knowledge and experience, it arguably obscures some of the ways that
power operates at the SMA. I will discuss my own reasons for making similar choices when I report on my work with
Debbie Britt at the National Black Doll Museum in my next chapter.
125 Rawson, “Archival Justice,” 179.
 73

mission is to gather and preserve records of Lesbian lives and activities so that future

generations will have ready access to materials relevant to their lives.”126. In its earliest

stages, Joan Nestle offered her apartment as a “provisional home” for the burgeoning

collection, not intending to be its primary caretaker.127 Yet, a disastrous attempt to move

the archives ended with a contentious break-up between two co-founders at a lesbian

separatist community in the woods.128 Deborah Edel rescued the collection and returned it

to Nestle; soon the two were living alongside the collection together for the next fifteen

years; the Herstory Archives purchased a building dedicated solely to housing the

collection in 1993. The rest is herstory. Even today, a full-time caretaker resides with the

collection in continuation of Edel and Nestle’s archival cohabitation.129

Outside of offering a tantalizing hint of the lesbian drama I’ve been craving, I’m

struck by the narrative similarities between the early stages of the Herstory Archives and

the New Alexandria Library. Like the New Alexandria Library’s Feminist Collective, the

Lesbian Herstory Archives “grew organically as a reflection of a dialogue between an

evolving cohort of volunteer archivists and a community of donors.”130 When Ben and Edel

126 While this language is unattributed on the Lesbian Herstory website, it may have been written by one or

more of the five original cofounders: Julia Penelope Stanley, Sahli Cavallaro, Pamela Oline, Joan Nestle, and Deborah Edel.
Lesbian Herstory Archives, “Our Herstory,” Lesbian Herstory Archives, May 7, 2023,
https://lesbianherstoryarchives.org/about/a-brief-history/.
127 Rachel Corbman, “A Genealogy of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, 1974-2014,” Journal of Contemporary

Archival Studies 1, no. 1 (March 20, 2014), https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol1/iss1/1.

128Corbman.
129Vanessa Friedman, “The Lesbian Herstory Archives Guard Our Past, Give Us Hope for Our Future,”
Autostraddle (blog), October 22, 2018, https://www.autostraddle.com/the-lesbian-herstory-archives-guard-our-past-
give-us-hope-for-our-future-436634/.
130 According to Corbman, the Lesbian Herstory Archives emerged from a series of conversations among Sahli

Cavallaro, Deborah Edel, Joan Nestle, Pamela Oline, and Julia Penelope Stanley. Each had attended the first conference of
the Gay Academic Union in 1973, meeting each other in a consciousness-raising session of the women’s caucus. Corbman,
“A Genealogy of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, 1974-2014.”
 74

made quick moves to rescue these endangered archives, they entwined their everyday lives

with their collections. Ben and the founders of the Lesbian Herstory both offer several key

narratives about the role of archives for gender and sexual minorities. Each name the

threat of misogynist, homophobic, and transphobic forces external to the lesbian

community. They interpolate themselves into the role of pioneering community leaders

who must hold the collections closely lest these outsiders destroy the community’s access

to their own history. In archiving, they secure the authority speak on behalf of a community

that benefits from their labor. These narratives thus rhetorically produce a host of debts,

temporalities, and ontologies between archivist, archive, and community. A community is

simultaneously honored and produced in the archive that could not exist without the

archivist. A community, imagining itself as in perpetual crisis, needs to be able to see itself

in the archive. An archivist’s archival care guarantees that embattled community’s trans-

temporal existence. In that labor, the minoritarian archivist becomes a synecdoche for both

the archive and the community. As Rawson does in his interview with Ben, and as I do

across this dissertation, honoring and respecting that community leader is imagined as a

way of honoring that community.

These stories are thus familiar to me as a scholar of minoritarian archives. Debbie

Britt and Muna Tseng likewise each offer stories where some outside force—beyond their

planning and beyond their professional training—called them to archive relatively late in

their lives. Debbie tells a story in which The National Black Doll Museum happened—and in

which she did most of the labor—but emphasizes exigence, serendipity, and
 75

responsibilities to family and community over her own creative agency.131 Muna Tseng

began to archive to fulfill a promise to her brother; knowing he would soon die from AIDs,

he asked her to “protect [his artistic] legacy.”132 This closeness to their materials—in terms

of both physical proximity and emotional intimacy—are precisely what allows them to

understand the significance of these materials, to curate and protect them with authority

and care. By holding their archives close, they implicitly argue, their archives become

accessible to these communities.133 Through their labor, materials that many might have

been deemed merely personal collections become publicly valuable. Private ownership

paradoxically allows for community access.

This logic might seem to run counter to that of many large, public- or state-owned

institutions that grant public access as part of their mission. Consider, for instance, the way

curators of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture

narrate its mission as a public institution: “The NMAAHC is a public institution open to all,

where anyone is welcome to participate, collaborate, and learn more about African

American history and culture.”134 Because of the Smithsonian’s resources—cultural and

financial capital, widespread public recognition, and a mission written into federal law

131 Britt, interview by author, Mansfield, MA.

132 Muna Tseng, interview by author, New York City, New York, n.d.
133 Muna Tseng is somewhat of an exception here. I argue that her work with her brother’s materials has been
essential for contemporary interest in Tseng Kwong Chi as a gay and Chinese and American artist whose work is
significant for both documenting the queer of color NYC art world decimated by AIDs and theorizing queer, Asian, and
postcolonial identity. Yet, for reasons that I’ll discuss in my chapter on Muna, it is not precise to say that she operates
these archives with the specific interest of providing a space for these communities with the same intentions and
rhetorics of these other activist-archivists. In my chapter on Muna I talk more critically about the relationship between
the political outcomes of her work, the way she narrates her own intentions, and the way that critics including me claim
her as a minoritarian archivist.
134 The National Museum of African American History and Culture, “About the Museum,” National Museum of

African American History and Culture, May 8, 2023, https://nmaahc.si.edu/about/about-museum.

 76

since 1846—its materials will remain safe and available to future generations. In the

nation’s broad interest, the NMAACH promises to serve an expansive, undefined public,

defining access as an issue of open doors.135

In the National African American Museum statement, instead of an archivist

welcoming you at the door, we have an institution welcoming itself welcoming you; instead

of a defined community, we have “all.” The Museum of African American History and other

Smithsonian institutions are funded primarily by the state; theoretically—if not in

practice—this means they are accountable to everyone. Although the underlying logic of

the public institution is that it is theoretically open to all, the often-unspoken reality is that

the public is invited with what Jacques Derrida calls “conditional hospitality:”136 The

institution—through the labor of staff who fill predetermined roles—holds the right to

welcome even as it articulates an expansive understanding of its public. As Sara Ahmed

argues, “To be made welcome by an explicit act of address works to reveal what is implicit:

that those who are already given a place are the ones who are welcoming rather than

welcomed, the ones who are in the structural position of hosts.”137 The conditions of

national museum attendance, for instance, include a host of assumptions about how a

museum patron should look and behave. In the specific context of U.S based museums,

visitors are expected to approach objects with emotional restraint and relatively solitary

135 For more on the details of the public funding of the Smithsonian Institution, visit this fact sheet: Smithsonian

Institution, “The Smithsonian Institution Fact Sheet,” Smithsonian Institution, April 7, 2020,
https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/factsheets/smithsonian-institution-fact-sheet.
136 Jacques Derrida, “The Principle of Hospitality,” Parallax 11, no. 1 (January 1, 2005): 6–9,

https://doi.org/10.1080/1353464052000321056.
137 Ahmed, On Being Included.
 77

reverence, viewing practices that normalize the perspectives of white, upper-class city-

dwelling women as the assumed museum visitor.138 While these codes have always been

apparent for those with the least proximity to whiteness, contemporary shifts in the ways

the broader public has conceived of diversity and inclusion have arguably made them more

apparent to everyone.139

In my introduction I offered a stark comparison between precarity and

institutionality to help me enunciate some of the underlying logics of minoritarian archives

against a strategically false backdrop of highly resourced public collections. Many

minoritarian archivists likewise use this rhetorical strategy as they describe the feeling of

minoritarian space in comparison to these large public institutions. At the most extreme

poles of this strategic binary are differing understandings of “welcomeness” that index a set

of interrelated power dynamics between institution, guest, and curator. Here, I define

“welcomeness” as an affective state that registers an individual’s felt sense of their ability

to participate meaningfully in a given community or institution. Minoritarian archives

frequently speak of access in terms of community membership, attempting to imagine

places that feel welcoming to those communities by reflecting their experiences and

providing havens from the violences of broader publics.

138 James Heaton, “Museums and Race: Are Museums Accidental Racists?,” Tronvig (blog), January 20, 2014,

https://www.tronviggroup.com/museums-and-race/.
139 To offer one example of this shift: In 1990 the publication Art in America published Maurice Berger’s “Are Art

Museums Racist?” and could assume that many of its white, middle- to upper-class readers hadn’t yet posed this question
for themselves. Thirty years later, Shirley Li would write in the Atlantic in 2020 “that the national reckoning over race has
permeated the country’s cultural institutions in a way that’s impossible to ignore.” Maurice Berger, “Are Art Museums
Racist?,” Art in America 78, no. 9 (September 1990): 68–77. Shirley Li, “American Museums Are Going Through an Identity
Crisis,” The Atlantic, November 28, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/11/american-museums-
are-going-through-identity-crisis/617221/.
 78

The emphasis in these narratives is not whether all people are equally permitted or

able to enter and make meaning in an archives, but whether they imagine themselves as

the kind of people for whom the space was created, and how minoritarian archivists

produce archives in this context. In my chapter on the National Black Doll Museum, I will

discuss how curator Debbie Britt made specific staging decisions in the Museum to engage

poor people and people of color who would otherwise feel that a museum was not

appropriate for them. Because they do not feel welcome, Britt argues, these guests are

unable to make meaning of their museum experience even when they do decide to enter

these spaces.

Ben likewise spoke of the SMA in terms of “comfort” and “ease” in comparison to

less domestic researcher institutions.

The personal and private nature of LGBT materials in someone’s home

fosters, to me, a real sense of comfort and being at ease for visitors and
researchers who come here. It also fosters discovery. We have everything
available, so people can handle materials, browse, take things off of the shelf
or out of the file cabinets, and find materials they didn’t even know they were
looking for. You don’t need to put on gloves and ask me to go get it. You can
open the file cabinets, you can go through the periodical stacks, and you can
see for yourself.140

Ben describes this visitor experience in comparison to that of “very staged” museums,

where “everything’s behind glass, very protected, and your experience is highly

structured.”141 I don’t know if you would come to this space exactly would, but I wonder if

you see yourself in Ben’s description of the SMA visitor. Ben does not directly invoke

140 Rawson, “Archival Justice,” 180.

141 Rawson, 180.
 79

community in this passage, and yet that’s all I can seem to read. This visitor is implicitly

welcome in this space based on their shared communal experience with Ben and the other

lives who touched this archives; in comparison to institutions that would limit their

creativity and sense of belonging—that are alienating—they feel free to explore here

without circumscription.

I again project myself into Ben’s living room. Yes, the stage is different from the

white walls and docents and admonishments of the archetypical modern museum.142 There

are the soft pillows of the couch, the water kettle on the stove in the kitchen, and the fuzzy,

elderly cats sleepy in the sun that breaks through the window. Everything else is dusty

stuff, books and pamphlets and bumper stickers and pins and clippings and screen-printed

t-shirts and posters and leather gear, a queer auric field of something beyond here, beyond

now. Sitting across from you, older than the bulldog portrait hanging above him, still

serious but also gentle, carrying his body like someone between politician and parent, is

Ben. He speaks softly, sternly, firmly about his role in protecting history. Would knowing

that Ben sees you as someone like him, someone whose history he rescued and continues

to protect, comfort you? Would the intimate domesticity of this scene put you at ease?

Un/welcome, Dis/comfort, Reverence; Or, Who Belongs Here?

If I’m honest with you, I’m not quite sure I would describe my time at the SMA this

way. I first met Ben in 2014, a semester into a PhD program at University of Massachusetts

142 In my chapter on the National Black Doll Museum, I will talk more about Brian O’Doherty’s conception of the

modernist museum as “the white cube,” a stage that vaults museum objects while obscuring the reproduction of power.
Brian O’Doherty and Thomas McEvilley, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, Expanded edition
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
 80

Amherst. I learned from another graduate student that he was looking for board members

to join the Sexual Minorities Education Foundation, Inc. (SMEF), a “national 501(c)(3) non-

profit organization that furthers the work and growth of the Sexual Minorities Archives”.143

But I had also heard about the archive a year earlier when I was first accepted into my

graduate program in Western Massachusetts. At that time K.J. Rawson was still completing

his dissertation down the hallway from where I worked as a full-time office assistant and a

part-time undergraduate student at Syracuse University. Minnie Bruce-Pratt, “poet activist

lgbtq+ anti-racist anti-imperialist”144 and her spouse Leslie Feinberg, author of Stone Butch

Blues and Transgender Warriors, lived a block away from my Syracuse New York home.

Minnie-Bruce, one of my recommendation letter writers, sent a congratulatory email

suggesting I find the SMA after my move. She would not be the only to tell me stories about

Western Massachusetts. I had been told that Northampton was brimming with queerness

of a rare sort: a mix of blue-collar New England white liberalism, and lesbians, oh my!

Where else would women’s college seniors sing karaoke alongside old white men in the

local VFW hall but Northampton, “where the coffee is strong and so are the women?”145

So, by the time I finally visited Ben in late October 2014 it was with expectations of

finding myself, my work, and my community in one site. When I arrived, greeted by Ben

and his two fluffy cats, I did feel excitement and warmth. But this was quite different from

143 Sexual Minorities Archives, “The Sexual Minorities Education Foundation (SMEF),” Sexual Minorities

Archives, May 7, 2023, https://sexualminoritiesarchives.org/about/smef/.

144 Minnie Bruce Pratt, “Minnie Bruce Pratt – Poet Activist LGBTQ+ Anti-Racist Anti-Imperialist,” May 8, 2023,

https://minniebrucepratt.net/.
145 An unofficial slogan of the gender transgression of Northampton lesbians, this line was printed on a sign

outside the downtown parking garage along with its rates.

 81

the kind of exploratory freedom Ben describes. Instead, I sat in reverence, feeling indebted

to Ben’s labor. A large part of this was the timing of my visit. Ben would share with me that

his landlord had notified him of her intent to sell the property in June, six months earlier.

According to Ben, after her visit to prepare the house for sale, she swiftly decided she

would not offer Ben the option to purchase his home and would begin eviction

proceedings. My senses of duty and seriousness were amplified in this context. These are

the feelings I project onto his interview with Rawson, why I am called to imagine myself in

the Rawson’s shoes. At the same time, while Ben’s warm and intimate hospitality was quite

different than the codes of entering a national museum, I nonetheless began to register the

conditions of that hospitality. Even outside of the threat of eviction, I knew that my ability

to enter and make meaning in the archives was contingent on my relationship with this

man. To be a member of Ben’s community meant venerating these objects, immersing

myself in our history, and feeling gratitude for the paths he paved for me. I was there

because I was invited by a trans elder, and showing appreciation meant seeing the archives

with wonder and naming his work as labor he did for people like me. My feeling of

indebtedness preceded my relationship with him even as our encounter heightened it. In

accepting that invitation as a form of debt, I also accepted what I imagined as the potential

contingencies of this gift. I certainly have no desire to speak ill of Ben or any of my other

interlocuters who have given generously to more than just me, and I’m not fearful that Ben

will rescind his invitation based on anything I’ve reported here. But this circuitry begs a

question that exceeds my own individual relationship with each of them: what are the

limits of what we can and should say when we imagine individuals as more than just elders

but synecdoche for communities?

 82

These are admittedly not the same circumstances of every visit to a minoritarian

archive. I’m thinking of how Madyu Narayan narrates her first visit to the Lesbian Herstory

archives as a graduate student and lesbian woman in 2012.146 After initial uncertainty that

she is even in the right place, an intern greets her at the door and invites her into the “dark”

and “cool” space. “I feel awkward in here. I feel as though I have stepped into someone’s

private home: I take a moment to remind myself that in fact, this is a private home.”147 At

first, Narayan, tries to force herself to feel differently.

“No matter how much I tell myself to relax and to enjoy myself, I am initially
nervous. I am afraid of touching things because I am afraid of being
reprimanded. My experience in other institutional archives has trained me to
be wary and circumspect […].148

This home should provide her comfort, but it does not, initially. She asks herself about the

source of this affect disconnect between her expectations and her experience. Instead of

something intrinsic to the Lesbian Herstory Archives, the “uncomfortable chairs and

windowless rooms” of institutional archives are the origin of this anxiety.149 “In contrast, a

sense of comfort pervades the space of the LHA. This is clearly not something I am used

to.”150 She can sense comfort, yet she is still not comfortable. The newness of it all prevents

her from feeling the way she should feel. Slowly, she acclimates to the space, feeling “silly

146 I thank Rachel Corbman for bringing me to Narayan’s work. Corbman wrote about Narayan’s disorientation
in her article on the archival logics of the Lesbian Herstory Archives. Narayan’s was once of several accounts
Corbman used to illustrate new visitors’ reactions to the unusual ways that materials are sorted in the LHA.
Madyu Narayan Madhu Narayan, “Writing the Archives” (Michigan State University, 2013),
https://doi.org/10.25335/M5VN1R; Corbman, “A Genealogy of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, 1974-2014.”
147 Narayan, “Writing the Archives,” 66.

148 Narayan, 67.

149 Narayan, 67.
150 Narayan, 67.
 83

and giddy” when she realizes “[t]here is no surface in this archives that does not contain a

piece of lesbian history.”151

Eventually her body calms. Her account ends with discovering the “intense pleasure”

of being in this place, among people like her, among their history.152 She learns that the

archives hold an original program for the 1982 Barnard Conference on Sexuality and

cannot contain her grin as she holds it in her hands. “I am content here, I think to myself…

There is a sense of safety here. I know my presence here would not be questioned even if I

didn’t have any research to do. I could just be here. For once, as a researcher, I am free to

let my body dictate how I go about my work.”153 All of this, she seems to say, was waiting

for her once she was finally able to shake off the disciplinary presence of the institutional

archive. What a queer document to give her such a centered sense of community, I think

now, when so many of us might think of that conference as one of the most infamous

battlegrounds of queer and feminist thought!154

Not every queer subject will feel the same way in queer space, of course. Some will

arrive with goals, predetermined notions of the work they intend to do and the meaning

they will assign to it. Narayan’s first visit to the queer archive might have a different ending

than mine: she was able to relax—find joy, even—and I was not. I, too, finally felt my way

into the queer community of the SMA in a different way, a story I will tell in the final section

151 Narayan, 78.

152 Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness.
153 Narayan, “Writing the Archives,” 88.
154 Rachel Corbman, “The Scholars and the Feminists: The Barnard Sex Conference and the History of the

Institutionalization of Feminism,” Feminist Formations 27, no. 3 (2015): 49–80.

 84

of this chapter. What I see in both of our stories is that they begin with overdetermined

expectation of queer community “as an unequivocal good, an indicator of a high quality of

life, a life of human understanding, caring, selflessness, belonging.”155 Miranda Joseph calls

this the “romance of community.” Even if you or another visitor might not have felt

precisely the same relationships with these materials and these curators had you entered

these spaces, this romance structures the feeling156 of minoritarian belonging in

minoritarian worlds. Few would stumble upon a small grassroots site without first

encountering stories of minoritarian archives as community centers. These are first sites of

pilgrimage before they can become places of comfort and ease. To repurpose Sara Ahmed’s

words about happiness, community is “a wish, a will, [and] a want,” something so central to

our desire that we’re willing to conjure it into being.157 The shared faith among so many of

us in the idea of community—even if we can’t immediately find it—limits the ways we can

describe our longing, our belonging.

The ”us” of my last sentence is doing a lot of work, even as I modify it with “so

many.” When some are united the idea of the possibility community in such a way, what

happens to those who notice the disunity that’s already there? For seven months in 2017-

2018 I served on the board of directors of the Gerber/Hart Library and Archives, a small

regional archival collection in Chicago, IL focused on the “culture and history of LGBTQ

155 Joseph, Against the Romance of Community, vii.

156 Williams, “Structures of Feeling.”
157 Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 2.
 85

peoples and additional marginalized sexual and gender minorities.”158 Unable to pay the

“give-and-get” sum required of new board members,159 the youngest of the crew, and with

a much less stable career, I hadn’t quite shaken the feeling of being the squeaky grad

student child interloper in the corner. I arrived at a meeting—what would be my final

meeting—already embarrassed and furious about some recent interactions with a staff

member at the archives who seemed hellbent on making me feel like I had no right to be

there. Surprised to discover he was invited to our meeting, I sat silently stewing as the

business unfolded. I honestly have no idea if you would have the same read if witnessed

our interactions or if your pored over our correspondence with more criticality. All I need

you to believe is that my felt relationship to him shaped my experience of the entire room.

Eventually the conversation turned to upcoming programming. A board member was

frustrated by the low turn-out of a reading by a Black gay bisexual author. His question of

“Why don’t people of color use this space?” was a not particularly veiled way of voicing

accusation: With everything we’ve done to preserve our shared queer history, we are angry at

them (Black and brown queer people) for continuing to make us look racist by not using our

resources. And a threat: If they don’t start showing up, why should we continue to develop

programming for them? The author, who in fact did show up, was a projected

158 https://www.gerberhart.org/about-Gerber/Hart Library and Archives, “About Gerber/Hart,” Gerber/Hart

Library and Archives: Midwest LGBTQ History & Culture, May 8, 2023, https://www.gerberhart.org/about-
gerberhart/.gerberhart/
159 One the list of “board expectations” at the time I joined was a commitment to “[c]ontribute annually and

support special campaigns and fundraising initiatives that may arise. Board members participate at the $1,000 give or get
level, but preferably at the $2,500 give-or-get level.” When I expressed my inability to pay this at the time of my
application the board president at the time replied “I think we'll have opportunities to raise the money and I'll cover
anything you don't raise. It's much more important to have you participate!” “Board Member Application Form”
(Gerber/Hart Library and Archives, May 16, 2017). Carrie Barnett, “Personal Email to Author,” May 18, 2017.
 86

representative for those who couldn’t bother. He became Sara Ahmed’s “affect alien,” one

who “convert[ed] the good feelings” of queer community “into bad.”160 In this all-white

space, the board member looked to us to affectively enunciate boundaries between those

who are willing to show up (“we”) and those who cannot be counted as ours.

I responded to the feelings in the room by trying to articulate pragmatic steps to

address what I conceived as the essentials problems; each of these involved reallocating

funding, time, and energy we were using on other projects to pay Black curators for their

labor, existing collections, and rewrite and publicize our “acquisition policies” in terms of

race and class. At the very least, I said, we could start by agreeing that a group of white

board members would probably not be the best judges of what is our is not welcoming to

Black visitors. None of named questioned our core assumption that “unity” of our

community was possible, even if we attributed the disunity to different political ends.161

From my injured perspective I saw a sea of wealthy white faces: one smiling, patiently, at

my naivete; another grimacing; and most tepidly nodding in agreement they didn’t seem to

actually feel so we could move through the agenda. I looked down at the secretary’s notes

to see he hadn’t recorded anything. In both the minds of those present and the archival

minutes, I had said nothing, offering institutional critique with no intention of putting any

of my own skin in the game. Perhaps my own memory, limited by perspective and a

narrative I apply years after the fact, is also not a reliable source about what did or did not

160Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 49.

161Miranda Joseph names this as the “notion of dispersal of people who, once brought together, would in fact
evidence unity, identity.” Joseph, Against the Romance of Community, xv.
 87

happen at that particular table. This isn’t a story of meaningful heroic white advocacy in the

face of institutional racism. Aside from one final exit interview with the interim board

president, this would be my last interaction with Gerber-Hart. I—white, queer, working

class, overly sensitive, and academically annoying, working-class board member—was

exhausted. I decided to stop trying.

I just didn’t feel welcome.

Loneliness, Devastation, Communion; Or, The Time of Community

I’ve worked myself into a bit of a feedback loop here in defining welcomeness in

terms of individual feeling. I’m certainly not alone in theorizing personal feelings—

especially feelings of anger, resentment, frustration, shame, guilt, and self-defeat—as

crucial sources of political information. Earlier I listed critics who have added critical

perspectives about the feminist and queer politics of emotions; each allow me to approach

feelings of welcomeness and marginalization as data for larger cultural narratives and

structures of power. Yet what has repeatedly perturbed me in this process of writing this

chapter is how easily my own feelings of marginalization can leave me with a relatively

simplistic understanding of the “centers'' and “margins” of community. Feeling

marginalized can uncritically amplify the belief in the existence of people who feel settled

in their own belonging by virtue of their flattened identities.162 In terms of this dissertation,

I must be critical about my own tendency to take community belonging for granted in the

162 And yes, in the context of white supremacy, it wouldn’t be false to say that some benefit more from the idea of

community than others. In my example of Gerber/Hart—while I certainly felt marginal to the assembled group, I
nonetheless was granted the write to sit at the table in part because of my whiteness and proximity to the cultural capital
of Northwestern University.
 88

cases of my interlocuters. Even I recount each of their own stories of marginalization that

led to the creation of their archives, I nonetheless imagine their archives as community

centers in a way that arrests their own relationship to those communities. In seeing

community as something one can have or not, it’s too easy to lose the complexity of how

people organize underneath its terms. Community remains a static and ownable entity

rather than the performative outcome of a diverse coalition of people And, in the specific

case of Ben, following his feelings of unbelonging opens to a richer story, both of his own

life and how we come to see places like the SMA at the center of community.

Ben always felt an ambivalent relationship to lesbian identity, but it was his public

mantle as the curator of the New Alexandria collection that felt especially painful and

urgent for him to reconcile. In his youth in Chicago, the Lesbian Feminist Collective and its

New Alexandria Library held the promise of community that extended beyond space and

time: friends and lovers in the present, yes, but also material proof that people like him had

always existed. In this role as a curator, he had expanded the collection beyond the

narrowest definition of “lesbian feminist,” which was, of course, never an easily

demarcatable identity in the first place. By the mid 1980s, however, Ben was in the process

of claiming a public identity as a transexual FTM man while remaining widely recognized

as a leader of lesbian community. In 1992, another name change for the New Alexandra

Library signaled an epochal shift in Ben’s and the collection’s entwined identities as he

publicly claimed trans* identity. “I said to myself, I am either going to have to find lesbian

leadership for this archive or I am going to have to expand it to the diverse rainbow of

communities that we have who are queer, and then I can stay with it. I chose the latter, and
 89

on January 1, 1992, I renamed it the Sexual Minorities Archives.”163 Once again a name

change reflects a much longer process of hashing out the edges of community. Questioning

whether his lesbian feminist community would ever truly accept his experiences of gender

dysphoria or his sexual desire, he concluded the archive’s identity would need to change if

he would continue to represent it.

But underneath all of that—or maybe at the heart of it—he was lonely. I learned

about Ben’s loneliness in his correspondence with trans activist and writer Lou Sullivan. If

it was the New Alexandria Library that first gave him the sense that people like him had

always existed, it was also what helped him understand the oppressive limits of community

in the present. Ben first wrote to Lou on New Alexandria Lesbian Letterhead in 1986,

requesting materials on “the female-to-male,” offering to review anything he sent in the

Library’s newsletter.164 Lou replied with INFORMATION FOR THE FEMALE-TO-MALE,165 a

pamphlet he authored and believed to be “the only booklet available on the subject […]

highly praised by those ‘in the know.’”166 Ben’s thank you on behalf of the Library included

a short note to Sullivan asking whether it would be okay to correspond personally as he

“process[ed] out [his] own identification as a transvestite and wonder[ed] more, at depth,

about the differences between TV’s [transvestites] and TS’s [transexuals].”167 With this

note, they would begin four years of correspondence and friendship.

163 Rawson, “Archival Justice,” 182.

164 Lou Sullivan, “Letter to Bet Birdfish,” September 29, 1986, Digital Transgender Archive.
165 Lou Sullivan, Information for the Female-to-Male Crossdresser and Transsexual, 1985.
166 Sullivan, “Letter to Bet Birdfish,” September 29, 1986.
167 Ben Power Alwin, “Letter to Lou Sullivan,” November 16, 1986, Digital Transgender Archive.
 90

Reading these letters now, I am so struck about the dissonance between Ben’s

public role as a leader of that collection and the anger and hurt of a young man who

desperately craved a label for his experience. In his first private letter to Sullivan—no

longer from New Alexandria letterhead—Ben explicitly named lesbian feminist community

itself as the origin of this gender dysphoria.

“The ‘trapped man inside the woman's body’ is an idea I've related to, though
it's been hard to admit this to myself. It wasn't until I came out as a Lesbian
and into feminism that I thought that was wrong and self-hating and I should
think of myself only as a "she" or "womin" from the standpoint of eliminating
sexism turned against myself, or so those politics told me (which I no longer
embrace, at least not in that way).”168

It would be easy to lose the complexity of Ben’s statement by overly focusing on the way he

narrates the disconnect between his sex and his gender, what Talia Mae Bettcher calls the

“wrong body model” of transsexuality.169 It’s clear from these letters that even Sullivan’s

distinction between FTM transvestites and transsexuals didn’t quite fit for Ben as he ached

to articulate gender outside the taint of medical intervention. What I find compelling is this

discussion is that ways he writes about his dissatisfaction with radical feminist community.

In another letter that year he would discuss his gender and sexuality as “feelings and

knowings inside which I've covered over for years with drugs, booze and "feminism."170

Feminist community had once seemed to offer solace from gender and sexual dysphoria,

but it was just another form of self-medication in the end. Embracing the romance of

168 Ben Power Alwin, “Letter to Lou Sullivan,” March 4, 1987, Digital Transgender Archive.
169 Talia Mae Bettcher, “Trapped in the Wrong Theory: Rethinking Trans Oppression and Resistance,” Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society 39, no. 2 (January 2014): 383–406, https://doi.org/10.1086/673088.
170 Bet Power Alwin, “Letter to Lou Sullivan,” July 24, 1987, Digital Transgender Archive.
 91

lesbian community, Ben had damaged himself in his attempts to ignore truths he already

knew.

It was strange reading these letters late in the process of writing this dissertation.

I’d first encountered many of these words nearly a decade earlier in a decidedly different

affective moment, at an event where Ben read quotes from them aloud. Reseeing that event

in light of Ben’s discontent made my argument about community aggravatingly frustrating

to pin down. I’d like to close this chapter by returning to this story: both what these letters

meant to me a decade ago and how my analysis has shifted with hindsight and the deep

attention of close reading. So, I embark on another narrative of suddenness and precarity in

the minoritarian archive, beginning with another swift timeline: I first met with Ben around

October 23, 2014. He had known since June that his landlord planned to sell his home of 30

years, but he had just recently learned that she rejected his purchase offer after visiting the

archives for the first time in twenty years. Instead, she would begin official eviction

proceedings. On October 30, about a week after our first conversation, Ben was served an

official no-fault eviction notice. He would have a month to find a new home. Relocating the

archives and “a 64-year-old, medically disabled transgender man”171 in a month wasn’t

possible. He remained in his home and retained a lawyer.

A small group of people naming themselves “friends of the SMA” organized a night

of archival readings at an independent bookstore in Amherst, MA to raise money for Ben’s

legal defense on November 21, 2014. The event program spanned sermonic calls to queer

171 Ben Power Alwin, “Press Release: Bet Power and the Sexual Minorities Archives Face Eviction,” November 6,
2014.
 92

ancestors, tawdry selections from mid-20th century lesbian pulp fiction, BDSM inside-jokes

published in fetish magazines, sincerely saccharine poems about love and identity, queer

POC Tumblr posts, and covers of contemporary music written by, about, and for sexual and

gender minorities. Ben was the last scheduled performer. He began with some of his

favorite selections from the archives, including his own particularly explicit diary entry

about masturbating a dildo during a highway drive. He then announced he would be

reading from a “new acquisition” for the SMA, the letters he and Lou Sullivan wrote to each

other in the four years before Sullivan’s death.

I knew the basic facts of their correspondence that evening, but the letters added

more autobiographical depth. On New Year’s Eve in 1987, 4 months after Ben’s first letter,

Sullivan had been diagnosed with HIV. Across his correspondence with Ben, he would

apologetically attribute lapses in communication to his struggle with illness.172 Ben’s final

two letters to Sullivan went unanswered. In Ben’s last letter on November 29, 1990, he

wrote that he had learned of Sullivan’s most recent hospitalization for late-stage AIDs. He

gave Sullivan the permission to not respond and instead used this last letter to thank him.

“I also want to tell you how very much you mean to me, Lou. […] Through knowing you I

can now visualize my soul — the man inside — walking courageously and freely through a

doorway which leads from darkness/invisibility and silence to light/personal presence and

voice.”173 Ben read this final letter to us in its entirety.

172 For example, see letters from Sullivan to Power on 3/7/1987 and 10/18/1988. Lou Sullivan, “Letter to Bet

Power,” March 7, 1987, Digital Transgender Archive; Lou Sullivan, “Letter to Bet Power,” October 18, 1988, Digital
Transgender Archive.
173 Ben Power Alwin, “Letter to Lou Sullivan,” November 29, 1990, Digital Transgender Archive.
 93

Figure 3. Final Letter from Ben Power to Lou Sullivan. (November 29, 1990, by courtesy of Ben Power Alwin
and the Sexual Minorities Archives)

He then began a short tribute to Leslie Feinberg, who had died just one week earlier

on November 15, 2014. I watched the “intense, palpable, earnestness” of his performance,

how he frequently stopped “to gasp, sigh, and turn away as his body recollected [loss and
 94

longing].”174 I sat in a packed audience of weirdos and queers, many of whom who had just

delivered their own naked words, a mix of bad poetry and soaring polemic. Hearing Ben’s

voice break and remembering Leslie’s smile, I was a sobbing mess of loss and love and

anger. I was undone.

The event has loomed large in my memory. I wrote about the reading soon after the

event for a graduate class, working out my initial understanding of “archival

performance.”175 Seeing myself in Ben’s struggle for identity, and claiming the losses of Lou

and Leslie as personal, I was a fuzzy node in a transtemporal constellation of queers. I

wrote about feeling my way to José Munoz’s theory of utopia, why mourning alongside Ben

left me both exhausted and full of glowing insurgency. Muñoz wrote about hope as a

[…] temporal calculus [that] performed and utilized the past and the future
as armaments to combat the devastating logic of the world of the here and
now, a notion of nothing existing outside the sphere of the current moment, a
version of reality that naturalizes cultural logics such as capitalism and
heteronormativity.176

I felt like Ben had expressed pain that everyone in the room could understand: how loss

and heartache become the conditions for communion and knowledge in our togetherness.

In my essay I called it a “truth” we all shared, in scare quotes. I knew I was projecting, but I

174 I am quoting from an unpublished seminar paper I wrote in a graduate class the same semester I attended

this event. Over multiple iterations this would become my writing sample for my application into Northwestern’s Ph.D.
program in Performance Studies.
175 The reading, I argued, was a particular dramatic instance of something actually pretty normal for archival

researcher. A reader in the present encounters a document and comes to some sort of knowledge about the past. In doing
so they perform the archive into being; that is, that object becomes archival in being seen as evidence in this way. Seeing
the archive as performance, I argued, would see beyond the person and the object to the larger scene that structured the
interaction. We can learn more about even a solitary act of reading, for example, by analyzing the material structures
(money, labor, time) that made this single moment of reading possible, the cast of people (those invoked in the document,
the various workers at every stage, the researcher, and imagined audience for the research).
176 Munoz, Cruising Utopia, 12.
 95

didn’t think I was wrong. What the event made possible for me was that same version of

community I had craved so palpably just weeks ago, when I first stepped into Ben’s home.

My memory of this event is necessarily a rehearsed account that elides crucial

details. Returning to what I wrote then and what I feel now, I keep returning to another

memory, one I’m not certain even happened. A few days later I would talk to a friend, the

same one who notified me that Ben was seeking support on the SME board. I had been

excited to talk with her after the event, imagining that we would bond over our shared

memory of the reading. She reminded me of Ben’s masturbatory truck-driving account and

rolled her eyes. That the same event could unspool me and annoy her felt like a swift kick

to the heart-gut. I saw her point. Ben likes to hear himself talk. I admit I’ve always had a

certain amount of discomfort about that memory, as if focusing too much on its content

would shatter the version of community that I believed we all conjured that night. Was this

a notion of community so grounded in the assumption of shared affect that a single bad

feeling could topple it? Of course not. Eyerolls, gossip, complaint: these two can be queer

reparative strategies in a world so hellbent on making us feel singular in our bad

feelings.177 I would reach out to my friend just to make sure she was okay with my oblique

references to her in this chapter. She said she has no recollection of that moment beyond a

177 In returning to Sedgwick’s framing of paranoid and reparative readings, here I am recognizing that modes of

social critique can also allow us to build community when we can claim negativity as a communal feeling. Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick, Michèle Aina Barale, and Jonathan Goldberg, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke
University Press Books, 2003).
 96

generalized memory of intimacy surround that evening, although she says it sounded

exactly like something she would complain about.178

This was the most difficult chapter I’ve written for this dissertation. I began writing

with an attempt to forget what I already knew about queer community long enough to

force out something that might resemble an academic argument. What I really wanted to do

was pull you in a room and gossip: to tell you stories that would make you nod in devious

recognition or gasp at the foibles of familiar figures cast in conflict or controversy. You

already know this to be a false dilemma. I hope the stories I’ve ultimately decided to share

have allowed you to think in a sustained way about the narratives, affects, and

relationships that coalesce when we approach the queer archive as a community center.

I’ve explored a few different conceptions of queer community in these pages. One is built

on sameness, weaponized naïveté, and the ignorance of privilege. This is Miranda Joseph’s

“romance,” the belief that communion alone will bring us together long enough to see the

unity that binds us. And, as my account of my work at Gerber-Hart attests: those of us who

benefit the most from this vision are most invested in protecting it from those who would

threaten it. I also think of queer community as a rhetorical and affective structure, one that

figures precarious queer community as enclave against a phobic public. This is a useful way

of imagining the work of queer worldmaking, allowing us to name the urgency of the

worlds we make. This account necessarily produces margins and centers based on personal

feelings of belonging and comfort, flattening the stories we can tell about each other and

178 Anonymous, “Personal Correspondence with Author,” April 27, 2023.

 97

the richness of how we intersect. Muñoz offered another path when he asked us to think of

queerness as collectivity centered around our shared relationship to futurity.179 This is not

to say we share the same experiences when we gather under the name of community; nor

do we imagine the same futures. So many of us assume the work of community precisely

because of the insufficiency of what we have been offered so far. We acknowledge that the

world—as it is—is not working for us, and we build capacity for this recognition. And we

build space and time together—stealing it if we need to180—to engender this as the basis

for coalition.

Munoz, Cruising Utopia, 11.

179

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, 1 edition (Wivenhoe:
180

Minor Compositions, 2013).

 98

II: The Hold in Three Variations; Or, Debbie Britt and the Black Doll Museum

From 2012 to 2020, the National Black Doll Museum of History and Culture

operated in Mansfield, Massachusetts, an overwhelmingly white suburb of Boston. Behind

an unassuming storefront on the New England town’s sleepy Main Street, the Museum held

what founder and director Debra (Debbie) Britt calls the world’s second largest collection

of Black dolls. When Debbie announced the Museum’s closure and as-yet-undetermined

relocation on June 17, 2020, she situated its uncertain future in the context of the COVID-19

pandemic (see Figure 4).

Figure 4 Debbie announces closure of the National Black Doll Museum on the Museum’s Facebook page.
(screenshot by author, June 17, 2020)

Rather than eulogizing a moment of loss, however, Debbie’s announcement asks

that we see this dislocation as yet another step of a museum that has always been “On The

MOVE.” I know I cannot return to the Museum as it physically was; I will never take another

picture or witness another tour. Yet, in revisiting my conversations with Debbie and Felicia
 99

as I review my notes and transcribe our recorded conversations, I find the Museum

again.181 Trusting Debbie in her beseechment to “not despair” about the Museum’s closure,

I not only invest in her faith that the Museum will reopen but recognize the demanding

work, funding, and publicization that this will require. By writing to you, I hope to enlist

you in this process.

My will to return is thus an attempt to (re)bring both myself and you as readers into

continued intimate exchange with the Museum, locating this writing—and your reading—

in the resonating force that Christina Sharpe calls “the wake” of trans-Atlantic slavery.182

For Sharpe, “the wake” offers an assemblage of meanings that describes the condition of

living, knowing, planning, and dying within the resonance of slavery that is contemporary

U.S. life.183 To do what Sharpe calls “wake work” is to recognize Black womanist survival as

a form resistant labor and an epistemological accomplishment. Debbie’s wake work

illuminates the inextricability of her experiences as a Black woman from her commitments

as pedagogue, community leader, family member, and historian.

181 A friend took me to the Museum for the first time as a birthday present in 2014. I would later return in 2017

for ethnographic research and oral history interviews and currently remain in collaboration with Debbie at the time of
this writing.
182 Sharpe, In the Wake.

183 Sharpe offers a definition of wake in its multiplicity: “If… we think the metaphor of the wake in the entirety of

its meanings (the keeping watch with the dead, the path of a ship, the consequence of something, in the line of flight
and/or sight, awakening, and consciousness) and we join the wake with work in order that we might make the wake and
wake work our analytic, we might continue to imagine new ways to live in the wake of slavery, in slavery’s afterlives, to
survive (and more) the afterlife of property.” Sharpe, 18.
 100

As Barbara Christian once argued, the capitalistic “race for theory” often involves

devaluing and ignoring the critical contributions of the people it seeks to describe.184 By

recounting Debbie’s labor, acts of inventive resistance, and embodied affective experience, I

draw upon theories long articulated by Black womanists and feminists in and outside of

academia. My primary goal in this writing is not to intervene in these discourses. To the

extent that I am interpolated into the museum as a white academic, I situate my writing in

parallel relationship to Debbie’s wake work, asking how the tools and theories at my

disposal might extend the reach of the Museum. I thus do not intend to use theory to

merely translate the work of the Museum into academic discourse, to only resituate its

praxis into a genealogy of academic Black feminist theory, or to otherwise instrumentalize

its narratives toward the (re)production of academic capital. Instead, by sharing Debbie’s

stories, I seek to sustain your attention on a single wake worker and her precariously

situated institution in the interest of securing material support for its work.

I theorize from grief that compels me to return and responsibility that compels me

to write. I am enlivened by a theoretical and aesthetic tradition of Black feminist writing

that, in the words of Jennifer Nash, “insist[s]that loss is only knowable through a proximity

to beauty.”185 And it is beauty that drew me to the Museum. With each attempt to tell the

184 Christian argued that the theoretical interventions of black women are often dismissed within anti-Black,

misogynist systems of academic value: “…I am inclined to say that our theorizing… is often in narrative forms, in the
stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language, since dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to
our liking. How else have we managed to survive with such spiritedness the assault on our bodies, social institutions,
countries, our very humanity? And women, at least the women I grew up around, continuously speculated about the
nature of life through pithy language that unmasked the power relations of their world.” Barbara Christian, “The Race for
Theory,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 (1988): 52, https://doi.org/10.2307/3177999.
185 Nash, “Writing Black Beauty,” 104.
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story of the Museum, the stark and arresting space of a single room beckons: a

reconstructed slave-ship cargo hold that was once built into the walls of its small storage

closet. Lighted only with a single beam ceiling of reclaimed, water-rotted boards, the Hold

replicated the claustrophobic fetidity of cargo confinement. Upon plywood shelves lining

its walls, 300 faceless West African wrap dolls stood silent witness to what Hortense

Spillers calls the “scene of actual mutilation, dismemberment, and exile”186 we know as

Middle Passage. Constructed from donated and scavenged plastic bottles and wrapped in

felt, the dolls were adorned with thousands of unmatched buttons and clasps, plastic

flowers, scraps of remnant fabric, discarded hair extensions and doll curls, and repurposed

found objects (see Figure 7).

The Hold captures my memory, yet it continuously dodges the demands of a

singular narrative. Writing from this impossibility, I offer this chapter in the form of three

compositions: “The Deadline,” “The Stage,” and “The Lesson.” Returning to the Hold three

times mirrors my own attempts to tell the story of the Museum in its multiplicity: as a

material outcome of labor and serendipity, a stage for improvised historical reenactment,

and a crucible for emancipatory pedagogies. In “The Deadline,” the Hold emerges as the

teleological outcome of dedicated labor, improvisational creativity, resilience, and faith. I

offer a narrative of serendipity and difficult work as Debbie and her sisters built a museum

in the face of overlapping desires and constraints. In “The Stage,” I locate the Hold within a

tour of the Museum. The Hold operated as a key juncture point between affectively

186 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 67.

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removed and depersonalized forms of museum spectatorship and those that more

explicitly position the museum visitor as a participant in historical reenactment. Finally, I

offer “The Lesson,” Debbie’s account of emancipatory pedagogy within the Hold. I share

and reperform her investment in the possibility for affective and epistemic transformation

in the reenactment of Middle Passage.

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The Deadline: Labor and Serendipity

In the summer of 2012, Debbie Britt faced a deadline. In six weeks, the National

Black Doll Museum of History and Culture would open. Debbie and her sisters Felicia Day

and Tamara Mattinson stood in a long-empty and poorly kept storeroom on the main street

of a Boston suburb, attempting to imagine the space’s transformation. The family and an

expanding congregation of volunteers would scramble to make a museum happen.

A museum was never their aim nor the inevitable outcome of their activist work.

Since my first visit to the Museum, Felicia and Debbie have shared stories of their ongoing

bond with dolls, initially as objects of childhood play, then as sought-after collectibles, and

eventually as vessels for their own creative output. In 2003, however, the family’s

individual collecting practices took on a different kind of urgency: Their five-year-old

nephew returned home from a soccer game in hometown of Mansfield, Massachusetts and

announced he no longer wanted to be Black, understanding from his white peers that Santa

doesn’t visit Black kids. The sisters responded by fervently collecting Black angels and

Santas, intending to overfill the interior and exterior of the house by December to celebrate

blackness and diasporic identity in the presence of the overwhelmingly white and

politically homogeneous Boston suburb of Mansfield, Massachusetts. Felicia spoke about a

new problem that emerged, the brimming boxes of dolls and toys that filled their homes.

From both their nephew’s enthusiastic response and their growing expertise in the doll
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collector’s market, they knew that their personal collection had immense value in multiple

valences, but the dolls remained in disorganized bins and attic crawl spaces.187

In Spring 2014, they contacted area libraries to gauge their interest in displaying

some of their dolls the following holiday season. For Felicia, building public displays felt

like a natural extension of appraising their family collection: “Let’s put ‘em in the library

and see how many we have. [But] we can’t just put them in the library… We gotta have

some rhyme or reason. So that’s what we did: got some fabric, put up a background…”188

While the Mansfield Public library agreed to show a few pieces of their collection in this

first year, they were often met with hesitation, disinterest, and outward hostility by white

library staff as they worked to expand the display to twenty-eight area libraries. Felicia and

Debbie spoke of this familiar treatment in the context of their childhood life in Boston,

where they were at the center of anti-poor, anti-Black riots in response to the

desegregation of Boston public schools in the mid 1970s to late 1980s. Ronald P.

Formisano has discussed the absurd contradictions of the anti-Black climate of the

antibusing movement: Boston maintained its association with its “abolitionist past” in

comparison to highly publicized civil rights struggles in the South at the same time its

citizens engaged in one of the most prolonged and violent campaigns against desegregation

in the nation.189

187 Felicia Walker, interview by author, Mansfield, MA, August 8, 2017.

188 Walker.
189 Ronald P. Formisano, “Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s,” University

of North Carolina Press, February 2004, ix, https://uncpress.org/book/9780807855263/boston-against-busing/.

 105

The sisters harnessed their existing epistemological and affective resources to

develop effective rhetorical strategies when approaching each of the libraries and engaging

with primarily white curators and librarians. “I mean, people have come at us really hard.

And we just, like, go out the door laughing.”190 Their resilience, forged in decades of finding

safety and joy within a household that valued Black representation and community

activism, afforded them affective resistance against the tired and repeated distancing

efforts among white interlocutors. Their knowledge about white affects and ways of

knowing provided them strategic ground. Debbie steeled herself and her sisters before

each new cold call or library visit with a tactical refrain: “You know where we’re going,

right? You know how they’re gonna be. Let’s just prepare.” Creatively navigating affective

resistance in the face misogynoirist191 doubt and ignorance became part of the reward for

engaging in this work. Debbie spoke of the increasing pleasure they found within this

process despite its ugliness:

We really get a kick out of people saying, “It’ll never happen,” and, “We’re not
having this” and just going places and then watching people’s reactions and
becoming in awe, and really seeing people saying, “We’re not gonna have
these Black chicks saying nothing.”192

For the sisters, being told they couldn’t accomplish something—that they were worthless;

that they didn’t belong; that they should give up, shut up, and stay in their lane—was

190 Britt, interview by author, Mansfield, MA.

191 Moya Bailey discussed how she coined the term “misogynoir” in a 2010 blog post to describe the “co-
constitutive, anti-Black, and misogynistic racism directed at Black women, particularly in visual and digital culture” (1).
192 Britt, interview by author, Mansfield, MA.
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simultaneously an invocation to prove them wrong and a confirmation that their work

mattered beyond their own individual family’s survival.

Debbie often chooses to narrate this stage of her life as one of stunning and

stubborn progress, but this narrative often belies the more complex truths about the

trauma that compelled her to both collect and share her dolls. Michele Wallace has written

about the “myth of the superwoman,” an image of Black womanhood that endows Black

woman with tenacity and uncanny strength.193 While Debbie did indeed display authority

and confidence in her performances as a public pedagogue, this was always in the face of

systemic racism that violented limited the imaginations, possibilities, and health of her

family. Past that initially catalyzing moment of their nephew’s internalized anti-Black

racism, what ultimately fueled their work was witnessing other children respond to their

workshops and hearing stories from adults about how their work resonated with their

childhoods, providing a grammar for their experience.

Motivated initially by a family crisis, the sisters began to see the potential for these

library displays to enable and sustain cross-racial conversations that initially felt

impossible in the fictitious postracialism of 2000s-era Boston. Their repeated encounters

with white supremacy during initial negotiations with local libraries affirmed the necessity

of representing the historical realities of racist violence, Black survival, and white

disavowal as told through the history and creation of Black dolls. They would likewise

come to recognize the value of dolls within these encounters to foster less circumscribed

193 Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, Reprint edition (London: Verso, 2015).
 107

dialogue. As they approached white decision makers who, at the visceral level, did not

know how to begin to speak to Black women, the sisters learned they could use their dolls

to offer white people emotional reprieve from their discomfort of acknowledging race.

And you see older white people that are so afraid…to have this
conversation—difficult conversations—they don’t wanna have it. But, if you
bring a doll. A doll is just such a simple thing… Nobody think you can have a
conversation with as simple thing as a doll. You bring a doll in there and you
can have it, that conversation. And it’s safe.194

This act of surrogacy, however, would also allow the sisters crucial emotional distance

from this work that required them to center white feelings of safety in their efforts to

communicate across rational and class difference.

Even as they witnessed the impact of their labor as they became increasingly

prominent members of their local community and in national networks of doll-collecting

and curation, they never imagined that they were already in the process of building a

museum. Within a few years they were curating displays and running doll-making

workshops at each of these twenty-eight Boston-area libraries. They expanded their

outreach to prisons, schools, and shelters for survivors of sexual and domestic abuse. These

workshops racked up miles on their cars and tested their bodies as they curated displays

and hauled plastic bins full of supplies from site to site. They were unprepared for the

intensity of response nor the sheer amount of physical work it took to manage the

materials necessary for the work. According to Felicia, “[w]ithout even thinking, we just

went on like this, for like, God, ten years! We went on like that for ten years. We became a

194 Britt, interview by author, Mansfield, MA.

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traveling museum without knowing we was a traveling museum.”195 In 2008, they hosted

the world’s first Black doll convention, which they positioned partly as a means of raising

money to find a permanent space to house their collection. As they would later write on

their website, “awareness was achieved. Funds, not so much.”196

In the summer of 2012, Debbie—on one of her regular walks through downtown

Mansfield’s Main Street—saw an unfamiliar white man moving a cobwebbed dress form

from the window of a long-empty storefront. When she inquired about the fate of the

building, he shared that he was the new owner of the building, complaining about the labor

the work of repairing the space for new renters. While Debbie initially spoke to express

curiosity rather than an actual desire to rent, the two quickly realized that her need for

space and his need for a renter for his newly acquired but rundown shop constituted them

as potential partners. The conversation quickly became a negotiation, one that offered the

promise of new publics and increased space for work that had outgrown a few library

displays and the storage capacity of her family’s basements. They struck an agreement: she

would have six weeks, rent-free, if she remodeled the space and then started recuperating

rent immediately afterward.

Goaded by the impossibility of making something happen, the three sisters forged

ahead. Once inside, Debbie covered the walls of the space with post-Its, mapping the

geography of the site with their existing collections in mind. The sisters would sit on the

Walker, interview by author, Mansfield, MA.

195

“About The Journey – National Black Doll Museum of History & Culture,” April 7, 2023,
196

https://nbdmhc.org/about-the-journey/.
 109

floor of home improvement stores and turn their heads sideways, finding novel solutions in

strangely shaped remnant hardwood. Instead of refinishing the plaster of a damaged wall,

they built shelves into the rafters (See Figure 5). Whenever they learned of remodeling

businesses within a day’s drive, the sisters gassed up their cars to claim old fixtures.

Finding salvation in clearance aisles, dumpsters, and the homes of people who owed them

favors, they amassed a stock of discounted, donated, and discarded paint, fabric, and wood.

Figure 5. Dolls displayed in exposed wall studs. (photograph by author, August 9, 2017, National Black Doll
Museum, Mansfield, Massachusetts)

One particularly trying experiment with a floor sander ended in serendipitous

triumph. While her sisters watched in horror, Debbie stuck her foot in a bucket of black

paint and kicked in exasperation at each accidental gouge and spiral in the floor, marking a

constellation of error with the shape of her stomping feet. Weeks later, as they imagined

how people might move through the museum, they realized that Debbie had already
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marked a movement through the site: what had begun as evidence of exhausted frustration

now appeared as an intentional choreography that would lead visitors through the space

(see Figure 6).

Figure 6. Debbie’s footprint in paint. (digital photograph by author, August 19, 2017, National Black Doll
Museum, Mansfield, Massachusetts

On an impossible schedule their hands carried out the plans in Debbie’s head. The

sisters bought discounted mis-tints of brown and black paint, scrounging through recycling

bins and dumpsters for raw materials. Their mother sat in front of soap operas, covering

recycled plastic bottles with black, brown, and tan felt to build the base of hundreds of

dolls. Dozens of volunteers gathered to cut cloth, hot glue feathers, and restring beads.

Debbie’s husband sawed and nailed and sweated to her specification. Together, they began

to fill the space. A vestibule at the Museum’s entrance would become a gift shop. A large

central room would tell a history of Black doll-making alongside rotating exhibits,
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performances, and town hall meetings. Adjoining rooms and hallways would become

permanent specialized displays.

Debbie was initially alone in her vision for one space in particular, a small storage

closet she deemed crucial for the narrative she knew the Museum could tell. When she

discussed her plans for the closet with her husband, he questioned her choice to reuse the

rotting wood they discovered as they sorted through the flotsam of the vacant store. He

didn’t understand how she planned to transform wooden pallets, a rusty bunkbed frame,

and warped shingles into the hull of a ship. But Debbie was already well practiced in

moving ahead in the face of puzzled looks and lack of imagination. Her sisters already knew

not to get in her way. Debbie had rehearsed this resolution: If she had once allowed the

disbelief, confusion, or disinterest of other people to slow her labor, she would not be in the

process of opening a museum.

In the end, set off from the central displays of the Museum, down a short hallway,

this space would become the Hold.

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The Stage: Historical Reenactment and Memory

How is a history of pain to be represented so that people will want to visit

(and revisit) the site? Must a teleology of progress away from the original
source of pain be invoked?

—Sandra Richards, “’What Is to Be Remembered?’ Tourism to Ghana’s Slave

Castle-Dungeons”197

Consider the site of the idealized prototypical mid-twentieth century museum, what

art critic Brian O’Doherty once called the “white cube.”198 Here, cleanly framed and

succinctly contextualized artworks are starkly displayed against white walls. The laborers

who have curated the space and built the collection are absent, with silent security guards

situated in each corner. Docents, usually volunteers or underpaid workers, are trained to

provide a narrative that conforms to standardized curricula and timings; their responses to

predictable inquiries are practiced. Most of the objects that constitute the museum’s

collections are locked away from public view, their provenances—frequently violent

histories of cultural theft—are typically absented. The custodians who care for the

collections will do their work—largely the labor of removing residual traces left by other

bodies—after the museum has closed. Each of these technologies allows modern museums

to obscure the perpetual labor and the historical violences that a museum project requires.

As they have perfected the ideology of this perfected white cube, institutional museums

continue to consolidate power and narrative through the shaping of social memory.

197 Sandra L. Richards, “What Is to Be Remembered?: Tourism to Ghana’s Slave Castle-Dungeons,” Theatre

Journal 57, no. 4 (2005): 617–37, https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2006.0044.

198 O’Doherty and McEvilley, Inside the White Cube.
 113

The National Black Doll Museum operated differently: through its spatial

reconfiguration, rearrangement of the embodied museum encounter, and explicit

aestheticization of the labor that produced it, the Museum encouraged its patrons to

directly reckon with their own role in African American history. Debbie or Felicia typically

offered a personal tour for each of the Black Doll Museum’s visitors. While the basic path of

the Museum was rehearsed, the guides for each tour shaped this experience in dialogue

with the actual people in attendance at a given time. Debbie and her sisters began with a

general lesson plan and set of teaching techniques, with a practiced attunement to the

needs and knowledges of each new visitor. By walking through the museum in this writing,

I am not concerned with faithfully reproducing a singular account. To do so would deny the

improvisational, contingent nature of each encounter and to assume that I might succinctly

describe the host of intimate exchanges that occurred within the Museum. Instead, I offer

an account of the Black Doll Museum’s geography as a stage: a site designed to engender

performance and visitor transformation.

For the family, the tour was both pedagogical and pragmatic: The collection

constitutes hundreds of thousands of dollars of financial value without resources to guard

from theft and damage. There were no means to hire and train a full support staff to protect

and publicize the collection. Yet, the sisters described these constraints as opportunities for

intimate exchange with each of the thousands of visitors. Tailored to the specific set of

knowledges and desires that each audience brought to the space, this responsivity to

audiences is a similar practice to that of many trained museum docents. Yet it is the specific

relationship of the family to these materials that transforms the relationship between

visitor and tour guide. In the Black Doll Museum, the people who own, curate, clean, and
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publicize the museum were always present. They spoke of the Museum’s construction

through personal experience, explicitly acknowledging the demands it made on their

bodies. When they offered provenance, they told the stories of rummaging, shopping,

negotiating, and gift-giving in which the objects first came to their possession. A question

about the value of the doll might have led to a story about Debbie’s relationship with an

aging doll dealer, or to Felicia’s last birthday party, where she finally received a gift of a

hyper-realistic “Reborn” doll. In turn, museum patrons might have reflected on their own

history of playing with dolls, of receiving familial gifts, or of their emotional response to

new knowledge about the history of dollmaking in the U.S.199

When arriving to the National Black Doll Museum, visitors paid an optional donation

at a small gift shop filled with handcrafted dolls, ornaments, and postcards. The tour began

with “The Ugly Truth,” a wardrobe in the style of a Victorian cabinet of curiosities. While

the cabinet itself was mostly full of 19th century Antebellum slavery figurines, the cabinet

was surrounded by a transnational and transtemporal assemblage of racial monstrosity.

Spilling from the cabinet and mounted to the walls, this aggregation of objects and images

included 20th century Jim Crow blackface morphologies of ink-black skin, round red lips,

and white, agape eyes: U.S. print advertisements from the 1930s, waxy plastic Japanese

kewpie dolls from the 1950s, and British golliwogs from the 1970s.

The tour-guides would often linger at the cabinet, gingerly removing two 19th

century dolls from its interior: one fashioned from the wishbone of a turkey, the other a

199 Britt, interview by author, Mansfield, MA.

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“topsy-turvy” doll with opposing Black and white child torsos joined at the hips.200 Against

this backdrop of long histories of racist imagery, the tour guide would then ask visitors to

hold these fragile and unsettling playthings in their hands. The sisters knew that most

museum visitors were accustomed to the admonishment to “look but not touch” in museum

settings. Such practices allow primarily white middle-class visitors a safe distance from

museum objects, allowing the scopic pleasure of encountering an object without a sense of

complicity in its continuing display. The sisters’ intimate display presented a stark contrast

to these techniques of physical and emotional distancing in the name of a supposedly

scientific gaze. Viewers of the Museum’s “Ugly Truth” were instead asked to not only

encounter but carefully cradle an object of abject racism in close proximity to the Museum’s

curator. The “Ugly Truth” was not simply a fact of a history long passed. It was instead, as

Sharpe reminds us, a resonating set of relations and historical realities that continue to

structure the present. According to Debbie, institutional practices of object display partially

explain why many Black and working-class people opt never to enter museum spaces.

Sometimes that makes people, of certain means, feel uncomfortable about

going, you know, so they just feel like that it's not wanted. […] And, you know,
people of color don't go to museums because they feel like it's not a
welcoming place for them. You know, it's like, “Everything's, they’re real
expensive. If I go there, if I break something, then I can't afford to pay for it.
I'm not going to bring my kids there because really, I don't want to be in that
position. I don't want to feel that uncomfortable.”

200 Robin Bernstein (2011) states that the topsy-turvy doll was “originally sewn by enslaved African American

women in the antebellum South” (81); she analyzed the doll as an object that invites certain forms of cross-racial play and
imagination.
 116

For visitors were never guaranteed the safety of whiteness in museum spaces, Debbie and

her sisters offer communion in the invitation to touch. They give their visitors the option to

engage, or not, and the promise that they would keep them safely locked away from

circulation outside of the Museum.

As the sisters returned the objects to concealed storage, a sign on the cabinet

admonished: “You Must know where you’ve been, so you can chart where you’re going. GO

BACK TO AFRICA.”201 The tour led visitors through a collection of dolls from regions of the

African continent, sharing stories about historical West African fertility and health rituals.

In the following hallway, a poster printed with a timeline of trans-Atlantic slavery hung

next to a poster describing a traditional 18th century West African dwelling. In what

appeared as merely a closet at the end of this hall, the Hold of the ship waited.

The tour guide would ceremoniously invite visitors to enter, with watchful

anticipation of what was likely to come. The room, barely large enough to fit a few adult

bodies, would often be stuffed with as many as ten school children. The tour guides would

explain that people from disparate African cultures were chained together in the hulls of

ships and carried to North America and the Caribbean to be sold as chattel. Then would

shut the door and leave visitors alone to adjust to stark and silent darkness. A thin beam of

fluorescent light barely illuminated 300 bottle-sized dolls (see Figure 7).

201 The Museum operates alongside other 20th century Black efforts to find historical African roots in the face of

diaspora, a sentiment often encapsulated in the phrase “a Race without the knowledge of its history is like a tree without
roots.” While often attributed to Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey, Charles Siefert likely first wrote this in his 1938 pamphlet
The Negro's or Ethiopian's Contribution to Art. Charles Siefert, “The Negro’s or Ethiopian’s Contribution to Art (Pamphlet),”
1938.
 117

Figure 7 The Hold. Digital photograph by author. 2017

At this point in the tour visitors had been asked to move backwards through time.

They began in the near past, confronted by nauseating imagery. As if responding to a

demand from visitors that the Museum account for this visual violence, the sign called them

back to Africa. The village, depicted only as pastoral scene on a single poster, figured as a

geographically and temporally distant ghost. This phantasm of an undisturbed homeland

was effaced within the Hold of the trans-Atlantic voyage. Here, three hundred dolls—
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although unnamed, silent, faceless, and dislocated in their object status—stood witness. In

this site, the admonishment to return to Africa that begins the tour ultimately revealed

itself as an impossible demand. While the Museum could offer historical context in its

staging of reenactment, it could not actually speak for the dead. Yet Debbie designed the

Hold to offer communion that would engender agency.202 The Hold held space for visitors

to feel the resonance of historical violence, to see their bodies as inheritances of the past,

and to beg the urgency of the question of what must be done. This (re)enactment was not,

however, a simple or straightforward attempt toward generating empathy of shared

experience with enslaved people. In the face of the logics that over-determine the potential

outcomes of any museum encounter, it was the pedagogical design of the makers of the

Museum that the unlit tightness and shadowy beauty of the closet-hold would precipitate

affective transformation that resisted mere sentimentalizations or sensationalizations of

violence. Visitors entered the space, their already sedimented social identities and

experiences written into their bodies. Their engagement was already structured by a set of

ideological and affective expectations of what a museum could do and how a patron should

engage with it. In comparison to the practices of looking encouraged by the white cube, the

tour was designed to engender performance predicated on practices of dialogic intimacy

rather than whitewashed distance. As the tour guides led the visitors through a museum of

their own making, they choregraphed a less proscribed and more reflective performance

202 Saidiya Hartman once wrote of this kind of willful agency facing impossibility: “The necessity of trying to

represent what we cannot, rather than leading to pessimism or despair must be embraced as the impossibility that
conditions our knowledge of the past and animates our desire for a liberated future.” Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” June
1, 2008, 13.
 119

practice for the remainder of the museum encounter. Crucially, Debbie constructed this

stage with the faith that that this dialogue would require markedly different work for its

multiple audiences.

Within the loosely teleological narrativizing space of the Black Doll Museum the

Hold was situated at the moment of breach, when multiple systems of kinship, history, and

quotidian life are irrevocably violated and violently reconstituted in the face of the trans-

Atlantic slave trade. It was, likewise, the point of departure for progress narrative of Black

resistance and survival through the curation and exhibition of a Black material and

expressive culture that would follow later in the tour. After exiting the Hold, visitors would

be transported three centuries forward with a call to perform a different form of memory

work: the repeated citation of names and accomplishments on a wall covered with home-

made interpretations of the paper-doll form. The tour snaked past a wall detailing the

accomplishments of dozens of Black inventors, activists, politicians, artists, and writers:

each figure a collage of facts, quotes, images, and found objects pasted onto painted

construction paper bodies. The crafty dolls explicitly performed the labor of their

production: not only the cutting and pasting of paper, but the fervor with which these facts

were researched and assembled as revolutionary, groundbreaking figures of Black history.

Participating in the re-creation of a canon of Black national heroes places the efforts of the

makers of the Museum within a genealogy of activist historians who have deployed the

reclamation of revisionist history as a project of Black pride.

The largest room followed (see Figure 8). At its center, a series of movable displays

offered histories of doll manufacturing beginning with the late 19th century. In stories of

Black struggle to produce dolls by and for their own communities, the room evidenced the
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resourcefulness and inventiveness of Black doll makers in seizing control of the production

and profits of Black dolls. The Museum documented their experimentations: bodies built

with bone, wood, clay, and plastic; increasingly lifelike facial morphologies and hair

textures; skin colors produced through new recipes of commercial and home-made dyes.

This central Museum space also hosted a rotating exhibit that at times displayed dolls

commemorating the Obama presidency, dolls depicting wedding traditions from various

African and Afro-Caribbean nations, and an interactive border wall of painted shoeboxes in

protest of Trump-era U.S. immigration policy. Two smaller alcoves were dedicated to

popular sports figures, musicians, and artists.

Figure 8. Main exhibit room. Digital photograph by author. 2017.

The various inventors, artists, athletes, and politicians represented in this main

exhibition space showcased Black expressive culture sustained through persistent

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historical efforts to forge community and financial independence. They were joined by two

smaller rooms that connected the loop of the tour. As visitors exited this larger space and

began circling back to the Museum’s entrance, they entered a room full of dancers, fashion

icons, and Barbies. The final space, a hallway outside the Museum’s two bathrooms,

included a wall of notable contemporary Black celebrities and politicians. In these last

displays of dolls in the Museum, visitors would see Black people—as Hollywood stars,

cultural icons, and world leaders—seemingly enjoying the benefits of mainstream success,

cultural relevancy, and political power. The two bathrooms that face this wall, however,

historicized this story of advancement by making progress contingent on learning in the

present. Signs indicated that the bathrooms were reserved “whites Only” and “Colored

Only” (see Figure 9). In staging Jim Crow bathroom policies within the Museum’s actual

working restrooms, visitors were reminded that their historical reenactment did not end

once they exited to the Hold. This final stage once again demanded reflexivity from its

multiple audiences, asking: Where am I located in this history? What have I inherited?

What is my responsibility?

Figure 9 Bathroom signage. Digital photograph by author. 2017.

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The Lesson: Pedagogy and Emancipation

If we can keep this thing going long enough, if we can survive and teach what
we know, we’ll make it. But the question is a matter of the survival and the
teaching. That's what our work comes down to. No matter where we key into
it, it's the same work, just different pieces of ourselves doing it.

—Audre Lorde

Debbie shared a story about a group of white high school boys who visited one day

after school when I asked her about the Museum’s location in predominantly white

Mansfield.

And, when they came in, and it was all… a bunch of jocks, high school football
boys that came in… and they were like ‘Ha, ha, ha,’ you know, ‘Doll Museum?!’
And I was like, ‘Yeah, come on in.’ … I took them in, and they was laughing…
and they were going through and they were like, ‘hmmmm’ [rolls eyes in
derision]. I knew [they] would [react to the Museum that way]; We go
through the whole thing… ‘til we get to that room.

Debbie easily read the students’ performances of feigned disengagement and casual

disdain. To them, the Black Doll Museum, in both its gendered and racialized dimensions as

a warehouse of girls’ toys and one of the few Mansfield businesses explicitly catering to

Black audiences, could offer them only a humorously exotic thrill. Debbie demonstrated her

willingness to take on the overdetermined role of the Black woman teacher: As she was

practiced in doing in her activist work, she made herself available for the physical and

affective labor of enlightening an aggressively disinterested audience. The students could

choose to make something of this experience, but only if they deemed her performance

worthy of their small investment of time. Their masculinized whiteness—intent on

remaining intact and unrecognized—demanded a proscribed performance from the

racialized and gendered role of the affective, pedagogic Black woman laborer. Debbie met

their disengagement with defiant patience. She remained committed to a strategic

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generosity that would sustain their interaction. She knew, for instance, that their affective

stances toward the museum were symptoms of their cultural illiteracy, a miseducation

accumulated across moments of travelling unmarked and unfettered among their

community. She would neither feed them palatable lies about the history of blackness in

the U.S. nor attempt to embody a politics of white respectability to which they may be

accustomed in a more institutionalized museum space.

In comparison to her earlier work that required her to center white feelings of

safety, the Museum afforded Debbie what Megan Boler has called a “pedagogy of

discomfort.”203 In Debbie’s pedagogy, confrontation held promise.

They thought it was a big joke, until I took their little asses and stuffed them
in that little slave ship room. And then it was, like, well, ‘Damn, how did they
eat?’ You know what I’m saying? ‘How did the people eat?’ Because it never
dawned on them, because all they learned in school is that people were
slaves and they got on these slave ships.204

Debbie distinguished between what she saw as the students’ formal learning from an

embodied affective connection to the material past. While the students arguably may have

“learned” a few historical facts about the history of slavery, these facts did not lead them to

acknowledge any kind of shared experience or humanity with those who were enslaved or

those who had enslaved them. Debbie’s critique of the students’ paltry history was paired

with her understanding that any lessons about the history of slavery in the Americas would

be necessarily insufficient in the face of whiteness built upon historical denial.

203 Megan Boler and Maxine Greene, Feeling Power: Emotions and Education, 1st edition (New York: Routledge,
1999).
204 Britt, interview by author, Mansfield, MA.
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They hear it but it’s not a feeling. ‘Til they get into a room where there’s 700
people on the ship, captured, enslaved, going in these waters that are
[tumultuous], you know, and… these people are coming from one climate to
another, being fed food that, you know, is not the same…There’s rodents on
the ship. … They just think people in Africa [were], like, running through the
woods, you know, the jungle with no clothes on. They don’t realize that
people are really snatched from their families. ‘Til they get in this room. And
when they get in that room, you put ten people in that room, and you kinda
close the door, and it’s a little bit dark, you be like, well, ‘This is not a good
feeling.’ So, ‘How do they eat, and what happened?’ you know, ‘How long was
their trip?’ and, ‘So, if somebody died, what happened?’ So, ‘Now we’re on top
of each other; so, now I have to be here, and then they have diseases. Oh, this
is horrible; I wouldn’t want this to happen to anybody!’

Offering this single moment as merely one example of the power the Hold, Debbie shared a

story of defiant faith in dialogic performance pedagogy. In the space of this single

encounter, she believed in the possibility of epistemological transformation. That the

students felt and saw something they hadn’t previously cared to experience suggested to

her that they will seek ways to forge less violent futures. For the students, “…the experience

of reenactment … [was] an intense, embodied inquiry into temporal repetition, temporal

recurrence” (Schneider 2011, 2). Standing in claustrophobic intimacy with three hundred

faceless dolls, they formed a new intimacy with the spatial and temporal distance of slavery

defined as much by the incommensurability of their experiences as it was by closeness.

Confronted by ignorance, Debbie argued, they began to feel the weight of a set of

new accountabilities. They were no longer irresponsible for their ignorance, and this

knowledge required them to orient themselves differently to ongoing anti-Black violence.

And that’s when it hit them: that it was, like, serious crap that had happened
back then. They had no idea. By the time they came out of there and went
into the historical room about the contributions that Black people had made
with… inventions and stuff, then it became, like, ‘Ok, something happened.
Because we didn’t really get all this in school. And I need to go back and
check all this out. This is, right here, this was, totally messed up. I will never
talk about slavery again.’ … And for them it was a whole life-changing thing
for them in one moment. Of being there like that. ‘Cause it was, like, ‘This is
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horrible… I’d never do that again.’ They didn’t feel that way when they left
out of here. It was a whole total transformation for them.205

Debbie adopted an optimistic stance in her work and then strategized a performance

pedagogy. This optimism positioned single performances as sites for the development of

awareness, accountability, and action. This is the same optimism that continues to

undergird her work with the Black Doll Museum, that sustains her in the face of struggle as

she stubbornly continues to engage.

Sitting with her own account of this moment in the hold, I’ve attempted a

methodology of close reading that begins and ends with a willed belief. My belief—not

simply that Debbie witnessed transformation, but that transformation is actually possible,

and that transformation has occurred—is part of the accomplishment of Debbie’s wake

work. She shares her stories with me—a white academic—authorizing me as researcher

and positioning me as confidant, all with the same affective and epistemological tools that

enabled her encounter with those students. She knows that I will be the final editor of this

writing, that I will curate and construct in the service of ideologies and political economies

that she cannot ultimately control. Strategically, she chooses to share these stories.

This kind of political attachment to optimism can easily be configured as perverse,

as a kind of willful hope that ignores the historicity and continued reality of social

violence.206 We would be right to ask questions about the durability of such

transformations, the inequity of emotional and physical labors assumed by these

205 Britt.
206 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
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pedagogies, and the diverging stakes that different audiences might have in critically

investigating race and gender. In the space of this piece, however, my will toward believing

in the labor of Debbie and her sisters also resists a rehearsed, reductive, and smugly certain

methodology that would position the museum as merely a site for the continued reification

of racist and gendered violence. Academic efforts to perform appropriate affective and

methodological allegiance to indexable radicality can too easily reproduce political

pessimism as a disciplinary project.207 Within the deployment of the practiced pessimism,

we can read only the possibility of continued exploitation and unfettered reproduction in

the zones where our entrenched identities come into contact.208

207 Like Eve Sedgwick, I am concerned with the ways that academic analysis can too quickly mistake disbelief for

criticality: “to theorize out of anything but a paranoid critical stance has come to seem naïve, pious, or complaisant.”
Sedgwick, Barale, and Goldberg, Touching Feeling, 126.
208 White feminist pedagogue Mary Louise Pratt uses the terms “contact zones” to refer to social spaces where

cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as
colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they lived out in many parts of the world today.” Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of
the Contact Zone,” Profession, 1991, 34.
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Figure 10. Debbie invites two visitors to participate in a “tasting of the four elements” during a tour of a Black
wedding traditions exhibit. (digital photograph by author, August 10, 2017, National Black Doll Museum,
Mansfield, Massachusetts)

The Museum, like all Black spaces, begins at the site of entrenchment and then

imagines its work in the interstices of what has been and what might be.209 Debbie chooses

to continue engaging with me, my whiteness and the institutionality that I carry and

reinstantiate in our interactions, all in spite of the host of forestallments that structure our

plays of identity. We—the name I insubordinately give to the assemblage of Debbie, the

students, me as author, and you as reader—cannot afford to read this as a naïve stance, to

distance ourselves from the politics of her labor by forestalling the possibility of

transformation. Sitting closely, intentionally, with Debbie’s words, in the face of the labor

made possible and visible in the site of the museum, asks us to engage with the same kind

209 Theorizing the spatial nature of Black woman’s lives during and after slavery in the U.S., Katherine McKittrick

discusses how Black Woman enact “emancipatory desire” even in spaces that were built to terrorize, objectify, and
surveil. Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2006), 41.
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of battle-honed optimism. We do not know what kinds of future performances are in store

for the students or us. We find ourselves again at the reverberating temporal collapse of

violences that continue to sting, to misname, to erase, to murder. In the face of this

wreckage, Debbie, as Black woman historian opts to build. The Museum tells us there is

something possible in the piling wreckage of history: materials to repurpose, allegiances to

forge, labors to honor, and knowledges to protect.

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Coda; or Staying Alive

A museum was not the inevitable outcome of Debbie’s activist work. After years of

packing and unpacking plastic bins, an empty storefront at the right place and the right

time seemed to offer an opportunity to build something more sustainable. Over eight years,

288 N Main St. would allow thousands to engage with Black history and culture. Plays were

staged, inaugurations celebrated, fascist regimes resisted, histories reenacted. Visitors

attended African dance classes, learned about historically Black Colleges and Universities,

and made thousands of wrap dolls from repurposed materials while listening to stories of

Black doll-making. After eight years, the Museum, quickly built on a tiny budget, had long

outgrown the storefront it called its home. But to narrate the Museum as either a simple

story of success or loss is to ignore the vagaries and contingencies that Debbie and her

family continue to navigate—have always navigated—to make the Museum happen. Even

as Debbie offers the stories of the Museum and of Black life in the U.S. as tales of progress,

these narratives can obscure the labor of serendipity: the work of making a museum

happen on a deadline, staging historical reenactment, and finding teaching moments in

seemingly intractable conflict.

Debbie and her sisters could imagine many possible futures for the Museum, but the

daily work of maintaining a Black museum in an anti-Black world didn’t always provide the

ideal resources for long-term strategizing. Eventually, the storefront that had held them,

providing provisional stability amidst precarity, had also begun to limit what the museum

might be.
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In the face of a COVID 19’s global threat to humanity, the makers of a small,

independently owned museum dedicated to Black history were required to make a

decision.

And so, when Covid happened, it's like, “Okay, so what do we do?” …We could
certainly stay in this place and keep giving this guy all of our money until
there's no more. And then we could just go back home and do nothing. Or we
can be smart: go and put everything in storage, organize, and do the steps
that it really takes in order to make sure that it's arrived.210

When Debbie made the official public announcement, during what would often be called “a

time of uncertainty,” there was still the work to be done. Debbie as activist-archivist

doubled down on her commitment to maintain the collection. At the time of this writing,

the Museum remains “on the move.” While other Facebook posts and newspaper articles

and phone calls mourned the loss of an institution, Debbie, her family, and a small network

of volunteers continued to work.

There was the sanding over footprints. Uninstalling shelves and peeling vinyl signs.

Renting storage units. Packing. Staying alive.

Finding stasis amidst a torrent of violence, civil unrest, and indifferent public health

campaigns. Maintaining social distance, wearing masks, and navigating the uncertainty of a

national campaign of misinformation. Staying alive.

Building a new website, designing a new logo, learning the qualities of successful

online exhibits and online stores. Learning how to use Zoom. Learning how to avoid Zoom.

Staying alive.

210 Debra Britt, interview by author, virtual, August 31, 2020.

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Cataloguing and appraising thousands of dolls and ephemera. Recording stories of

aging doll-makers. Donating bins of stuffed animals and Barbies and cloth dolls to local

shelters for survivors of domestic abuse. Staying alive.

At the time of this writing, several towns in New England are campaigning to be the

new home for the Museum. Representatives from Easton, MA’s Stonehill College hope a

college campus will provide the kind of cultural capital in which an institution could

flourish. At a 2020 Juneteenth celebration, Paul Heroux, mayor of the affluent and racially

homogenous town of Attleboro, committed $1 in city funds for every private donation of

any size to the Museum.211 Attleboro representatives would later offer Debbie a shuttered

country club and several buildings across several acres of maintained lawn at a fraction of

its property value. A developer from Brockton, MA, offered to sell a small building at the

heart of a growing cultural district in one of the poorest and most racially diverse cities of

Massachusetts.212

While each of these opportunities once again promise the Museum certain forms of

futurity, they have left Debbie with the task of answering new questions about the life of

this collection. Who will the Museum serve? Who will be able to enter its doors? How will

the mortgage be paid? Beyond the initial calls for support, who will do the work? In the

wake of the Mansfield Museum’s closure, Debbie works to claim space and time outside the

vagaries and contingencies of serendipity.

211 Attleboro Celebrates Juneteenth, Video, 2020, https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=578335793074943.

212 Britt, interview by author, virtual.
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This time she refuses a deadline: “So let's stop now and really do the work that it

takes to make sure that it’s gonna be there and it's going to be lasting. Because it should be

a repository, because this is a history that should be told… should be and will be.”213

213 Britt.
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III: Archival Responsibility: Muna Tseng and Tseng Kwong Chi’s Estate

Figure 11. Puck Ball (The Gang’s All Here). (photograph by Tseng Kwong Chi, 1983, by courtesy of Muna Tseng
Dance Projects, Inc.)

The Gang’s All Here

Twelve people pose in the sights of a camera, in front of a studio backdrop. Can we

assume they’re friends? One moment of their gaiety is captured on black and white film,

cropped and printed in a perfect square on photographic paper. From my perspective the

image captures a precarious kind of queer belonging: Queer, as in they’re all weirdos, as in

their smiles and embraces and theatricality set off my gaydar, as in their intimacy is

indeterminate and provocative, as in I like their style. Precarious, as with any photograph,

because the moment the photographer squeezed the bulb the moment had already passed,
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because all communion is temporary. I promise to put this image within a proper story, a

story that will first require me to look at it more closely.

What can this image tell us? As an archival object, does it offer historical evidence?

What can we make of its formal qualities? Do we care about these people: their agency,

their sartoriality, their roles in this club? We’ve got some options for our analysis. It’s

probably old hat to say we might find what we seek. At the very least, we can only see what

we’ve already practiced to already know. But—of course—our orientations to the frame

are not accidental;214 nor are the stories we repeat.

It's not exactly a scene from the United Colors of Benetton, but we can spy some

1980’s multiculturalism215 if we’re already familiar with its codes: here gathers a multi-

ethnic group in stylishly diverse clothing, embracing, smiling—some mid-laugh, some

flashing open-jawed teeth, a few with the grimace of a shy kid with braces on picture day.

Fitted suits and tuxes are the backdrop for more playful fashion: a trapper’s hat, very tall

coiffed blonde hair, and a white femme subject whose large curly wig crowns the even

larger oversized ruffles of their dress. The performers are all queered in their promiscuous

proximity. The first half of the image’s title, Puck Ball, suggests they’re on their way to or

214 Here I’m drawing on Sarah Ahmed’s articulation of a queer phenomenology that “emphasizes the importance

of lived experience, the intentionality of consciousness, the significance of nearness or what is ready to hand, and the role
of repeated and habitual actions in shaping bodies and worlds.” Ahmed, “Orientations,” 544.
215 I cannot reference United Colors of Benneton without thinking of Patricia Williams and her storied of being

denied entry to a Benneton store. She had arrived “two Saturdays before Christmas, at one o’clock in the afternoon” to
shop, and a with teenaged boy denied her entry after she rang the buzzer at the entrance. Williams tells a story of her
attempts to work through the incident as a legal writer and Black woman: Rejection led to rage; rage led to writing;
writing led to disenfranchisement, misrepresentation, and disbelief from multiple non-Black audiences. The boutique,
who used images of multiculturism to sell clothes to the bourgeoise profited. William’s story is not the only reason I might
approach late 20th-century images of multicultural joy with predetermined irony, but she helped. Patricia J. Williams, “The
Death of the Profane: (A Commentary on the Genre of Legal Writing),” in The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Harvard
University Press, 1991).
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returning from an event. The second half, The Gangs All Here, tells us their closeness is

familiar. It feels easy to me to read the reportorial216 into the photograph: this is a group

that knows how to pose, how to pose together, how to perform joy for the camera, how to

magnify joy for their coperformers, how to nail a countercultural artsy aesthetic, all

without appearing to try too hard. As long as we don’t look too hard.

What happens when we begin to focus on the individual performers? As I scan, one

figure “rises from the scene.”217 He crouches a bit tighter, stretching in what cannot be a

comfortable pose to puzzle-piece himself into the stances of the rest of the party. His

eyes—the only ones covered with tinted lenses—seem to point away from the rest of the

party’s visual focus. His right hand squeezes a camera bulb, his left hand positioning the

long black cord away from the group.

But, of course, I can’t continue with a truly formalist narrative. My reading is already

overdetermined, because I know our sunglassed photographer to be Tseng Kwong Chi, and

I already know this is an image that situates him as a documentarian of the queer arts

216 I am more specifically using Diana Taylor’s notion of the repertoire as “acts of transfer.” By this I mean I
approach group intimacy as a set of shared behaviors and attitudes that members practice and perform in community.
Similar to analysis in my chapter with Ben Power, I imagine community belonging here as a negotiated and contingent
outcome of this group repertoire. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire.
217 Roland Barthes wrote about the “studium” as a quality of all photographs as kind of generalized, “average”

knowledge one would come to understand about a photograph’s meaning based on its use of social symbols and codes.
The “punctum,” conversely, is the part of some photographs that seems to “rise[] from the scene, shoot[] out like an
arrow, and pierce[].”In this writing, I’ve tried to capture my initial experience of looking at this picture; first seeing it as
very clearly as a portrait of community in revery, finding myself being struck by the awkwardness of Tseng Kwong Chi’s
pose, and then seeing much more in the photograph than I did on first glance. In this case, the punctum of Tseng led way
to further analysis about the entire crew, an analysis I may never have been drawn to do where it not for his awkward
pose. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, Reprint edition (New York: Hill
and Wang, 2010).
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scene of 1980s Greenwich Village New York City. 218 I stare at the camera shutter release

bulb and wonder what to make of Tseng’s act of authorial agency. The same gesture that

captures their togetherness seems to set him aside as someone other than his co-

performers. Has he orchestrated this scene? Is he one of them? The poses of the others, too,

begin to feel absurd as I press the photograph to tell its truth.219 Once a snapshot of

community in revel, the image begins to fall apart under my analytic pressure: does

anybody really belong here?

I spy Keith Haring’s head near the top left corner, and suspect I know other names.

My suspicion quickly takes on the edge of an ethical prescription. Because I recognize

Haring’s presence, I assume there are other people I should be remembering here. Because

many of the unfamiliar faces are women and people of color, I assume there are historical

reasons I don’t. And I have the nagging concern that being a performance scholar proper

218 In “How Not to See (Or, How Not to Not See) the Photographs of Tseng Kwong Chi,” Warren Liu askes “[W]hat

might it mean to look at the photos as if one knew nothing about Tseng Kwong Chi—to look solely at what the camera
authorizes (or forces) one to see?” Liu reflects on the fact that the viewer who knows more about Tseng Kwong Chi’s
oeuvre will see both more and less in this image than the formalist analysis I’ve briefly attempted here. Warren Liu, “How
Not to See (Or, How Not to Not See) the Photographs of Tseng Kwong Chi,” Amerasia Journal 40, no. 2 (January 1, 2014):
30, https://doi.org/10.17953/amer.40.2.90v225666718561l.In the context, the familiarity Tseng’s sunglasses and suit—
and his “Slutforart” name badge, which is only perceivable once you know it’s there—might lead us to different
conclusions about the kind of scene documented here, especially in terms of what Vivian Huang has called the
“inscrutability” of Tseng’s performance as a gay Asian subject who obscures his face and pulls his posture away from the
camera. Vivian L. Huang, Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2022).Yet, as I will continue to explore in this chapter, this image operates differently from many of the self-
portraits that Liu is discussing in “How Not to See” in the ways that has functioned as a self-evident document of
community without the same kinds of analysis applied to Tseng’s images in other series that depict him as a lone “Asian
man wearing a Mao suit, juxtaposed against a seemingly incongruous backdrop.” Liu, “How Not to See (Or, How Not to Not
See) the Photographs of Tseng Kwong Chi,” 25. Instead I argue that, even in the context of Asian American and queer
criticism that has already overdetermined its reading about Tseng’s work, images like The Gangs All Here have been
relatively unexamined precisely because they are used as evidence of belonging rather than analyzed as works of art.
219 Writing on this and other self-portraits of “Tseng and friends, or Tseng and other, ‘realer’ celebrities,” art

critic Joan Kee would read this awkwardness as evidence of falsity: “Tseng and his companions may be linked arm in arm
in a gesture of fellowship, but their smiles are too-perfect, as if contrived to complete the external ensemble.”
http://www.artnet.com/magazine_pre2000/reviews/kee/kee10-30-97.asp
 137

requires my ability to cite these names and appropriately locate them within artistic and

academic genealogies. As anyone who has witnessed the aggressive name-dropping of

theories and theorists in graduate seminars and conference presentations, these roll calls

frequently operate as disciplinary mechanisms.220

I’ve tried to sit long enough to find out what stories the photograph can offer, but

this nagging sense has already brought me elsewhere. I think about viewing Kwong Chi’s

photographs with his sister Muna Tseng in 2019, another moment when I felt like I should

be able to name these names but could not. In this chapter, I think about the

coperformativity221 of this and other responsibilities in my work with Muna Tseng. That is, I

ask how responsibility is felt and performed relationally: between ethnographer and

interlocuter, performer and audience, archivist and archive, and brother and sister. Today,

Muna is known both as a Bessie-award winning choreographer and as the executor of

Kwong Chi’s artistic estate following his death in 1990.222 Tseng Kwong Chi, while arguably

most well-known for documenting Keith Haring’s art, is increasingly recognized as

220 Here I am thinking of Michel Foucault’s conception of the emergence of academic disciplines alongside the

develop of other forms of disciplinary power. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences,
Reissue edition (New York NY: Vintage, 1994).
221 For more on co-performativity, see D. Soyini Madison, Dwight Conquergood, and E. Patrick Johnson on

performance, ethnography, and ethics. Madison, Critical Ethnography; Conquergood, Cultural Struggles. Johnson,
Appropriating Blackness.
222 Some of Muna’s major works include a trio of performances dedicated to remembering her family, including

SlutForArt on her brother (written and directed by Ping Chong, choreographed and performed by Muna Tseng, premiered
at 92nd St. New York in New York City on March6, 1999) , Stella on her mother (choreographed by Muna Tseng with
dramaturgy by Ong Keng Sen, premiered at Danspace Project NY in New York City on May 5, 2011), and IT’S All TRUE
GRANDFATHER on her grandfather (choreographed and directed by Muna Tseng, premiered at the Baryshnikov Arts
Center in NYC on March 27, 2017).
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significant gay Asian American artist and performer.223 Donning sunglasses and a thrift

store “Mao Suit” costume, Tseng photographed self-portraits of his life as an “ambiguous

ambassador,”224 infiltrating such sites as the Met Gala, Jerry Falwell’s moral majority, and

Ansel Adams fabricated landscapes of unsettled USAmerican western frontier.225

I first contacted Muna after a conversation with performance scholar Joshua

Chambers-Letson. He had warmly described his own visits to Muna’s apartment to visit her

brother’s artistic estate, part of his research on the siblings and their cadre of other artist

‘misfits who didn’t belong’”226 in 1980s Manhattan. While I understood the siblings as

important figures in contemporary discussions of women and queer of color performance, I

was mostly drawn to an intimate story of loss and memory. From her apartment, Muna

remembers and memorializes her brother; her archival performances draw from intimate

melancholic loss to produce public tributes to minoritarian life. She describes her archival

and performance work as fulfilling a responsibility to both her brother and her audience

rather than broader minoritarian communities. What I would eventually discover is that

Muna’s performances are particularly compelling for my investigation of minoritarian

performance in her ambivalence about the contemporary identity politics that frequently

223 Amy Brandt, curator for the 2016 exhibit “Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera,” is a rich source of

information about contemporary interest in Tseng Kwong Chi. Amy L. Brandt, “Tseng Kwong Chi and the Politics of
Performance,” in Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera (Norfolk, Virginia: Chrysler Museum of Art, 2015).
224 East Meets West: Tseng Kwong Chi, 1984, https://vimeo.com/58113614.
225 Here I am referring to Chambers Letson’s analysis of Tseng’s performances of Asian identity that allowed him
to infiltrate sites like the Met Gala and a meeting of the so-called “moral majority,” as well as Iyko Day’s arguments about
Tseng Kwong Chi’s landscape portraits following the work of artists like Ansel Adams who depicted the North American
west as an empty land ripe for colonization. Joshua Chambers-Letson, “On Infiltration,” in Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for
the Camera (Norfolk, Virginia: Chrysler Museum of Art, 2015). Iyko Day, “Tseng Kwong Chi and the Eugenic Landscape,”
American Quarterly 65, no. 1 (2013): 91–118.
226 Joshua Chambers Letson, personal interview with Muna Tseng, October 26, 2016.
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frame her brother’s legacy. I’ve begun this chapter speculating about the Gang’s All Here as

a portrait of precarious queer belonging. As I’ll continue to explore, this image serves as

documentation of a particular mode of communal living because of the forms of

minoritarian mourning it enables in the present.

Figure 12. The siblings in Hong Kong, 1956. (photograph, photographer unknown, by courtesy of Muna Tseng
Dance Projects)227

Minoritarian critics, I argue, use images like The Gangs All Here to index overlapping

multiple forms of social belonging that shape the contours of violence, creation, and

227 As published in “The Short But Extraordinary Life of Artist Tseng Kwong Chi. ”Oliver Giles, “The Short But

Extraordinary Life of Artist Tseng Kwong-Chi,” Zolima City Magazine, July 20, 2022, https://zolimacitymag.com/the-
short-but-extraordinary-life-of-artist-tseng-kwong-chi/.
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resistance that is minoritarian life. Muna isn’t in this image—perhaps she was stuck at

rehearsal or still recovering from the previous night’s party228—but she has been central in

shaping the way we see it today. I tell this story in the pages that follow. I continue my

reading of The Gangs All Here, tracing how Tseng Kwong Chi’s papers become archival

through Muna’s performance. This tale of archivization arguably begins with Muna’s

collaborations with multi-media theatre maker Ping Chong: 98.6: A Convergence in 15

minutes and SlutForArt, two performances that provoked Muna to revisit her brother’s

archive in the spirit of inquiry sharpened by loss. I use these works to help understand

Muna’s relationship to archival and familiar memory in her twined roles as archivist,

performer, and sister. In this section, I develop the concepts of emotional and archival

processing to describe the ways that Muna simultaneously mourns her brother while

performing his public legacy. I close by reflecting on archival responsibility, sharing how

Muna conceives of her responsibility to her brother’s archive as a collaboration with her

audience and other cultural critics. I then examine my own role in this collaborative

meaning-making process as a performance ethnographer. My work with Muna thus

continues a throughline I’ve developed across this dissertation as I’ve navigated such

feelings as suspicion, anxiety, indebtedness, reverence, and intimacy as I’ve reported on my

228 In an interview with Widewalls Magazine, Muna talked both about how the siblings’ lives converged in New

York City and how their social worlds expanded in their creative work. Muna’s dance practice often kept her in the studio
while her brother was out producing photographs of a different social scene: “Because I was a principal dancer at Theatre
of the Open Eye, as well as performing in my own dance works, I did not partake in the late night clubbing that Kwong Chi
became immersed in.” Elena Martinique, “Muna Tseng On the Prolific Practice of Her Late Brother Tseng Kwong Chi,”
Widewalls, accessed June 6, 2023, https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/muna-tseng-interview.
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interlocuter’s stories of longing, loss, and creation.

The Party

Figure 13. Before our first interview, Muna bookmarked several pictures. Here, she flips through a book on
Keith Haring to show me Art After Midnight (photograph by Tseng Kwong Chi, 1985) soon after my arrival,
another portrait of Tseng Kwong Chi and his friends in the 1980s Manhattan art scene. (digital photograph by
author, August 20, 2019, West Village, New York City)

I arrived for my interview with Muna much too early, anxiously pacing up and down

Greenwich Village’s Christopher St. until it seemed appropriate to ring the land line to her

loft. Muna quickly retrieved me, inviting me to ride the freight elevator to her floor. She had

prepared for my visit by covering a table with images of Tseng’s pictures of his

contemporaries, many who I did not recognize at the time on sight: Bill Robinson, Ann

Magnuson, Kenny Scharf, and others. I viewed her preparations as acts of care: she

anticipated my reasons for visiting as a researcher and had taken time to stage our

conversation. I, in contrast, had prepared by watching her filmed performances and

reading any interview I could find where she discussed her archival work. In my anxious

state, I took this mismatch as evidence that I had already failed to respect her labor. That I
 142

didn’t meet Muna’s expectations of what I came to her home to research magnified my

responsibility for knowing Tseng and his friends. I searched for their names on my phone

on the subway after my visit, never quite being sure about the boundaries between my

ethical commitment to the worldmaking powers of minoritarian performance and what felt

like a more shameful personal desire to belong in Muna’s orbit and my home discipline. In

turn, I would repeat the roll call when I explained my work to folks unfamiliar with Muna

and her brother by situating them in relation to names they might know better. Together,

we participate in a durational process of building community by reiterating its boundaries.

With each citation of names, artistic canons are built, historical narratives are authorized,

and the borders of in-groups are reinforced. Those in the know are granted provisional

belonging.

The Gang’s All Here is one of several of Tseng Kwong Chi’s group portraits that

capture scenes of belonging and joy, and they frequently serve similar functions across

contemporary media about Tseng.229 Across diverse media, the presence of specific notable

people in the image signals the historicity of the gatherings they document. These images

229 For example, the Julia Saul Gallery used it as the central image for their second solo exhibition on Tseng
Kwong Chi’s work in 1997, Tseng Kwong Chi: The Gang’s All Here: New York in the Eighties. A press release for the event
promised “[t]hree large group portraits of assembled artists, including [Keith Haring], Ann Magnuson, McDermott and
McGough, John Sex, and others are described by Richard Martin as "one day ranking with Fantin-Latour and Manet's
gatherings of the Impressionist circle." In performance scholar Joshua Chambers-Letson chapter on the Tseng Kwong Chi,
The Gang’s All Here serves as an establishing shot for Tseng’s social life in the downtown New York City arts scene. And in
a 2019 New Yorker “Photo Booth” feature,229 essayist Brian Dillon publishes The Gang’s All Here alongside Paris/New
York.229 Here they serve as a kind of social backdrop for Dillon’s political and historical analysis of other image series.
Julie Saul Art Gallery, “Program for ‘Tseng Kwong Chi: The Gang’s All Here: New York in the Eighties,’” 1997; Chambers-
Letson, After the Party; Brian Dillon, “Tseng Kwong Chi, an “Ambiguous Ambassador’ to Life in America | The New
Yorker,” The New Yorker, June 23, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/tseng-kwong-chi-an-
ambiguous-ambassador-to-life-in-america.
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are rarely accompanied with a caption naming each of its subjects. Much like my account in

my chapter on Ben Power, I would need to search for hours to locate the longer title of The

Gang’s All Here and get a full roster of names.230 I would argue this is precisely because of

the way the images circulate as almost self-evident documentation of a sparking form of

communion that becomes historically notable precisely because of the conditions under

which it falls apart.

Authorized by a few faces that certain audiences will quickly recognize, these

photographs document a party of friends whose co-presence that matters more than the

attendance of one or two dazzling guests. Josh Chambers-Letson uses “party” in its

simultaneity: a joyous social gathering and a site of minoritarian performance, a resistant

political configuration and an instance of actually existing socialism,231 an enclave for what

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call “planning,”232 and what Jennifer C. Nash calls “a place

of remaking mourning into something capacious enough [for] both grief and dance.”233 It is

230 Left to right, top to bottom: Katy K, Keith Haring, Carmel Johnson, John Sex, Bruno Schmidt, Samantha

McEwen, Juan Dubose, Dan Friedman, Kenny Scharf, Tereza Goncalves, Min Thomez, and Tseng Kwong Chi. This caption
appears in The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974.-1984, near a discussion of the affective and political
qualities that differentiated downtown artists from the “traditional Uptown art scene.” Marvin J. Taylor, ed., The
Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984 (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2005), 22.
231 The term “actually existing socialism” was used by Eastern Bloc governments to describe the Soviet Union as

a pragmatically accomplished form of socialism in comparison to more theoretical Marxist ideals. Irwin Silber has written
how the idea of “actually existing socialism” developed from a Soviet defense of communism into a political dismissal of
the possibility of socialism’s success. Irwin Silber, Socialism: What Went Wrong, 1st edition (London ; Boulder, Colo: Pluto
Press, 1994), 111. For Chambers-Letson and his interlocutors, the realm of aesthetic minoritarian performance offers
glimpses into a possibility for communism that is not completely forestalled by the violences of the Soviet Union: “This
kind of communism might take its cues not so much from the failed political parties of historical communism, as from the
parties the SNCC activists threw while listening to Simone’s records or the performance rich-parties of queer of color
night life. Not because these spaces were perfect—they were and are replete with their own violences—but because they
were trying to produce something else, something we don't have a vision of. Yet.” Chambers-Letson, After the Party, 8. My
use of “actually existing socialism” refers to the contingent, ephemeral, and not-yet realized utopian energy of
minoritarian performance described by José Muñoz. Munoz, Cruising Utopia.
232 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons.

233 I thank Jennifer Nash for these words, which she offered on an earlier draft of this chapter. Jennifer C. Nash,

“Personal Email with Author,” September 22, 2022.

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necessarily spatially, temporally, and affectively divided from other forms of durational

everyday life, some impossible “nonetheless” that must, therefore, come to an end. In the

face of anti-minoritarian violence, Tseng and his friends achieved belonging alongside each

other. That this party of famous people occurred, that we can witness a certain kind of joy

in the frame, that a document was produced of the event by a gay Asian American, and that

many of these people would be dead within the decade all matter. Such archival documents

thus offer a narrative of the precarity of minoritarian life and the contingency of

minoritarian life. In the specific case of Tseng, this narrative tethers contemporary

recognition of his artistry to a critique of the art world that took too long to notice him.

Because of the systematic devaluation of minoritarian life—the image seems to allow

historians to say—this becomes a portrait of almost inevitable loss. Because we failed to

recognize minoritarian artistry, we failed to see Tseng. And so, this document of this party

would eventually be used to place Tseng in the service of multiple narratives at the

intersections of queer and Asian American art history and performance studies, narratives

that hinge on understanding him and his friends as minoritarian subjects.

As an archival scholar, I encounter this image 32 years after Tseng’s death related to

AIDS. Encountering the image, we rehearse the facts that Tseng was there, amidst familiar

names and faces, that something ephemeral and ineffable but close to joy was experienced,

and that the lives in this frame are worth remembering. As an archival object, it performs

an act of time travel: cultural workers including archivists labor to preserve a particular

version of the past in the hope that the voices of the dead will continue to resonate. With

hindsight sharpened by mourning and the rehearsal of public memory, Tseng Kwong Chi’s

documentation thus becomes prescient in the face of the destruction that will soon follow.
 145

As Tseng’s friend and artistic contemporary Ann Magnuson—and the image’s femme

subject with the ruffles and big hair—wrote: “I thought our particular brand of joe de vivre

would continue undeterred well into the next century. Countless obituaries later, I realized

those moments were all too fleeting. But the proof is in the proofs.”234 Yet, what does the

image prove? And how does this image, as a singular object, take on this kind of archival

weight? In other words, what demands and desires give a photograph the burden of

serving a historical narrative?

Like all of Tseng’s images since his death, Puck Ball (The Gang’s All Here) appears in

academic manuscripts, newspapers, and exhibitions “by courtesy of Muna Tseng Dance

Projects.” Muna, absent from this image, assumed responsibility of Tseng Kwong Chi’s

artistic estate at his death in 1990. For a while, the boxes languished in storage as Muna

simultaneously pursued her own flourishing dance career and avoided the intensity she

knew would await her when she dove into Tseng’s work. As I’ll discuss with more detail,

Muna first began working with gallerists in the early 90s, but it was not until the mid-90s

that Muna began a more comprehensive review of Tseng’s legacy prompted by a series of

performance collaborations with director Ping Chong. Muna helped curate two major

exhibits of Tseng’s photographs at the Julie Saul Gallery, beginning with East Meets West:

The Expedition Series in 1996. In 1997, Muna curated Tseng Kwong Chi: The Gang’s All Here:

New York in the Eighties. Tseng’s images of his friends, colleagues, and lovers were offered

as archival evidence of an art scene decimated by AIDs, Reaganism, the Culture Wars, and

234 Julie Saul Art Gallery, “Program for ‘Tseng Kwong Chi: The Gang’s All Here: New York in the Eighties.’”
 146

Giuliani’s subsequent wars against people of color, the poor, queers, and evidence of the

worlds they fought to make for themselves. Anne Magnuson’s words about “joie de vivre”

and loss appeared on this show’s brochure.

Figure 14. Muna maintains a wall of books featuring Tseng Kwong Chi photographs. The wall obscures her
bed from the view of archive visitors. “One day” she tells me with a grin, “my nightmare is that I’m going to
get crushed by books.”235 (digital photographs by author, August 20, 2019, West Village, New York City)

As creative director for Tseng’s estate, Muna has now housed Tseng’s archives in her

East Village apartment for more than thirty years after making an initial promise to her

brother. She laughed as she shared his expectations for her labor with me: “He, you know,

said ‘Take care of my work,’ and, um, ‘Make me famous! Take care of my legacy.’”236 Muna

is, of course, not singularly responsible for Tseng’s legacy, and it would be futile to offer a

comprehensive history of exactly how an artist is collectively remembered across time.

Honoring her archival labor, however, requires recognition of that fact that Muna has

235 Tseng, interview by author, New York City, New York.

236 Tseng.
 147

personally authorized nearly every citation of Tseng Kwong Chi’s work since his death,

including many widely circulated and frequently reproduced images of the art and

performances of artists who are more instantly recognizable to mainstream audiences:

Keith Haring, Bill T. Robinson, Basquiat, etc. Some of the most famous images of Keith

Haring’s subway artwork, for instance, are only available to us because Tseng Kwong Chi

followed his friend’s path by train an hour later, documenting the guerilla work before the

street cleaners covered it over with new paint.237

When researchers, museums, artists, and journalists hope to reproduce and/or

purchase these images, they first contact Muna, paying subvention rights to the legal entity

Muna Tseng Dance Projects. Like each of my interlocutors in this dissertation, her financial

life is intertwined with the archive that she curates, protects, and publicizes. While I’ve

offered “precarity” as one framework that differentiates minoritarian archives from the

material and ideological conditions of institutionality, this does not mean I read risk into

the present material state of Muna’s life or Tseng Kwong Chi’s archive. I met Muna long

after the years where a ragtag gang of queers and weirdos and “suburban refugees”238

made a world for themselves in Manhattan. Muna has achieved wide recognition and

regular work as a performer and is able to live with relative financial comfort in a loft in the

center of New York City’s Greenwich Village. And history does care—at least for now—

237 Muna would talk about how Kwong Chi would perform Chinese stereotypes in order to dodge the police

during these trips: “Whenever Kwong Chi would get stopped, he would go into his Asian tourist persona, and look like he
didn’t understand what was going on and say "Ah, subway very interesting," which would usually get him off the hook.”
Martinique, “Muna Tseng On the Prolific Practice of Her Late Brother Tseng Kwong Chi.”interview Vivian Huong might call
this a performance of queer and Asian inscrutability. Huang, Surface Relations.
238Ann Magnuson, “Club 57,” Artforum International, 1999, https://www.artforum.com/print/199908/club-57-

840.
 148

about the art she and her brother made and make. By the time I arrived for our interview,

she could point me to any number of writings and exhibits and performances that

documented the many legacies of her brother. Amongst the boxes that filled her loft were

the beginnings of her own archive; she was actively curating the “Muna Tseng Dance

Projects” collection for the Jerome Roberts Dance Division of the New York Public Library

for the Performing Arts, “the world’s largest dance archive and library.”239 By including

Muna in my study of minoritarian performers under the name of “precarity,” however, I

emphasized the contingency of these legacies. No institution cared for the Kwong Chi—or

any of his friends—as the politicians and the developers waged was against those with HIV

and AIDs. Even as he watched the art world offer “conditional hospitality”240 to some of his

more famous friends, he was not one of the names most people knew. It was up to Muna to

make his legacy, and it required her to reorient her living conditions and her professional

future, using skills she did not yet know she had.

Likewise, while I choose to narrate Muna as a minoritarian subject, this is not

precisely the way she labels herself. Muna does not claim that she protects her brother’s

archive in the interest of a community of queer Asian Americans; nor does she frequently

adopt the mantles of feminist or Asian American when describing her own artistic

endeavors. Both Muna and her brother have rejected the label of “Asian artist” at times,

demanding recognition of their work as artists first rather than embracing their social

239 “Jerome Robbins Dance Division” (New York Public Library), accessed June 6, 2023,

https://www.nypl.org/locations/lpa/jerome-robbins-dance-division.
240 Here I am returning to Derrida’s concept of “conditional hospitality” I discussed in Chapter 1. Derrida, “The

Principle of Hospitality.”
 149

interpolation. “He was dealing with identity politics,” said Muna in an interview with arts

reporter Oliver Giles. “Even though he did not ever say ‘I’m a Chinese artist’ or ‘I’m a

Chinese-American artist’ or ‘I’m a Chinese-Canadian artist.’ He just said, ‘I’m an artist.’ He

did not want to be ghettoised.”241 Yet my engagements with Muna’s archival and aesthetic

work suggest to me that her relationship with identity politics is, of course, more

complicated than outright refusal. Feminist researcher Michelle Fine once warned feminist

ethnographers against engaging in a “sophisticated form of ventriloquy” whereby even the

most contradictory appearing statements of their interlocutors still serve to authorize the

researchers pre-existing understanding of the world. 242 My point her is that I recognize

that Muna simply might not completely agree with my decision to position the siblings

alongside other minoritarian cultural workers. I understand my responsibility as naming

the complexities of identity as it is personally felt, publicly performed, and textually

theorized across time, but also to recognize plainly that it is not my ethical work to fully

resolve apparent contradictions within these complexities. I’ll continue to explore my own

felt responsibility in the conclusion of this chapter as I think of my work alongside Muna’s

sense of responsibility to her family and to her art.

Kwong Chi found sexual and romantic intimacy amidst the racism of Manhattan gay

culture and making art from the East Village of NYC while many of his friends were

241 Giles, “The Short But Extraordinary Life of Artist Tseng Kwong-Chi.”
242Michelle Fine, “Dis-Stance and Other Stances: Negotiations of Power Inside Feminist Research,” in Power and
Method: Political Activism and Educational Research, ed. Andrew Gitlin (Routledge & CRC Press, 1994), 13–35,
https://www.routledge.com/Power-and-Method-Political-Activism-and-Educational-
Research/Gitlin/p/book/9780415906906.
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achieving recognition from the lucrative and exclusionary art world.243 Muna honors

Kwong Chi’s own fraught relationship to cultural identity as a young, gay Asian man, born

as the oldest son in Hong Kong to a wealthy family, exiled to Canada during the Cultural

Revolution, educated in the British, and artistically trained in Paris.244 In resisting the label

of Asian artist, Muna resists the expectations that her work is wholly a reflection of the way

the world would sort her and her brother as Asian subjects, viewing their art as plainly

representative of their ethnicity. Muna labors to be faithful to Tseng’s frequent insistence

that he be recognized as an artist on aesthetic terms, even we read such work as his East

Meets West Series as insurgent plays with identity politics. In protecting Tseng’s identity,

Muna thus navigated one of many risks of archival time travel: In our efforts to allow the

dead to speak on their own terms without the taint of presentism, we can easily arrest their

own perspectives to the “then and there” of a static past.245 We and Muna cannot ever know

how Tseng would name himself if given the opportunity to continue to live and create.

243 In a taped interview with choreographer Bill T. Jones excerpted in SlutForArt, Chong and Jones speculate

about the ways that Tseng’s performance of blank Chineseness might have emerged as a response to his frustration with
not being able to claim the same “entitlement” as his white peers, despite his affluent background and pedigreed training.
In Jones’s words, “What was it that he still didn't have from the culture at large? And it's that inclusion, that's what the
question was—why is that fucking inclusion so important to us? Because it represents power, but I'm saying you have
power! You have economic power. Intellectual power! What power don't you have? And you're saying there is, there is,
there is this entitlement, this I think we can feel, but he was trying to express it, I think by this retreat, if you will, of maybe
this appropriation of this official other, this stranger, a stranger… He can’t be hurt, he needs nothing, he is completely self-
contained, he is just moving through. I am just a tourist here, right?” Muna Tseng and Ping Chong, “SlutForArt,” PAJ: A
Journal of Performance and Art 22, no. 1 (2000): 111–28, https://doi.org/10.2307/3245920.
244 Martinique, “Muna Tseng On the Prolific Practice of Her Late Brother Tseng Kwong Chi.”

245 Black Feminist theory has richly theorized the risks and desires of speaking for the dead, especially in the

context of the colonial archive. As I wrote in the introduction to this dissertation, Saidiya Hartman finds herself at a
narrative impasse while writing Lose Your Mother when she encounters Venus, named only in the archive as one of two
murdered girls in a case against a slave ship captain. Hartman, Lose Your Mother. She reminds us in “Venus in Two Acts”
that “[t]here is not one extant autobiographical narrative of a female captive who survived the Middle Passage.” Hartman,
“Venus in Two Acts,” 2008. She longs to give Venus life and voice in her writing, but she understands each story is a
reiteration of the same “scene of subjection” that consigns her to annihilation. Many others have written on this dilemma,
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SlutForArt, or Archival-Emotional Processing

When she made a promise to protect her brother’s legacy, however, Muna wasn’t

committing only to holding her memory of him intact. Instead, she would need to learn to

see him in a wider context, understanding not only the impact he made during his life but

the potential for his work to reach new audiences. Sparked by two collaborative

performances with director Ping Chong, Muna would eventually explore many of these

complexities of her brother’s identity. This collaboration first took shape with a much less

specific impulse. In the interest of creating new work, Muna approached Chong, a bisexual

Chinese American theatre maker celebrated for his investigations of cultural identity and

interdisciplinary theater works. From 98.6, we learn that Muna first proposed the idea of a

“solo piece exactly fifteen minutes long, quinze minutes exactement.”246 The resulting

performance was 98.6: A Convergence in 15 Minutes (PS 122, New York, NY, April 1996), a

duet between Chong’s prerecorded narrations and Muna’s live dance. In their preparation

for 98.6, the pair offered stories of Chong and Muna’s family and reflections about each of

their relationships to loss, identity, and art. Scripted by Chong and choreographed and

performed by Muna, the piece reperformed their own process of coming to know each

other. In this section, I’ll explore how 98.6 prompted Muna to return to her brother’s

offering new strategies for thinking and writing in the face of archival absence and violence. For example, in Zong, M.
NourbeSe Philip alongside Setaey Adamu Boateng, offers poetry as a form of “not telling” the story of trans-Atlantic
slavery. In 1781, to collect insurance money, the owner of the ship threw 150 people into the sea. Philip restricted herself
to only the words of the court case, the only written archive of these people’s lives. M. NourbeSe Philip and Setaey Adamu
Boateng, Zong! (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2011). Christina Sharpe would repeat “defend the
dead,” a line from one of Philip’s poems, as she conceived of wake work, which I discuss in more detail in my chapter on
Debbie Britt. Sharpe, In the Wake.
246 98.6: A Convergence, Performance, 2002, https://vimeo.com/175614070.
 152

archival objects with new creative energy. In this collaborative process, the pair would

produce one of Muna’s most well-known pieces, SlutForArt.

98.6 begins in near darkness. Two lines projected on the back of a dark stage double

Chong’s narration: “The things they share. A full mystery of an Other.” In what follows, they

will offer stories of their entwinements and divergences as Chinese American immigrants

and artists. Halfway through the performance, Chong’s digitized voice narrates a story of

their collaboration. Muna begins to dialogue with Chong’s narration.

Chong: What if our interaction as two artists—

Muna: and two people who barely know each—
Chong: is splayed open like a cadaver on a morgue table?
Muna: Like the messiness and chaos that making art really is?
Chong: Like the exercise in humility that making art really is?

98.6 emergences from a mystery, but in the interest of making something new rather than

in the demand for resolution. The pair’s metacommentary thus dramatizes the productive

potential of performance as a mode of inquiry.247 Their performance poses an implicit

question: What will happen if we make something by dwelling in the excitement and risk of

this unfamiliarity? As in many of his works, Chong uses the concept of otherness in 98.6 to

create amidst the limitations of any subject to know another human being. This limit

persists—is perhaps even widened—even when those subjects ostensibly share many of

the same burdens and joys of culture and history. Chong and Muna name many of these

“convergences,” moving from multiple scales of identity and experience. They share traits

that are once universal (“Eyes, ears, nose, mouth. The ability to breathe. Breath. You know,

247 Performance as “inquiry” is one of the main interventions of the field of performance studies according to

Dwight Conquergood. Conquergood, “Performance Studies.”

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the givens.”) and culturally specific (a vexed relationship with mainland China, a familiarity

with dry salted fish, an absent brother). Simultaneously, by framing the “Other” as a

mystery, Chong draws on a long history of critics who have interrogated otherness in terms

of the production of race and ethnicity. He recognizes that the pair will always be cultural

others in the Orientalizing gaze of the North American whiteness.

Chong once described this otherness in terms of his own ability to see and document

the world:

As an artist, I'm an outsider in American society. As an experimental artist,

I'm an outsider within the art world. As a person of color, I'm an outsider; as
an immigrant, I'm an outsider; as a bisexual man, I'm an outsider. It's the
position that fate has allotted me, but it's a valuable position to be in, because
I think every society should have a mirror held to it by the outsider.248

Multiple overlapping experiences of being “othered” have attuned Chong’s ability to

describe the logics of otherness. By otherness, he means there is the unknowability of any

single person to another, and the way this chasm can seem to paradoxically widen in the

face of intimacy. Too, there is obliqueness of the minoritarian subject to majoritarian

society, and the way that hones that person’s ability to know the terms of that world, often

as a precondition for their survival. And, in the space of minoritarian performance, shared

experiences of otherness become the grounds for creation beyond mere survival.

As Muna shared her life with Chong and their audiences, it sharpened her own

interest in knowing her brother. If 98.6 was born in the productive energy of a new

248 Chong originally wrote this in the introduction to The East/West Quartet, a collection of four of his theatre

works. While his original writing identified him as “gay,” he now identifies as bisexual. Ping Chong, The East/West
Quartet, Illustrated edition (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2004). Bruce Allardice, “Personal Email with
Author,” August 25, 2022.
 154

relationship; SlutForArt was produced in response to the lingering mystery of Tseng. When

Muna first contacted Chong in the interest of creating the solo piece that became 98.6, she

had not yet begun opening her brother’s boxes. Muna began conceiving of SlutForArt as she

prepared for those two exhibits at the Julia Saul Gallery: 1996’s East Meets West: The

Expedition Series” and 1997’s Tseng Kwong Chi: The Gang’s All Here: New York in the

Eighties, nearly six years after Tseng’s death and a year after 98.6’s debut. Acting as her

brother’s official archivist, this exhibit was her first sustained effort to fulfill her promise to

him. She quickly learned that this form of archivization, however, was not sufficient for

making personal meaning of her loss. Before 98.6, Muna remembered Tseng primarily as

her troublemaking, fun-loving, erudite, and often irritatingly spoiled older brother—the

subject of both her adoration and her jealousy. Though her artistic collaboration with

Chong, however, Muna had begun to see what she called her brother’s “family baggage” and

the “cultural” in wider political context.249 In 98.6 Chong recognized Tseng as a fellow

outsider: a racial, ethnic, and sexual “other.” He shared many of Tseng’s experiences as the

eldest Chinese son, an immigrant from Canada, and a bisexual artist of color in the NYC arts

scene. If 98.6 asked “What will we create to know each other?, SlutForArt echoed, “And how

will we remember Kwong Chi when his absence looms so large?” An inquiry, sparked by

the strangeness of a friendship in the process of becoming, led a pair to create. That

creation in turn called for more performance.250

249 Tseng, interview by author, New York City, New York.

250 Tseng.
 155

Their first public performance of SlutForArt debuted in 1999 at NYC’s 92 Second

Street Y during its Harkness Dance festival, winning a Bessie award for Chong’s script and

Muna’s choreography. Muna danced and Chong narrated over a projection of Tseng’s

photographs of travel now known as the East Meets West series. Muna built a soundtrack of

Tseng’s favorite records pulled directly from his archive: Earth Kitt’s rendition of “C’est Si

Bon,” Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, and their father’s mambo collection. They interviewed

seven people who knew Tseng well,251 interspersing the performance with audio clips and

projected quotes from these recorded conversations.

Muna reperformed 98:6 before SlutForArt’s debut. SlutForArt begins with the same

two lines projected on the back of a dark stage, with the name narration from Chong: “The

things they share. A full mystery of an Other.” In scripting SlutForArt, Chong repurposed

many lines, yet removed his own self- narrative to focus more directly on the Tsengs sister

and brother. In both, Chong’s narration repeats the universal givens of all bodies: their

features and their potential for action. Muna enters the stage as Chong offers the same

description of her body in specific, its capacity for movement, and the way their audience

might view both:

She's 5'l/2" tall, dark eyes, short hair.

What one would describe as petite.
Seeming to need protection,
Seeming to not.
Seeming to be assured
And seeming to not.
Hesitating and seeming to not.

251 Interviewees included performer Anne Magnuson, Metropolitan Museum of Art fashion curator Richard

Martin, artist Kenny Scharf, life companion Kristoffer Haynes, choreographer Bill T. Jones, photographer Timothy
Greenfield-Sanders, cousin Jenny Yee, and Muna herself. “SlutForArt,” https://vimeo.com/175614070.
 156

Not to be that is.

One thing's for sure: she moves with a buttery grace.

In both pieces, Muna embodies Chong’s description as he narrates: she is small against the

expansive darkness of the floor and occasional brightness of the projector screen behind

her, which offers small pieces of the script in stark white. She first walks slowly to her

mark, then holds her legs steady while moving her arms smoothly up and away from her

waist. Only her face and the tops of her hands are visible in the focused spotlight, her body

partially backlit by the projected words. This moment originally heralded Chong’s own self-

description in 98.6 as Muna moves her body with slightly wider gestures. In SlutForArt,

with a quick, weighty breath and a swing of her arms, Muna speaks.

She stands still, embodying the same vulnerable strength that Chong has just

described. In live dialogue with Chong’s recording, she remembers:

Chong: The things they share.

Muna: An alliance at the altar of Art
Chong: The full mystery of an Other.
Muna: He was my idol. He was my guru.
He was impossible, but I loved him.
He was my brother.
Chong: The things they share.
Muna: The solace in Art as a refuge from pain.
Chong: The full mystery of an Other.

Watching these pieces together allows me to see performance and inquiry in a dialogic

relationship. The “mystery of an Other” compelled Muna and Chong’s original

collaboration, leading them to creation built on the serendipity of mutual recognition. If

98.6 was an exploration without a distinct point of inquiry, SlutForArt was born from a

sharper longing. Chong’s own story recedes in SlutForArt while his hand remains. His

multifaceted analysis of otherness would continue to shape the way Muna performers her

relationship to her brother. Here the mystery of the other shifts from the possibility
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imbued in an encounter with the stranger to the incomprehensibility of mourning and the

impossibility of articulating what has been lost.

In Muna’s mourning, Tseng was—remains—both brilliant and inaccessible. He lives

in the stories she shares and recedes when she attempts to touch him, both the resonating

work he left behind and the plans he would never live to fulfill. For Muna as archivist and

sister, “processing” her brother’s papers has always been a doubled act, a simultaneous

means of making sense of her personal loss and creating an archives for Tseng’s legacy.

“Archival processing” is a frequently used term by archivists that typically refers to the acts

through which “raw” materials become legible as an archive.252 Muna describes archival

processing as relatively pragmatic acts of sorting, scanning, and labeling, differentiating

this work from her more exploratory and creative labor as a performer.253 Contrasting her

archival labor from her creative work in this way, Muna downplays her active role in

building Tseng’s legacy. Yet with each label, folder, and archival-quality box, Muna began to

periodize her brother’s artistic production and situate him and his friends as co-

conspirators in an aesthetic and political scene. Through these initial acts of sorting her

brother’s papers in the interest of creating a public exhibition, at a particular juncture of

the AIDs crisis, Muna’s work for the 1996 and 1997 exhibitions would help to further

252 Professional archivists describe processing as a timeline that begins when the objects are first acquired and

continues through acts of curations and care. According to the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, “[a]rchival
processing is defined as the activities of accessioning, arranging, describing, and properly storing archival materials
according to established national standards and best practices.” Barbara Aikens, “Processing Guidelines: Chapter 1,
Processing Workflow at the Archives of American Art,” Text, July 23, 2015,
https://www.aaa.si.edu/documentation/processing-guidelines-chapter-1-processing-workflow-at-the-archives-of-
american-art.
253 Tseng, interview by author, New York City, New York.
 158

Tseng’s reputation as an Asian American portrait photographer and a documentarian of the

1980s art world, situating him among other gay artists who were lost to AIDs and the

darlings of the art world. As I’ve discussed, this framing has continued to resonate in

contemporary discussion of Tseng’s legacy. In the present, we know that this story

authorizes Tseng as a significant cultural figure and minoritarian subject who deserves

recognition, yet often in a way that Muna now fears has reduced his art to identitarian and

documentarian functions.

But the Muna who first endeavored to move through Kwong Chi’s had a much less

settled understanding of how we all would remember Tseng Kwong Chi. Her brother’s

archives waited for her impatiently, a palpable material presence that demanded care and

attention.254 Did Kwong Chi know the weight of an archival box when he sat in the hospital

and asked his sister to make his legacy? In long avoiding the archival processing of Kwong

Chi’s things, Muna had also delayed what psychologist Stanley Rachman first named

“emotional processing,255” Within psychotherapeutic contexts, emotional processing has

often been described as a process of bringing conscious narrative to irreconcilable loss as a

254 In my introduction I argues that foundation theories of “the Archive” in the humanities are written from the

perspective of researchers encountering processed collections in major research institutions. The field of performance
studies is replete with stories of artists “activating the archive,” bringing life and meaning to the passivity and inertness of
arcane and dusty manuscripts. My understanding of minoritarian archival performance assumes a more coconstitutive
relationship between archive and performer based on the intimacy between minoritarian archivists and the materials
they collect. These archivists use archives, yes, but the archives are also palpable forces in their lives, shaping their spaces,
burdening them with their requirements for care, clarifying their purpose, amplifying their responsibility.
255 S.J. Rachman, “Emotional Processing,” Behaviour Research and Therapy 18, no. 1 (January 1, 1980): 51–60,

https://doi.org/10.1016/0005-7967(80)90069-8.
 159

“healthy” part of recovering from its affective intensity.256 Muna’s dual roles as a sister and

dancer, however, offered a less narrativistic and more embodied means of revisiting

memory and trauma. Her brother things demanded that she do more than sort files. “I

would go crazy if we were just doing scanning and preserving and whatnot without doing

something with it.” Muna mourned through acts of public creation in co-presence with

Chong and their audience rather than resolving her pain in private and individual acts of

“coming to terms” with her loss.257

In these public performances, she enlisted a wider audience of witnesses and

cultural critics to make meaning of Tseng’s life and death. Muna believes the performer’s

job is to make something beautiful of the archive by investigating its emotional excess, but

it is not necessarily the work of the performer to explicitly resolve this investigation. The

performer must also be able to recognize their responsibility to the audience is to not lose

themselves to this emotion. I’ve long heard Muna repeat phrases like “separate

emotionality from the facts” in other interviews and lectures as she discussed her archival

labor. But I was surprised to discover in my conversations about the ways she endeavors to

do this in her performance work, even in performances grounded in her own pain. For

256 Critics in and outside of psychology have rightly critiqued the racial and class normativities for this model of

trauma, including David Eng and Shinee Han and their work with Asian American racial melancholia and racial
disassociation. David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of
Asian Americans (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). We might view Christina Sharpe’s work in In the Wake,
likewise, as a way of describing the work of living amidst constant loss, loss that white supremacy renders mundane
rather than aberrant. Sharpe, In the Wake.
257 Western ideas of normative mourning processes share a common ancestor in Sigmund Freud theories of

mourning and melancholia, where he makes the distinction between a “successful” mourner and the interminably
melancholic subject who fails to let go of the lost object and “recathect” to a new one. Sigmund Freud and Anna Freud,
“Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XIV
(Legare Street Press, 2022), 237–58.
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example, I asked Muna about a moment in an interview with Elephant magazine where she

spoke about the “challenge” of “separat[ing] the emotional response from the facts” of

financially managing an artist’s legacy when that artist is her brother.”258 I asked—perhaps

too imprecisely—for an illustration of how she meets this demand. Muna turned to her art

rather than her archiving.

She shared a story of rehearsing for a preview performance of SlutForArt. In this

segment, “Last Dance for My Brother,” Muna performs over the elegy of the fourth

movement of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, a piece the siblings loved together. Wearing

a reproduction of her brother’s Mao suit, in the sight of a camera tripod, Muna dances. In

the final moments of the piece, she offers a monologue about her brother’s final days in his

hospital room. In rehearsal, Muna could rarely complete this monologue without fracturing

into sobs. She spoke to me about her fear that she would fail this performance, how she told

Ping Chong she didn’t think she could do it. He simply and calmly replied, “You’re a pro;

you’re not going to cry.”259 He was right.

In “Last Dance for My Brother” Muna’s choreography reperforms this struggle

between composure and dissolution.260 Muna oscillates, sometimes a stoic and inaccessible

figure, sometimes rupturing into momentary revelations of pain and memory. She

straightens her suit and folds her sunglasses with careful precision; she trips; she stumbles;

she spins as she falls to the floor. She rocks herself to peace; she feuds with the air; she

258 “Interview: Muna Tseng on Keeping the Legacy Alive,” ELEPHANT, September 13, 2016,
https://elephant.art/interview-muna-tseng-keeping-legacy-alive/.
259 Tseng, interview by author, New York City, New York.

260 “SlutForArt.”
 161

flings her limbs in protest. She straightens her body; she smooths her suit. In the piece’s

final moments, she drapes her jacket over the camera and offers her brother one final

dance. As the music ends, she kneels and holds out her hand. A stagehand offers her a

microphone. She pauses to breathe deeply, clipping it to her chest. She remains on her

knees, twisting her body slightly. This is the work she came to do. She silently reminds

herself of the advice she tells her students: “If you’re too much invested emotionally in the

piece, then you’re leaving the audience out, you’re not performing anymore […] You know?

You’re just in your own world.”

Finally, she delivers her monologue, holding her voice steady, knowing the audience

will weep. Her monologue ends with a note about her brother’s relationship to time.

I think Kwong Chi never looked back much. I don't think he thought about the
future much either. He always lived intensely in the moment, like right here,
right now, celebrating all that life had to offer. 261

She holds herself together. She remains on the floor as the spotlight fades. She invites us to

mourn through her. She does the work she came to do.

I was not in the audience that evening. I watch this performance from a computer

screen twenty-one years after it was filmed (2002), three years after the piece first

premiered (1999), nine years after Kwong Chi’s death (1990).262 As an archival object, I

know it works on me differently than it did a live audience. I know, watching her perform

“Last Dance for My Brother,” that she will survive this grief even as her choreography

threatens to come undone. I know that her training as a dancer will allow her to return to

261 Tseng and Chong, “SlutForArt.”

262 “SlutForArt.”
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scenes of devastation and somehow outlast the threat of annihilation. And I know the terms

she will eventually use to describe this performance, how she will see it part of a long

process of coming to her brother’s archives and making something beautiful out of the

deadness of paper and film.263In this knowing, I feel a strange kind of protectiveness as she

delivers the final lines of her monologue. It feels like she’s saying her brother was the

impetuous one, the one who didn’t consider the future, the one who—ultimately—left her

the job of figuring out how what happened next. In this narrative, I worry that she remains

the little sister who will never fully give herself to the joy of the present. I want to thank her

for giving us all the change to register loss so sharply. Has she had room in this to reflect on

the weight of a role foisted on her in her own youth? I think I know she doesn’t think of this

as a burden, but I still want to tell her, “Muna, that’s hard work.”

But Muna doesn’t describe responsibility—to her brother, to the audience—this

way. Muna believes that all of us—the performer, the archivist, the family historian, the

ethnographer, the performance theorist, the mourner, the artist, and the ticket-holder—

approach archives from multiple simultaneous valences. She speaks about her

responsibility to perform in the same breath that she demands something of us: “I mean,

we have to make something creative out of this. Otherwise, it’s just dead stuff. But it’s the,

the multidimensionality of the emotional, the intellectual, the, you know, social,

ethnographic, the—there’s so many dimensions to it.”264 Even the ways she delivered this

263 In Josh Chambers Letson words: “Gathering the ephemera and the fragments left in the wake of her brother’s

life and death, Muna put the pieces together to keep him alive and take him with her to the various battles that she would
wage in his name—and in her own.” Chambers-Letson, After the Party, 236.
264 Tseng, interview by author, New York City, New York.
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line to me in our interview revealed to me something essential about her conception of this

responsibility: Beginning with “emotion,” she offered a list of perspectives from which one

might make something more than deadness from the archive. She trailed off, saying “you

know” as she looked at me with warm expectation. She knew that I, too, will create from my

own frame of reference, but she can’t predict the form it will take or the name I will give it.

This responsibility twines ethical duty with critical capacity: we must create, using the

unique set of tools we’ve developed from our overlapping professional, political, and

personal experiences. In this sense Muna highlights her work as archivist and performer as

collaborations: She curates her brother’s papers so that others will make meaning of his

legacy. She makes art so that her audience will feel their own ways through, art that will

inspire future meaning-making and future performance. We’re part of the deal she struck

with Kwong Chi.

Responsibility

I wish I could end the chapter here, shaking of the dust of writing with a vague note

on performance futurity. But thinking about the ways that Muna conceives of responsibility

has put pressure on my understanding of my own work. As she sees it, Muna’s job—as an

artist, archivist, mourner, and keeper of family memory—is to use these ephemera and

fragments to create something beautiful. And my work—as an ethnographer, a witness, a

performance theorist, and an archival scholar—is to somehow make sense of what she

creates. But this doesn’t quite capture the complexity of our relationship or how I’ve come

to understand my roles in light of the work of this dissertation.

In her guidebook on critical ethnography, D. Soyini Madison wrote about the

production of a “compelling sense of duty and commitment” that characterizes the ethics
 164

and affects of the critical ethnographer: “The conditions for existence within a particular

context are not as they could be for specific subjects; as a result, the researcher feels an

ethical obligation to make a contribution toward changing those conditions toward greater

freedom and equity.”265 The critical ethnographer sees the contingency of injustice and feels

duty. Madison’s emphasis on “what could be” reminds me both of José Muñoz’s gaze to the

“horizon” of queerness266 and Lisa Lowe’s speculative work in the “past conditional

temporality.”267 Each emphasize the importance of thinking differently through time:

finding new methods of living and thinking in the present in our recognition that very little

of what we’ve received was inevitable, that the future is still unresolved.

The world is—has not—been sufficient. I hope the stories I’ve shared across this

work have attested to the creative labor of each of my interlocuters. Each built space that

was not guaranteed them, space that might never have been without their perspectives,

inventiveness, and labor. But I also hope that I’ve attended to the “not-yet-ness” of this

work. I know that their archival labor is not enough to guarantee life, that their archives

frequently demand too much of their bodies and spirits, and that the communities they

hope to serve are still in the process of becoming. Most minoritarian archives will not

outlast their creators; they will not realize the rare kind of lasting recognition, community

support, and material health of a community center like the Lesbian Herstory Archives.

Even as we should question if longevity is the only way we might imagine the health of

265 Madison, Critical Ethnography, 5.

266 Munoz, Cruising Utopia.
267 Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents.
 165

minoritarian archives, it’s clear that precarity frames their work in ways that limit life.

What is my role in shifting these conditions?

I conceived of a project that would honor the entanglements of minoritarian

archival performers with their archival work, a project that would require deep

ethnographic attention built on emotional intimacy. I hoped to demonstrate minoritarian

archives as sites where community, history, and identity are each actively negotiated in

specific ways that don’t resemble the stories we’ve all rehearsed about major archival

institutions. And I wanted you to know who was doing that work, the people who labored

to create these spaces when institutionally failed them, us. Gathering their stories, I felt,

was the first step in honoring labor that deserves more than simple neglect or celebration.

Like Muna Tseng, each of the archivists of my study have rehearsed their stories

with an attunement toward multiple audiences and a reparative eye to the histories of their

communities. Yet as I came to know each archivist more personally—what I read as outside

of their more public performance—they shared what often felt like much richer and

messier narratives about their relationships to identity and community. I thus began my

ethnographic work by drawing a conceptual line between what I then saw as each

archivist’s rehearsed professional narrations and the less polished, less overdetermined

storied that led to their labor. And I called this mess. Throughout this dissertation I have

offered this kind of “mess” as a heuristic that would allow me to more fully account for

minoritarian performance by thinking beyond the strategies, aesthetics, and values of

majoritarian archives. I had learned from people like Soyini Madison, and I wanted to be

the kind of critical ethnographer who “takes us beneath surface appearances, disrupts the

status quo, and unsettles both neutrality and taken for granted assumptions by bringing to
 166

light underlying and obscure operations of power and control” as part of their commitment

to freedom work.268 My closeness to each archivist, I hoped, would unsettle the rehearsed

“surface” of their public performance. I’ve argued that adjusting my eyes to focus on the

devalued, obscured, and implicitly maligned aspects of minoritarian archival

performance—looking past the surface—allowed me to more fully support the

worldmaking power of minoritarian archives. And I came to imagine that my most

important work as an ethnographer was to foster intimate relationships with my

interlocutors that would lead us all to value the mess of their work differently.

And then came the latest plague. I would not say that the COVID-19 pandemic

fundamentally shifted my understand of academia or my role within it, but it did make me

less patient with whole endeavor. If it was difficult for me to understand my role before the

pandemic, it was impossible not to picture fiddles and smoldering coliseums every time I

logged into another Zoom symposium for who-the-fuck-cares. After attending a virtual

lecture of Muna in the winter of 2022,269 I bemoaned obtusely to a mentor that academia’s

turn to Zoom was reproducing the worst qualities of academic lectures: we’d both heard

Muna tell these stories before, nothing new was illuminated, and we witnessed the

audience ask the same questions they always asked her about archives, art, and Asian-

Americanness. I mused about the future of ethnographic intimacy in the context of a global

pandemic that made in-person interviews feel like dangerous luxuries.

268 Madison
269 “East Meets West: The Art of Tseng Kwong Chi,” Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, accessed June 6, 2023,
https://artmuseum.mtholyoke.edu/event/east-meets-west-art-tseng-kwong-chi.
 167

Brusquely, he named what he called the implicit “anti-theatrical”270 prejudice of my

complaint, asking why I was equating Muna’s honed performance with artifice. In other

words, my criticality about the surface had become a tool of disbelief. In attempting to

honor the improvisational, tactical, and contingent as labor that deserved critical attention,

I often relied on comparatively unexamined assumptions about the rehearsed, strategic,

and aesthetically performed. The role of critical performance ethnographer, I implicitly

argued, required me to look beyond, to perform suspicion, and to discount the surface of

narratives, even when each archivist had carefully honed the surface as part of their labor.

In other words, in dismissing the repetitiveness of Muna’s words across her lectures and

our conversations, I was missing something significant. If until then I had been invested in

questions of truth, my mentor suggested that a performance analytic might instead point

me to ask what these stories produce in their repetition.

Let me stage Muna’s insistence that Tseng Kwong Chi not be seen as an Asian artist

within the scene of that particular evening. An elite private women’s college had invited

Muna to speak on Tseng Kwong Chi’s East Meets West series in conversation with a well-

known Asian Americanist who had written about Tseng Kwong Chi’s landscape

photographs as insurgently queer, Asian, postcolonial parody. During the question-and-

answer period a student asked a question steeped in the language of presentist progressive

identity politics. Muna replied emphatically that her brother was not an Asian artist. The

student nodded, as if the answer didn’t matter. I was seeing two people talk at odds, but it

270 Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
 168

felt like only Muna noticed. I admit discomfort continuing to claim the siblings as

minoritarian performers in the space of this dissertation precisely because of the ways

Muna’s reply to the student was able to register as non-information.271 Especially given the

increasing critical attention Tseng Kwong Chi has received within Asian American

performance and art criticism, I’m concerned that the complexity of Muna’s identification

of herself and her brother is too easily eclipsed. My argument is not that we all need to let

go of our investment; rather, I am asking what this investment proscribes in its repetition.

Honestly, I am not confident I understand this complexity. In some ways it would be

easier to punt the whole conversation to someone else by not even noting the thorns of

representation in the first place. Michelle Fine once wrote about a particular pattern in

ethnographic encounters where white scholars report on their interlocuters’ words

without analysis. For Fine, this is a way of avoiding white discomfort in the name of

feminist ethics:

While researchers, particularly White feminists, need to worry about the

imperialistic history of qualitative research that we have inherited and to
contain the liberal impulse to "translate for" rather than "with" women
across chasms of class, race, sexualities, politics, living arrangements, etc. […]
the refusal to theorize reflects either a form of theoretical condescension or
hyper-protocol reserved only for Others with whom serious intellectual work
and struggle are considered somehow inappropriate.272

271 J.L. Austin might call this an example of infelicitous speech. The student already had the answer in front of her

before posing the question. By posing it in this context—where all present were reading Muna and Kwong Chi as speaking
from the perspective of contemporary Asian American identity politics—she had already uttered her successful
performative. Muna’s reply, on the other hand, was so far afield from the genre of speech in that occasion that it didn’t
even register as a misfire. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,
1975).
272 Michelle Fine
 169

I didn’t feel it was appropriate to offer Muna’s representation of Tseng without comment.

Neither, as I argued above, was it appropriate for me to pretend that Muna and I were

saying the same things using different terms, what Michelle Fine would call

“ventriloquism.” I ultimately made several decisions in how I would represent the siblings

in these pages in terms of identity politics. In broad terms, I spoke of their relationship to

wealth, immigration, and class. When I imagined Ping Chong’s lingering “hand” in

SlutForArt, I was partly suggesting that the piece investigated identity in forms I don’t read

in Muna’s other performances. I provided breadcrumbs for an analysis I’ve chosen to set

aside for now, until I know more. Had I been able to identity this tension earlier in my

research, I suspect I would have asked Muna better questions.

This is not to say there aren’t existing places from which to begin this analysis.

Instead, I’m noting the ease of claiming Tseng’s identity in the service of a progressive

identity politics. I think, for instance, of two clips of Bill T. Jones’ interview with Ping Chong

that play during SlutForArt: In the first, Jones talks about Tseng’s sexual preference for

white men even in (because of?) the face of the racist gaze he received as a gay Asian man.

I think he described himself to me once as a snow queen, any person of color

who prefers white men and yet by the same token, he was very aware of the
races and the way in which Asian people were viewed, and I think that’s what
I saw a lot in his work. He was taken aback that I was, in a way, before people
were really talking about identity politics.273

Here we might read Jones as subverting his own implication of Tseng’s internalized Anti-

Asian racism by positioning Tseng as a nascent theorist of identity ahead of his time. I came

273 Tseng and Chong, “SlutForArt.”

 170

close to saying something similar when I said that Muna cannot know how Kwong Chi

would have made sense of his own identity in light of current formulations race. In the

second clip, Jones talks about Tseng’s performance of the ambiguous ambassador and how

the friends argued about the politics of racial representation in Tseng’s work.

However, his imagery was always the curious, blank Chinese tourist. I would
say to Kwong that you don't fool me. I, I know, I can sense protest when I see
it. This is a rough conversation we were having, that this blankness was the
way in which this culture at large expected him, as an Asian man, to—to
exist. So he became a kind of a cipher, a smooth surface that because it was so
impenetrable, this persona, it reflected everything!274

This is the same kind of performative flatness Vivian Huang writes about when she claims

Kwong Chi as a performer of campy distance and Asian inscrutability.275 Both cases require

the critic take their readings of the potentially radical effects of art and then ascribe

political intention onto the artist. I’m not inclined to disagree with either of them, and I

certainly don’t offer an opposing argument about Tseng’s intentions. Rather, I’m saying that

there are ways of reading these tensions into the work that our presentist understandings

of identity foreclose.

I find myself once again talking about Kwong Chi when I thought I was reporting on

Muna. I came to talk to Muna’s home to talk about her labor and the meanings she made of

inviting people into her home as researchers, but frequently these conversations led back

to stories about Kwong Chi. I suspect that Muna anticipated what brought me to her

archives as a performance scholar and that telling these stories was part of respecting the

274 Tseng and Chong.

275 Huang, Surface Relations.
 171

work I came to do, but I always hoped that our future conversations might unsettle some

these rehearsed narratives. I close this chapter by returning to a brief intimate moment

when she helped enunciate how she sees our complimentary but diverging responsibilities

in the research encounter.

I remained with Muna after our officially scheduled interview hour had ended. I had

asked Muna about the fate of her brother’s “Mao suit.”276 She told me it was currently on

loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art but usually sits folded in archival storage box

alongside many other objects from her brother and her family. “It’s all here! And I don’t

even have outside storage anymore because I want the stuff with me. You know, it’s like, it’s

safer. I just feel like, it’s like, I know where it is. it’s sleeping with me, you know?” She used

to keep her apartment practically empty before her brother’s objects were delivered,

rehearsing on the open floor front of a wall of mirrors. Something about sitting in that

space with Muna—surrounded by the business of running Kwong Chi’s estate—reminded

me of the non-messy mess of Debbie Britt’s basement. I began to ramble about how Debbie

had created a museum in no small part due to running out of personal storage space. But as

I told her a condensed story, I lost myself to the tenderness of Muna sleeping next to her

brother’s suit and starting to hold back tears. I took a quick breath laughed in self-

deprecation at my understatement, “It’s intense.”

Chuckling, Muna moved to the floor-to-ceiling wall of books and files that tucked her

bed away from archive visitors: “Well, let me show you some real physical material, lived

276 Tseng, interview by author, New York City, New York.

 172

material.” I lied and told her it was fine if she didn’t want to show me. Thankfully, she drew

back the curtain hiding a small closet next to the shelves. I was instantly filled with

reverent appreciation and voyeuristic academic curiosity for this invitation into intimacy.

“No, I mean, it’s so funny. I’m, like, hiding this. Because you know I’m, like, I’m preparing for

museum people to come […]” She laughed as she remembered an earlier question about my

interest in hoarding and minimalism in relationship to archives, “This is, like, not your

minimalist aesthetic here.”

Figure 15. Muna, blurred from excitement, shows me her mother’s fur coat. (digital photograph by author,
August 20, 2019, West Village, New York City)

Muna moved to her father’s ornate robe, the one “he wore to Chinese New Year in Hong

Kong” and her mother’s dresses that she “bought in London, when she was a singer there.”
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“Literally, you know, it’s like…” Here Muna stared at the closet instead of finishing her

sentence, as if we didn’t need words to understand. She laughed again, in plaintive memory,

before again adopting a more choreographed pose and tone.

“The ‘Stella’ dresses are in here. My mom’s dresses.” I remembered recorded footage

of Stella (Danspace, New York City, 2011): three dancers in couture mid-century cocktail

dresses dancing to memories of Muna’s mother. She had told me earlier how one of the

non-negotiable casting qualifications was the ability to fit into her mother’s old clothes.

Seeing them now, hanging from tiny hooks, I again I shook my head in disbelief, amazed

that the dresses in front of me were the same as the dancer’s costumes, the same that her

high society mother wore in night clubs in Hong Kong, Vancouver, and New York. She in

turn remained amazed by my glee. “It’s funny, I kind of, like, feel about shameful about this

stuff and it’s so cool that you’re into it.” She continued to comb through fashion accessories

and decorative objects, purchased in memory of the things her grandmother once collected.

Then she pulled back again and looked at me, using a tone indicating she was

parroting something we’ve both heard before, “Separate emotionality from the facts.”

Without pause, she quickly rebutted, “But the fact is it’s emotional. So the fact that I’m

wearing my mother’s dress when I’m performing a 19th century Qing dynasty lady in Ping

Chong’s piece at La MaMa means…what? You know, I mean, those are the questions that,

you know you write about and answers that you answer, you know.” She began with what

she experienced as the dominant narrative about the role of the archivist, who must

“[s]eparate emotionality from the facts” in the interest of eliminating personal bias from

their work. Telling true history, we’ve been told, requires critical detaching. Quickly, she

rejected the plausibility of this demand: “But the fact is it’s emotional.” Initially lingering at
 174

her closet to touch the fabric of her grandmother’s dresses and reflect on this emotionality,

she abruptly shifted a final time: “[…] I mean, those are the questions that, you know you

write about and answers that you answer, you know.”

In that specific moment, I recoiled from the sudden explicit recognition of my

responsibility as ethnographer and performance theorist. Experiencing her fall into

reminiscence at her closet alongside her, I felt almost affronted by this the sharp deflection

of emotional intensity. Reeling, I could not quickly make sense of what felt like a sudden

boundary. Was she avoiding the pain of memory and the shame of revealing emotionality

to a relative stranger? Had I made an ethical miscalculation about my role as ethnographer?

Trying not to register whiplash, I laughed uncomfortably and attempt to just as swiftly

lower Muna’s expectations, “Well, I’ll keep them questions. [uncomfortable laughter] No

answers.”

There was shift I couldn’t name. “Yeah,” she said as she punctuated the ending of

this act of the research encounter, “[w]e started to say the archive is, like, pull back the

curtain, or open the closet—That’s the name of our archive.[…]The curtain rings squeaked

and rattled as Muna pulled the curtain closed again. This is Kwong Chi’s archive.” She

meant to announce we were returning to Kwong Chi’s archives after our brief diversion.

But it was hard not to see it as a comment on the that work that brought us together.

Almost four years ago, I visited Muna for the first time. I had so much to ask her, and

she welcomed me with excitement and curiosity. As I shared in these pages, I was

entranced by her stories as much as I was intimidated by them. But I realize that every time

I’ve tried to tell you about Muna, I’ve offered stories of her collaborations with other

people. To talk about the far reach of her critical influence, I started with an image taken by
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her brother that does not include her. In trying to understand the shape and color and

temporality of her loss, I instead offered a story of performance collaboration as embodied

method. And when trying to name the complexity of our responsibilities to each other and

our work, I fear I’m still hazy about where I’ve landed. From my perspective, Muna isn’t in

the practice of using her narrative to describe her feelings. Ping Chong seemed willing or

unable to offer a simple description of Muna in SlutForArt,, even as he came to know her

well. The only thing he could be certain about was the poise and generosity of her

movement. “One thing’s for sure,” he said, “she moves with a butter grace.”277 I think that’s

right.

277 Tseng and Chong, “SlutForArt.”

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Conclusion: Nonetheless: A Women’s Ashes, A Soldier’s Finger, A Desiccated Mouse

It was three months before I was scheduled to defend this document, and I was

hyperventilating in my bed. I had just discovered another archival loss: all of my notes on

processing Helen Sclair’s archival collection were gone. I spent hours only to confirm what I

already knew: what was once hundreds of pages had become a 116-kilobyte link on my

hard-drive that went nowhere. You can tell I’m calmer now, ready to generalize pain into

metaphor so it can become theory. And I begin in the unbearable reality of loss, something

so fundamental to archives that we can go on wild theoretical rides to name it but still

never come close. When thinking archivally, we protect materials with an understanding

that there is something powerful about keeping and sorting and sharing things that will

outlast us. But we know that what the archive can offer isn’t the same thing as restoring

what we’ve lost.278 And we also know we’re working against time. If something perseveres

through the neglect and the floods and the crumbling empires, is there any guarantee we’ll

be around and equipped to make sense of it at all anyway?

Yes, I’m talking about a larger problem than my own relationship to failed record-

keeping, but it was easy to lose perspective when confronting the loss of digital evidence of

all of that fucking work with Helen. I originally met the remains of some of Sclair’s things

in a graduate seminar at the Newberry Library in Chicago, IL, one of the U.S.’s largest,

oldest, and most materially resourced public research libraries. Sclair—known locally in

278 I discussed Julietta Singh’s “No Archive Will Restore You” in my introduction. Singh writes about the Archive

in the context of academic labor, specifically in the credentializing contingency of graduate study. Here she conceives of
the archive as an external future thing on which the academic pins their hopes for livable life: The archive, it must be
notes, is also your enabling fiction: it is the thing you say you are doing well before you are actually doing it, and well
before you understand what the stakes are of gathering and interpreting it.” Singh, No Archive Will Restore You, 23.
 177

Chicago as the “cemetery lady”—had bequeathed her extensive collection of death and

cemetery ephemera to the Newberry Library upon her own death in 2009. Sclair’s

collection was strangely situated at the Newberry Library, a public research institution

known for its rare medieval manuscripts and archives of canonical literary authors like

Herman Melville, rather than such “subject-based”279 collections as Sclair’s. Despite actively

publishing and teaching in multiple venues and frequently appearing as an expert on death

in local media, Sclair’s work never coalesced into the genres that most typically afford

acclaim and authority and memory to academic historians: her public pedagogies were

never recorded on any student’s transcript; she never published a full-length book; and her

labor as a historian never secured her a tenure line. But Helen had become a “staple”280 at

the Newberry, researching Chicago history from the genealogical reading room,

volunteering at the massively popular annual book sale, and offering seminars on Chicago-

area cemeteries as part of its adult educational programming. The Newberry took on

279 Archival institutions typically specialize in certain kinds of archival collections. The difference between these

collections will help determine what institutions may deem the collection valuable and how they organize the collection
in anticipation of future users. “Types of Archives | Society of American Archivists,” accessed June 5, 2023,
https://www2.archivists.org/usingarchives/typesofarchives. These differences may require specific kinds of subject-
based competencies for archivists that are tasked with making them available and legible to these anticipated users.
Society of American Archivists Reappraisal and Deaccessioning Development and Review Team, “Guidelines for
Reappraisal and Deaccessioning,” Text, May 2012, https://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/comp4specollect. In the widely
influential “What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift,” Terry Cook
discusses the emergence of modern archival studies and its professional standards for archival materials. Cook
demonstrates that archival theory and practice emerge from “wider cultural, legal, technological, social, and philosophical
trends in society.” Terry Cook, “What Is Past Is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future Paradigm
Shift,” Archivaria, February 12, 1997, 17.
280 On Halloween in 2012, the Newberry Library published a tribute to Helen on its tumblr blog that included

these lines: “A recognized authority on cemeteries and burial practices, Sclair, prior to her death, was a Newberry staple.
For years, she volunteered at the Annual Book Fair and led a popular adult seminar on Chicago-area cemeteries.”
Newberry Library, “The Cemetery Lady,” Tumblr, Tumblr (blog), October 31, 2012,
https://newberrylibrary.tumblr.com/post/34703867175/the-cemetery-lady.
 178

Sclair’s strange collection without a solid plan for how they’d archive it,281 accepting 146

boxes from Sclair’s daughter Lu Helen Sclair in 2010.

I would first meet Helen’s archives eight years later. Using funds from the Andrew

W. Mellon Foundation, the Newberry offered “The Archive: Theory, Form, and Practice” in

2018, 2019, and 2022.282 Multidisciplinary humanities scholars from graduate programs

across the U.S applied to participate in a series of weekly seminars and archival workshops

at the Newberry, and we were the first cohort. For our final projects, we were tasked with

writing up archival processing plans for a few of the Newberry’s small unprocessed

collections that were then languishing in archival limbo.283 Each collection was an example

of the “massive backlogs of inaccessible collections” that fill archival institutions, typically

unpublicized and unavailable as they wait for staff to start their processing labor.284 I

281 The Newberry’s acquisition of Sclair’s materials was managed by Sclair’s friend Paul Gehl, who served as the

Custodian of the John M. Wing Foundation on the History of Printing at the time. Gehl was largely responsible for the first
sort of Sclair’s collection, first separating Sclair’s personal papers from her “ephemera collection,” including “[m]emorial
cards and ribbons, funeral programs, cemetery and mortuary advertisements and signs, and other printed ephemera
relating to death, mourning, and the funeral industry.” “Collection: Helen A. Sclair Ephemera Collection” (Newberry
Library), accessed June 5, 2023, https://archives.newberry.org/repositories/2/resources/679. I learned most of the
details of this acquisition and initial sorting secondhand, primarily in two interview with Newberry Library staff including
Alison Hinderliter, Matthew Rutherford, and Samantha Smith. Hinderliter, Alison and Rutherford, Matthew, interview by
author, Chicago, IL., November 14, 2018; Hinderliter, Alison and Smith, Samantha, interview by author, Chicago, IL.,
November 14, 2018. I also received copies of email correspondence between Gehl and others with details about the
acquisition, including an email from Gehl to Newberry Staff announcing details about the completed acquisition in May
2010. Paul Gehl, “Sclair Collection Now in House,” May 26, 2010.
282 Newberry Library, “About,” The Archive: theory, form, practice, August 10, 2021,

https://archiveformtheorypracticecom.wordpress.com/program/.
283 A processing plan is the first step to ensuring that “accessible and usable at a determined processing level. In

most institutional archives, this will involve deciding the level of organizational granularity for each record, how the
collection will be described at each level (collection, folder, record, etc.), note restrictions to the collection (for instance:
can a researcher obtain sensitive information about living people named in documents?), and notes about the physical
condition of the materials. “Processing Plans,” accessed June 5, 2023,
https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/jointprocessingguidelines/processing-plans.
284 In “More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing,” Mark A. Greene and Dennis

Meissner address what they identity as a growing problem of new archival acquisitions outpacing the ability for archivist
to process. They advocate for new standards in archival processing that would prioritize the public availability of archives
 179

worked through a small part of Helen’s collection during the seminar and then returned to

the Newberry to carry out the rest of the archival processing work in 2019. It was slow,

distracted, and unpaid work for a low-priority collection, and I did not complete the

project. My involvement ended when the pandemic closed the Newberry and I moved away

from Chicagoland.

Figure 16. My view of two of boxes from the “Helen Sclair Papers” from the reading room of the Newberry
Library. (digital photograph by author, October 3, 2019, Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois)

From what I understand, most of these specific Newberry collections continue to

remain in a liminal half-processed state, some limbo between the dumpster and public use.

It’s a problem of numbers, really: we decide to collect only a miniscule amount of the

material traces we produce as we move through our days. Even if we’re lucky enough to

have the money and space and time to hold a few things close, the bulk of our stuff doesn’t

matter to people beyond ourselves. Some people’s stuff is elevated to the status of public

(product) over current ideals in archival studies for thorough and careful processing of collections at the item level
(process). Mark Greene and Dennis Meissner, “More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing,”
The American Archivist 68, no. 2 (September 1, 2005): 208–9, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.68.2.c741823776k65863.
 180

value; maybe they wrote an in/famous book, or were born into an in/famous family, or

were un/lucky enough to find themselves at the center of some historical event. We already

know whose stories are most likely to matter enough to be treasured by the most

resourced archives and museums and libraries. But, even in these rare institutions, our

capacity to collect far outweighs our ability to curate and care for our things. You might

already know this at the level of your own home—it’s hard to keep house—but it’s also a

troubling problem for archivists who collect in the name of making publicly meaningful

collections.285 As it often the case, our efforts to keep everything that might have future

value prevent us from appropriately caring for the things that do. In the melodrama of my

own archival loss, I hated myself and my carelessness, feelings amplified by my own sense

of responsibility for Helen’s legacy in the face of the Newberry’s neglect. It’s one thing if we

lose a few files for a project no one really cared about; it’s quite another when we feel like

we’re using archives to fight for our lives.

285 Greene and Meissner, “More Product, Less Process.”

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Figure 17. Image of Helen Sclair’s tombstone from a point and shoot camera, taken by Helen Sclair herself
before her death, lying on a table in the Newberry Library reading room. (analog photograph by Helen Sclair,
date unknown, Chicago Bohemian Cemetery, Chicago, Illinois, by courtesy of Lu Helen Sclair)

I wanted Helen to wait for me until I was ready to do the work, but I was confronted

with the facts: I’ll probably never find the energy and opportunity and perspective to

return to her stuff. I suppose it depends on who you ask, but I think most would agree that

a dissertation conclusion is supposed to take a few threads of what you couldn’t accomplish

in your graduate work and make them sound like verdant fields of possibility for the

future: something your next project might deliver, or perhaps something a larger coalition

of people urgently needs to take up. A more pessimistic vision is there’s also the growing

detritus in the process that will never quite amount to anything. All archives—our hard

drives, our bodies, our boxes of stuff—are material, are already in the process of decay.286

This is another archival metaphor. If we think of the archive as merely a holding grounds

286 James Boyda, “On Loss in the 21st Century: Digital Decay and the Archive: Editor’s Introduction,” Spectator

33, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 6–10.

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for future work, we can mistake the act of setting aside for the art of keeping on hand. Part

of telling a piece of Helen’s story in these final pages is ensuring that I don’t keep making

this same mistake. I had once trusted a repository to hold a woman’s life, mistaking the

preservative power of a hard drive for the social performative I’m calling the Archive.

I want to use this conclusion to bring together three archival moments that have

remained with me throughout this project but that I could never quite house in my body

chapters. I’ve offered bodily remains as a central image: a plastic bag of cremated ashes, a

bloody prop finger, and a shriveled mouse carcass. In each narrative, the disembodied

object breaks through, interrupting a mundane process of labor. I group them here for the

same reason that they were difficult to place elsewhere: each offered me a visceral feeling

of the power of archival performance, but each seemed to become something else when I

submitted them to the scrutiny of close analysis. I call these moments of punctum following

Soyini Madison, which she described as “break [s] in the flow of expectation that [resist]

the repetitive and hegemonic power to reinscribe identity and value”.287

I read and was prepared to report on Roland Barthes’s definition of the “punctum”

here, but that’s not quite what how Soyini means when she references him.288 Picture

yourself in a black-box studio space, walking in geometric lines, knowing you’re here to

understand performance as a method for inquiry as part of your disciplinary training.

You’ve just read Ben Spatz What a Body Can Do, a book about “embodied knowledge as

Madison, Acts of Activism, 49.

287

I would argue that the primary difference is between Madison’s understanding of the punctum in
288

performance as opposed to Barthes analysis of the still image.

 183

technique.”289 Soyini, a scholar you’ve come to revere, is shouting chaotic directions at you

try to get out of your head. You’re stumbling past your classmates in a weird version of Red

Light, Green Light and then suddenly she yells “punctum.” This means you’re supposed to

abandon any semblance of remaining bodily comportment, and suddenly shift your

attunement to the world by shifting your body. You’re supposed to learn something in this

moment about the phenomenology of knowledge. You’re supposed to know that when the

second-wave feminists talked about standpoints, they might have done a better job if they

talked about actual bodies making sense of their world from their actual sensing organs.290

In each of these narratives a person is interrupted in their work of thinking and doing only

to sense something that was hiding in plain sight.

Punctum: Ashes

In the Spring of 2019, nearly ten years after Helen Sclair’s death, I sat in the reading

room of the Newberry Library. Before I encountered Sclair’s papers, the Newberry had

already culled her materials for rare books and maps, sorting them to more appropriate

homes in other collections. More than 80 boxes of books deemed “modern, non-rare” were

given the “book-fair” treatment, sold in the Newberry’s yearly popular book fair to raise

289 Ben Spatz, What a Body Can Do: Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research, 1st edition (London ; New

York: Routledge, 2015).

290 Sarah Ahmed made this argument while advocating for a theory of queer phenomenology based on feminist

interventions in the philosophy of phenomenology. She named, for instant, “Sandra Bartky, Judith Butler, Rosalyn
Diprose, Elizabeth Grosz, Iris Marion Young, and Gail Weiss” as “[f]eminist philosophers [who] have shown us how social
differences are effects of how bodies inhabit spaces with others and have emphasized the intercorporeal aspects of bodily
dwelling.” Ahmed, “Orientations,” 544.
 184

funds for the library.291 What remained after all of this were thirty boxes of unsorted

materials, loosely grouped under the name “Helen A. Sclair papers.”292

I opened the first box. At the top was a plastic bag holding a piece of folded paper

about the size of a Splenda packet. I had been warned that Helen’s papers were in complete

disarray. This “mess” was precisely the reason I met Sclair’s stuff in the first place. The

Newberry had assigned me to Helen’s things after reading my fellowship application. I had

talked about hoarding as an archival method, arguing that a key difference between a hoard

and an archives was who believed the collection had value and whether they had enough

room and energy to care for it.293 It felt like my supervisor was excited to share Sclair’s

squalor with someone who would appreciate it.

Primed as I was, my first assumption was that this object was a Splenda packet,

grabbed in the process of sweeping her shit into plastic bags. I read the note.

“May my mother’s ashes bring you good luck. She loved life and enjoyed
doing genealogical research at Newberry Library.”294

291 Paul Gehl, “Sclair Collection,” May 26, 2010.

292 “Collection: Helen A. Sclair Papers” (Newberry Library), accessed June 5, 2023,
https://archives.newberry.org/repositories/2/resources/678.
293 Literary scholar Scott Herring makes a similar argument when he discusses debates about the status of Andy

Warhol’s Time Capsules, a collection of “hundreds of thousands of objects” including “sketches, receipts, correspondence,
uneaten food, clothing, pornography, insoles, a nude photograph of Jacqueline Onassis, film, toys, and books.” Scott
Herring, The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture (Chicago ; London: University Of Chicago Press,
2014), 80.
294 “Helen Sclair’s Ashes with Note by LuHelen Sclair,” n.d., Helen Sclair Personal Papers, Newberry Library,

Chicago, Il.
 185

Figure 18. Some of Helen’s remains, wrapped in a note from her daughter Lu Helen Sclair, sealed in a
sandwich bag, sitting on top of a manilla folder. (digital photograph by author, February 20, 2019, Newberry
Library, Chicago, Illinois)

I hadn’t yet spent enough time with Helen’s papers to understand that these ashes were a

piece of Helen herself, gifted by her daughter Lu Helen. I had no sense of the scope of the

collection, nor of the persnickety grammarian and messy record keeper I would find as I

acquainted myself with her materials. I just knew I’d found a dead body, or a piece of what

was left of it.

I was horrified.

I wrote to my supervisor, trying to maintain a tone that would smooth over my

discomfort and inexperience. If it was a normal thing to find bodies in the archive, I

certainly didn’t want to highlight my imposture. “Ashes in sclair collection?!,” I wrote in the

subject line. In the body I attempted a wry joke, “Looks like we’ll need a folder for ‘other

people’s ashes, unlabeled, donated to Sclair in a Ziploc bag.” 295 My supervisor replied

swiftly: “Yikes! Recommend deaccession, especially since they are not identified!296”

295 Zender, Benjamin, “Personal Email to Alison Hinderliter,” February 28, 2019.
296 Alison Hinderliter, “Personal Email with Author,” February 20, 2018.
 186

Deaccessioning is the “process by which an archives, museum, or library

permanently removes accessioned materials from its holding.”297 It’s not quite the opposite

of accessioning, because you can’t really return the object back from whence it came.

Walter Benjamin’s angel of history would “like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole

what has been smashed,”298 but we know you can’t reverse cremation. The archive

promised to care for these ashes—maybe they weren’t quite sure what that would entail—

and now they were ready to relinquish that responsibility. The whole thing was absurd.

Was I supposed to sneak over to the marble bathrooms and dump the body down the sink?

Was there a form I would first need to requisition? Does the Society for American

Archivists299 recommend a specific kind of candle if I decide to have a toilet-side ceremony,

or would “store-bought” be fine?300

I set Sclair aside and dove deeper into the box, trying to see if I could assign the

ashes a better story.

Eventually I realized I had encountered Helen in the archive, through a more

prolonged process of getting to know her and her collection. I had big plans of how I might

archive against the Newberry grain, how I might use her papers to tell her story in a way

297 The Society for American Archivists, one of the larger and older professional organizations for archivists,

released best practices for “reappraisal and deaccessioning” in 2012. Society of American Archivists Reappraisal and
Deaccessioning Development and Review Team, “Deaccsessioning Guidelines.”
298Walter Benjamin, On The Concept of History (New York: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2009).
299Society of American Archivists Reappraisal and Deaccessioning Development and Review Team,
“Deaccsessioning Guidelines.”
300 Ina Garten is a food celebrity known for, among other things, suggesting that people make time-intensives

meals from high-quality scratch ingredients, with the rejoinder gentle patronization that sometimes “store-bought if fine.”
Ali Jaffe, “I Think About This a Lot: Ina Garten Saying ‘Store-Bought Is Fine,’” The Cut, November 26, 2018,
https://www.thecut.com/2018/11/i-think-about-ina-garten-saying-store-bought-is-fine-a-lot.html.
 187

that the institution wasn’t inclined to do. I began to sort, to cull duplicate newspaper

clippings, to make note of key players and timelines. I created so many notes. And then I

lost them. I’m bitter about the whole thing. I hate that I went unmentioned when the

Chicago Tribune published a feature story about Helen Sclair without naming any of my

work.301 I hate that the same week the Newberry invited me to be one of three featured

speakers at the culminating Symposium for the fellowship—for free—they also rejected me

in my application for a short-term fellowship to return to finish processing. Most of all, I

internalized the limitations of institutional archivization as personal failure. I hate that

Sclair trusted them to care for her materials, that I tried to intervene, and that nothing

much happened in the end.

According to the Newberry website, Helen Sclair’s personal papers remain

unprocessed, available by appointment only, with at least five days’ notice. I wonder if

anybody visits her.

Punctum: Finger

301 Kori Rumore, “‘Dead People Always Seem to Get in the Way of the Living.’ Facing Death with Chicago’s

‘Cemetery Lady’ Helen Sclair.,” Chicago Tribune, November 1, 2020, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-helen-

sclair-cemetery-lady-20201101-ooff6owkereyvdiqu4wkhixjje-story.html.
 188

Figure 19. Cover image for Performing Remains (photograph by Rebecca Schneider, June 4, 2005, Lincoln,
Rhode Island, by courtesy of Rebecca Schneider)

A severed finger lays on a bed of dry grass and leaves on the cover of Rebecca

Schneider’s “Performing Remains: The Art of War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment.” It’s

a bit strange, maybe, on the cover of a book ostensibly about grown men playing soldier.

Where’s the performance? The reenactment? The war? The book’s title, like the finger,

promises us potential meaning in multiples:

“Performing remains,” that is, performance lingers, affects, effects, even as it

inevitably disappears.302

“Performing remains,” that is, performance is the magic hat that will bring the

snowman “back again, someday.”303

302 As I discussed in the introduction, Peggy Phelan argued that the power of performance is in its ephemerality.

Phelan, “The Ontology of Performance: Representation without Reproduction.”

303 Here I’m attempting one potential metaphor for understanding performance as a force that animates the non-

living object. In the song “Frosty the Snowman,” children animate a snowman by placing a magic hat on its head. His life is
threatened by the heat of the sun, but he asks to “run and have some fun” now, with the attendant promise to “be back
again someday.” Walter Rollins and Steve Nelson, “Frosty the Snowman Lyrics,” lyrics.com, accessed June 5, 2023,
https://www.lyrics.com/lyric-lf/500102/Gene+Autry/Frosty+the+Snowman.
 189

“Performing remains,” that is, performance can almost conjure something that used

to be there, and in that surrogacy something will be gained, and something will be lost.304

Schneider found the finger on a research trip to a farm in Lincoln, Rhode Island,

where a group of people had traveled to reenact battles from the U.S. Civil War. She was

surrounded by the kind of falseness that seems to haunt theatrical performance, at least

according to folks who worry about these things.305 Beside a “faux soldier,” who lay to the

side of a “faux surgeon’s faux tent,” in a field in 2005 where no Civil War battle had ever

been fought, a fake finger cut through the noisiness of the fiction: “Though not at all in the

head-space of a reenactor, I was brought up short and had to gasp coming upon this

severed index lying forgotten and left behind.”306

Surrounded by the falseness of this scene, witnessed by performers she had come to

observe, a little bit of the past had somehow breached her awareness of space and time. At

first struck speechless, and then brought to laughter, Schneider was finally provoked to

theorize, to come to narrative after coming to her senses.

Sometimes, it seems, the Archive is merely a stand-in for the thing we cannot touch.

From a bird’s eye view, there’s something absurd about staring at a document and asking it

304 Primarily thinking of performance as a mode of cultural communication, Joseph Roach forward a definition of

performance as “surrogacy,” “the doomed search for originals by continuously auditioning stand-ins.” Joseph Roach, Cities
of the Dead (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
305 In articulating the production value of performance studies, Dwight Conquergood summarizes foundational

moves with the field against long-standing charges of performance as falseness, especially histories of Western theatre:
“Victor Turner, inspired by his performance ethnography collaborations with Richard Schechner, coined the
epigrammatic view of “performance as making, not faking” (Turner 1982, 93). His constructional theory foregrounded the
culture- creating capacities of performance and functioned as a challenge and counterproject to the “antitheatrical
prejudice” that, since Plato, has aligned performance with fakery and falsehood (Barish 1981).Victor W. Turner, From
Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, Performance Studies Series, 1st v (New York City: PAJ, Performing Arts
Journal Publications, 1982), 93; Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice; Conquergood, Cultural Struggles, 27.
306 Schneider, Performing Remains, 51.
 190

to tell us stories about actual life. But something somehow slips through, often when we’re

not looking for it. Perhaps it was always there? Schneider had come to study performance,

to understand what these war larpers could tell her about theatrical reenactment and the

temporalities of nationalism and war.307 She had come to study the “possibility of temporal

recurrence and explore the theatrical claim lodged in the logic of reenactment that the past

is not (entirely) dead, that it can be accessed live.”308

But what struck her was the gory reality of blood and pain.

Punctum: Mouse

307 This is acronym for “live action role players,” people who play out scenes and tropes from fantasy role-

playing games in live settings, often with props and costumes.

308 Schneider, Performing Remains, 17.
 191

Figure 20. My grandparent’s basement, after the cleaning. (digital photograph by author, March 27, 2017,
Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio)

A month before I started my Ph.D. program at Northwestern I travelled back to

Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio to help my mother clean. She had her own home, but she was living

with my grandfather after he left the oven burner on too many times to be trusted to his

own care. Living on a couch in his basement, she had built literal walls out of her

belongings. And I was there to help her clean so they could sell his house and move him to a

nursing home.

I was there to throw stuff away. I read through the evidence of life, piles and pools of

forms and office supplies and greeting cards and movie tickets and gifts and clothing

sedimented in layers: my grandmother’s illness and death; various lay-offs, graduations,

luncheons, celebrations; a successful completion of a sanitation management course; a

miscarriage; an unopened gift bag from a particularly exciting girls’ night out. By the third

day of excavation, I had developed new strategies for the draining monotony. Until the pain

in my back registered a certain kind of urgency, I’d sweep a mound of things into boxes,

breathing shallowly to avoid inhaling the talcum powder that had spilled months earlier

somewhere in the piles. I’d carry the boxes two at a time up the stairs where her hoarding

hadn’t reached, dumping them in little rows on the stained carpet. Every time my back

ached too hard to keep sorting I’d take a break short enough to not fall into despair.

I had made inroads in my demolition, finally seeing stretches of the floor. I started to

scoop up another box-worth of my mother’s life when I saw a dead mouse underneath the

pile.

A dead mouse. Not just dead but shriveled and flat. Every part of my body filled with

disgust and shame and panic. There was too much death, too much filth, too much stuff.
 192

No amount of curation could contain this excess.

Dead Stuff

So I sit here with two entwined impossibilities that seem simultaneously

overwrought and at the pithy heart of things:

The Archive cannot prevent the living from dying.

Performance cannot bring the dead to life.

I’ve been writing about people whose work embodies the unspoken nonetheless of

this statement. Nonetheless, we perform, to remember, to live, to communicate, to share.

Nonetheless, we archive, to imagine a future where Life matters, because the lives we have

lost matter, because our liveness and our lives matter, because we believe we will be the

ancestors of people who will care that we existed, and this is one way we care for them.309

It is not, as José Muñoz reminded us, that we abandon the present to escape to an idealized

past or to embrace an inevitably better future. Knowing ourselves this way—as links in a

transtemporal chain—shifts our relationship to the morass of the present. We know that

“this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.”310 When we name ourselves

in the Archive, we understand that we were, are, and never will be alone in this struggle.

These facts are the precondition for the nonetheless of minoritarian archival

performance. In the face of the inevitability of loss, archival performance can allow us to

309 Christina Sharpe might call this one way of “defending the dead.” She was quoting a poem by M. NourbeSe

Phillip, who revisited the primary scene of death and listened to her ancestor Setaey Adamu Boateng, who could only
speak her story using the words from the colonial archive. Philip and Boateng, Zong! quoted in Sharpe, In the Wake.
310 Munoz, Cruising Utopia, 1.
 193

orient ourselves to each other differently, to recognize our shared vulnerability to loss as a

site of responsibility and creation.

Let me say this less abstractly. Tseng Kwong Chi died and left his sister the work of

sorting out his legacy. She looked to a stack of paper and felt an imperative. “I mean, we

have to make something creative out of this. Otherwise, it’s just dead stuff.” For Muna, this

is an imperative that neither began nor ended with her. Having heard her story, we are

responsible to make something of it. In describing minoritarian archival performance in the

pages of this dissertation, I am emphasizing the archival as the promises we make with

things in the names of the people we love.

I’ll try again. Nothing can live forever. The trick is not just survival. In the archive we

convoke something more than bare life311 from a bunch of stuff on its way to becoming

dust. But the archive itself is far from dead. It can be a scene of mutually assured

creation,312 where we take that dust and call it loam. In doing so, we commit to care for our

patch of dirt. This isn’t to say we’re always equipped to do this work. It certainly doesn’t

mean that we’re all equally committed to liberation. We’ve created archives of violence and

pretended they were celestially ordained, making our inventions of the nation and race and

capital look like givens and keeping only the documents that’ll prove it. Archives are not

dead, but they are frequently deadly. One of the powers and burdens of minoritarian

311 Here I am drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s theory of “bare life,” a form of living outside the relationality of the

social based that reduces a human life to “mere biological existence.” Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and
Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
312 Here I am drawing on rhetorician Barbara Biesecker’s theory of the Archive as a site of “doubled invention,” a

“provisionally settled scene of our collective invention…of us and of it.” Barbara A. Biesecker, “Of Historicity, Rhetoric: The
Archive as Scene of Invention,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9, no. 1 (2006): 124,
https://doi.org/10.1353/rap.2006.0018.
 194

archival performance is that living outside the protection of the nation can give you hope in

the possibility of opting for something less violently foreclosed, even at the risk of

“evaporating at the touch.”313

That is, Debbie Britt knows that her dolls will not live forever. Even as she gave back

the keys to the building that once held the Museum, this was not an occasion to embrace

the offers to sell the dolls in the name of keeping them safe. Here’s the false dilemma: I

think we could stay up late all night and worry about the future fate of her objects after her

demise, or we could find ways to embrace and support her vision. Or any vision, really, of

something quirky and precarious but decidedly less overdetermined than those places with

more money and time and energy. Because that’s another thing I didn’t quite capture here.

Grassroots archives are weird and not inevitable, full of sometimes unhinged people who

think they’re acting on behalf of community. And you should visit one soon if you haven’t,

because they’re all on the brink of destruction.

Somebody sat across a seminar table and asked me in disgusted disbelief, “so you

think all archives are performance?! Doesn’t that vacate the concept of performance of any

of its radical potential?” All I care to want when I invoke the inartful phrase “archival

performance” is your promise that you’re willing to see archives with the same complexity

you would ascribe all other performances. You can disagree with my definition, but I am

insisting that you recognize that everything here is contingent on human action, that you

remember the people putting things into folders, that you see yourself as part of this co-

313 Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence.”

 195

performance. When you let go of your faith in the deadness of archives, you might

acknowledge the wider scene in which we all agreed to see a piece of paper and decide it

meant history. Because we can get so caught up in the work of understanding what the

archive is trying to tell us that it takes us too long to perceive the bloody finger at our feet.

Ben read a letter to Lou in a bookstore, and I bawled because I remembered being

lonely. And then I felt like I had to prove something to earn a degree, and I forgot again. K.J.

Rawson posted the letters on the Digital Transgender Archives, and I downloaded them

just in case I needed them. I guess I’m lucky I remembered to return, if only to remind

myself why I came there in the first place.

There was safety in the pdf, but it’s risky to reduce the archive to a storage facility.

Helen’s ashes might be less likely to blow away in their box at the Newberry, but the

possibility of her becomes foreclosed in the hermetic seal. Is this what Derrida was trying

to say in his discussion of Freud and the death drive?314

And I think that’s close to the last thing I wanted to tell you about things. If there is a

difference between hoarding and other archival modes after all, maybe it’s a distortion of

potentiality. We keep too much because we’re not willing to divest in a single possible

version of ourselves, even if that investment threatens to suffocate in the present. I think

this conclusion might be trying to say too many things at once. This makes sense, because I

314 Derrida, Archive Fever.

 196

inherited my mother’s material deviance.315 I want to thank her for helping me understand

the capacity of things to “spark joy,”316 to “bury alive,”317 and to become archival.

315 In The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture, Scott Herring argues that popular and

spectacularized accounts of hoarding position those with strong object-attachments to objects as both psychopathological
and “materially deviant;” view messy homes and clutter as symptomatic of a host of individual mental illnesses; and treat
the disordered as potential public health threats as their objects emit smells, harbor disease, and threaten to pull apart
the very foundations of buildings. Herring, The Hoarders.
316 In The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese art of Decluttering and Organizing, organizational

expert Marie Kondō offers an embodied technique of understanding one’s relationship to their belongings by holding
them closely and sensing whether they “spark joy.” Marie Kondō, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art
of Decluttering and Organizing, 1st edition (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2014).
317 In the television documentary series Hoarding: Buried Alive, hoarders and their family and friends discuss the

effects of hoarding behavior on their lives while the hoarders are offered professional support from therapists and
organizers. “Hoarding: Buried Alive,” television documentary series (TLC, 2010).
 197

Appendix A. Scales of Personal-Public Custodianship and Precarious-Institutional

Security

Figure 21. Personal-Public Custodianship: The personal relationship between archivists and their objects
mean they care for these materials differently than collections owned by communities, government entities,
and private organizations.

Figure 22: Precarious-Institutional Security: The techniques of institutionality may be imagined in a

dialectical relationship with systemized insecurity. Institutionality promises to bestow public recognition,
reliable funding, permanent staffing, and a more secure future for archival collections.
 198

Appendix B. Sexual Minorities Archives Timeline

Source is marked in subscript for each entry.

1. Timeline on the Sexual Minorities Archives Website318
2. Rachel Corbman’s essay on the Lesbian Herstory Archives319
3. Correspondence between Ben Power and Lou Sullivan
4. K.J. Rawson’s Interview with Ben Power320
5. Lesbian Herstory Archives website321
6. Madyu Narayan Dissertation322
7. Letter from Leslie Feinberg to Sexual Minorities Archives323
8. Personal notes of the author

1970s
1972
Date unspecified: Chicago Women’s Center opens at 3523 North Halsted Street,
Chicago, Illinois1
1974
Date unspecified: Chicago Women’s Center renamed Lesbian Feminist Center1
July 12: the Center founds New Alexandria Library for Women1
September, date unspecified: The Center renames the library the New Alexandria
Lesbian Library1
1976
Date unspecified: Ben Power begins volunteering at Lesbian Feminist Center1
January, date unspecified: Lesbian Herstory Archives opens to lesbian public in home
of Deborah Edel and Joan Nestle at Ninety-Second Street, New York, New York2
1977
Date unspecified: Ben relocates New Alexandria Lesbian Library for Women to 7404
North Hoyne Avenue Chicago, Illinois1
1978
February, date unspecified: Lesbian Feminist Center closes1
1979
Date unspecified: Ben Power moves to Huntington, Massachusetts1
Date unspecified: Ben renames collection New Alexandria Lesbian Library1
1980s

318 Sexual Minorities Archives, “History.”

319 Corbman, “A Genealogy of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, 1974-2014.”
320 Rawson, “Archival Justice.”

321 Lesbian Herstory Archives, “Our Herstory.”

322 Narayan, “Writing the Archives.”

323 Feinberg, Leslie, “Letter to the Sexual Minorities Archives,” August 15, 2014, https://sites.smith.edu/leslie-
feinberg-library/about-the-sexual-minorities-archives/.
 199

1980
Date unspecified: Ben Power moves to Worthington, Massachusetts1
1981
Date unspecified: Ben Power moves to 260 Main Street, Leeds, Massachusetts1
1983
Date unspecified: Ben Power moves to 146 Riverbank Road, Northampton,
Massachusetts1
1986
August 31: Ben Power first writes to Lou Sullivan3
December 31: Lou Sullivan receives HIV diagnosis3

1990s
1990
November 29: Ben writes final letter to Lou Sullivan3
1991
March 2: Lou Sullivan dies
1992
January 1: Ben renames the collection the Sexual Minorities Archives (SMA)4
1993
June, date unspecified: Lesbian Herstory Archives reopens at 484 Fourteenth Street
Brooklyn, New York5

2010s
2012
August, date unspecified: Madyu Narayan visits Lesbian Herstory Archives6
2013
June 21: K.J. Rawson interviews Ben Powers4
2014
June, date unspecified: Ben’s landlord puts Northampton house up for sale1
August 11: Leslie Feinberg promises to donate personal research library to SMA7
October 4: Landlord visits Northampton property8
Around October 23: author’s first visit to SMA9
October 30: Ben’s landlord serves Power no fault eviction notice8
November 6: Press release8
November 15: Leslie Feinberg dies
November 21: Fundraiser8
2015
March 26: Ben completes purchase of new home at 135 Lincoln Street, Holyoke
Massachusetts1
2017
June 3: Official reopening of SMA at 135 Lincoln Street, Holyoke, Massachusetts1
 200

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Vita

Benjamin Zender
[email protected]
Education
Northwestern University
Ph. D., Performance Studies; Certificates: Gender & Sexuality 2023
Studies, Critical Theory
• Dissertation: Mess: The Labor of Minoritarian Archival
Performance
• Co-Advised by Joshua Chambers-Letson and Jennifer C.
Nash, with Charles E. Morris III
M.A., Performance Studies 2017
University of Massachusetts Amherst
M.A., English: Composition and Rhetoric Concentration 2015
Syracuse University
B.A., Writing and Rhetoric with Distinction; Minor: LGBT/Queer 2012
Studies

Research and Teaching Interests

Black Feminist Theory, Queer of Color Theory, Minoritarian Performance, Critical Ethnography,
Archival & Museum Studies, Affect and Feeling, Critical University Studies

Publications
“The Deadline, The Stage, The Lesson: The Hold in Three Variations at under review
the National Black Doll Museum.” African American Review.
"What Might be Bullets, Fireworks, or Balloons: Repertoires of More than 2019
Survival in Cassils’s 103 Shots and Lyle Ashton Harris and Thomas Allen
Harris’s Brotherhood, Crossroads and Etcetera.” QED: A Journal in
GLBTQ Worldmaking, Volume 6. 1.
Opening Conversations: A Writer’s Reader (writing textbook co-editor). 2015
Hayden-McNeil Publishing.

Fellowships, Awards, and Competitive Assistantships

Northwestern University Graduate Assistantship 2016-2023
School of Communications, Northwestern University
Graduate Writing Fellowship 2019-2022
Graduate Writing Place, Northwestern University
Research Grant 2020
Sexualities Project, Northwestern University
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Gender & Sexuality Studies Teaching Assistantship 2019-2020

Gender & Sexuality Studies Program, Northwestern University
Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship 2019
Social Sciences Research Council
Newberry Library Archival Fellowship 2018
Mellon Foundation, New York, NY
University of Massachusetts Amherst Graduate Assistantship 2012-2016
Department of English, UMass Amherst
Diversity Fellowship 2015-2016
Writing Program, UMass Amherst
Walker Gibson Graduate Essay Prize 2015
Department of English, UMass Amherst
Feminisms & Rhetorics Graduate Student Award 2015
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Arizona State University
Moran-Herrington Fellowship in Composition & Rhetoric 2012-2013
Department of English, UMass Amherst

Conference Presentations and Seminars

Panelist: “Rhetorical Stewardship & Black Feminist Conceptualizations of 2022
Care”
Rhetoric Society of America Conference, Maryland, MD 2021
Attendee: Archival Power Seminar
Rhetoric Society of American Summer Institute, Syracuse 2020
University
“Marie Kondo’s Promise of Happiness: Everyday Minimalism, Whiteness,
and the New American Dream”
Rhetoric Society of America Conference, Portland, OR 2020
(conference cancelled due to COVID-19)
“An Archives of One’s Own: Feminist Historiography and the Cemetery
Lady” 2019
Rhetoric Society of America Conference, Portland, OR
(conference cancelled due to COVID-19)
“Archiving the Cemetery Lady: Feminized Labor, Feminist History, and 2019
Floral Tributes”
National Women’s Studies Association Conference, San
Francisco, CA 2019
“Public Pedagogies and Queer Stuff: Enacting Community in a Hoard
of Clam Shells, Corset Clips, and Broken Inkwells”
Theoretical Archaeology Group Conference, Syracuse, NY 2018
Attendee: Summer Institute in Performance: Transnational Feminisms in
Practice
Northwestern University 2018
 213

Panelist: “Researchers, Activists, and Archivists: A Roundtable Discussion 2017

on Queer Archives”
Rhetoric Society of America Conference, Minneapolis, MN 2017
“Queer Trans Culture and Invention Beyond Visibility: Experiencing
Cassils”
Rhetoric Society of America Conference, Minneapolis, MN 2016
Queer Archival Immersion Seminar
Rhetoric Society of American Summer Institute, Indiana University
“Building Beautiful Walls: History, Labor, and Accountability in the 2016
National Black Doll Museum of History and Culture"
Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference, University of Dayton
“#trigger Rhetorics: From Digital Feminist Practice to Institutional 2016
Appropriation”
Thomas R. Watson Conference, University of Louisville
“(Re)articulating ‘Woman’: Archival Performances and Gender Activisms 2016
in Women's Colleges”
Rhetoric Society of America Conference, Atlanta, Georgia 2014
“’Dear Lou’: Archival Orientations, Queer Performances, and the Sexual
Minorities Archives” 2012
Conference on College Composition & Communication, Houston,
Texas
“(Re)writing the Student Body: Archiving Gender Activisms at Smith
College”
Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference, Arizona State University
“UMass, tumbling: Enacting Audience in the Composition Classroom”
Engaging Practices Conference on Composition, UMass Boston
Panelist: “Rhetoric in the Matrix of Feminism, Family, and Human Rights”
Conference on Activism, Rhetoric, and Research, Syracuse
University

Teaching Grants & Awards

Course Enhancement Grant for “GSS 330: Trash!” 2020
Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Northwestern University
Residential First-Year Experience Student Choice Teaching Award 2015
Residential Learning Communities Office, UMass Amherst
College Writing Special Project Funding 2014
Writing Program, UMass Amherst
Residential First-Year Experience Student Choice Teaching Award 2014
Residential Learning Communities Office, UMass Amherst

Undergraduate Teaching
 214

Northwestern University
Expository Writing (for young adults incarcerated by Illinois) 2021
Angry, Ecstatic, Depressed, Inspired: Feminist Feelings (cancelled 2020
due to COVID-19)
Trash! Hoarding, Bad Objects, & Performance 2020
U.S. Gay & Lesbian History (teaching assistant) 2020
Sexual Subjects (teaching assistant) 2019
Performance, Culture, & Communication 2018
University of Massachusetts Amherst
College Writing (including Honors College Writing, College 2013-2016
Writing, College Writing for Business Majors)

Additional Teaching
Community & High School Courses
Chicago Howard Area Community Center
Creative Non-Fiction for advanced English language 2017
learners
Summerfuel International High School Program 2016
Advanced Essay Writing 2014-2016
Social Media & Journalism

Writing Consultation & Pedagogical Support

Northwestern University 2020-2022
Prison Education Program tutor 2019-2022
Writing Consultant (grad., faculty, staff) 2019-2022
Interdisciplinary Writing Group Coordinator
University of Massachusetts Amherst 2015-2016
Writing Tutor 2016
Diversity Fellows Coordinator 2015
Graduate Teaching Instructor Mentor

Archival & Museum Work

Archivist: Helen Sclair Ephemera and Personal Papers Collections 2019-present
Newberry Library, Chicago, IL
Exhibit Designer: Sanctified (Exhibit on Assotto Saint) 2018
African American Cultural Center, University of Illinois at Chicago
Board Member 2016-2017
Gerber/Hart Library and Archives, Chicago, IL
Board Member 2014-2015
Sexual Minorities Archives Educational Foundation, Northampton,
MA
 215

Public Performance & Programming

Author: Junk 2019
Summer Institute in Performance, Northwestern University
Exhibit Designer: Sanctified 2018
African American Cultural Center, University of Illinois at Chicago
Convener, Instructor: Halcyon House LGBTQ Creative Writing Workshop 2018
Cleveland Park Public Library, Washington, D.C.
Author, Performer: keep, donate, trash 2017
Northwestern University
Author, Director, Performer: imposters 2015
University of Massachusetts Amherst

Academic Service
Professional Development Presentations Delivered
“Writing the Prospectus” 2021
Department of Performance Studies, Northwestern
University
“Demystifying the Job Market” 2020
Graduate Writing Place, Northwestern University (COVID-19
cancellation)
Panelist: Dissertation Development Program Colloquium 2020
The Graduate School, Northwestern University
“Process-Based Writing in Your Classroom” 2020
Graduate Writing Place, Northwestern University
“Writing for Internal Fellowships and GAships” 2020
Graduate Writing Place, Northwestern University
“Developing and Delivering Conference Papers, Panels, 2019
& Presentations”
Graduate Writing Place, Northwestern University
Panelist: Alumni Career Panel 2016
Writing Program, Syracuse University
Invited Speaker: ENGLISH 329H Tutoring Writing: Theory & 2016
Practice
Writing Center, UMass Amherst 2016
Panelist: Symposium on Diversity and Composition
Writing Program, UMass Amherst 2015
Panelist: “Navigating Intersectional Identities”
Department of English, UMass Amherst 2015
“Process-Based Writing in Your Classroom”
Writing Program Spring Symposium, UMass Amherst 2014
Panelist “Graduate Student Orientations”
Department of English, UMass Amherst
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Committee Work
Member: Graduate Conference Committee 2017-2018
Department of Performance Studies, Northwestern
University
Convening Committee Member: “Methods Symposium 2016: 2015
New Approaches in Queer, Postcolonial, and Black Studies”
UMass Amherst
Student Representative: Composition and Rhetoric Faculty 2015
Committee
Department of English, UMass Amherst
Designer: Bodies that Matter Interdisciplinary Graduate 2014-2015
Conference
Department of English, UMass Amherst
Student Representative: Faculty Graduate Studies Committee 2014-2015
Department of English, UMass Amherst
Member: English Graduate Organization 2013-2016
Department of English, UMass Amherst
Reader: First-Year Common Read Committee 2014
UMass Amherst
Communications Chair: Community Conference on Activism, 2011-2012
Rhetoric, and Research
Writing Program, Syracuse University

Educational Administration
Co-founder and Director of Curriculum, FIRSTgen Orientation 2020-2021
FIRSTgenOrientation.com
Senior Administrator 2009-2013
College of Arts and Sciences, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY
Conference Assistant 2010
Transnationalizing LGBT Studies Initiative, Syracuse University
Office Coordinator 2008-2009
College of Arts and Sciences, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY

Academic Professional Memberships

Member: National Women’s Studies Association 2019-present
Member: Rhetoric Society of America 2013-present
Member: Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and 2013-present
Composition