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COPYRIGHT 2002 Duke University Press
Every lesbian is worthy of inclusion in history. If you have the courage to touch another woman, then you area very famous person.
--Joan Nestle, Not Just Passing Through
Perhaps to the surprise of those who think of both traditional and grassroots archives as an esoteric interest, Cheryl Dunye's 1996 film The Watermelon Woman elevates the institution to a new level of popular visibility by making fun of it. The archives also serve as a source of narrative drama in The Watermelon Woman, in which Cheryl (played by Dunye herself) becomes obsessed with uncovering the life of the mysterious Watermelon Woman, an African American actress who plays the stereotypical maid roles in old Hollywood films such as Plantation Memories. Through interviews and trips to libraries and obscure archives, Cheryl slowly pieces together the story of Fae Richards, whose offscreen life includes a romance with her white director, Martha Page (styled after Dorothy Arzner), a career as a singer in black clubs, and, in her later years, a long-term lesbian relationship. Combining documentary with fiction, The Watermelon Woman weaves a visual archive of old photographs, film clips, and newsreels into its drama, simulating the look of these genres so well that it is hard to believe that Fae Richards is Dunye's creation and not an actual historical figure. (1) The most accessible part of the Fae Richards archive are the materials that connect her to mainstream popular culture--Hollywood films and a relationship with a prominent white woman--and Cheryl at once cherishes these artifacts and searches for other evidence that would bring Fae Richards to life as something more than a stereotype of a marginal figure. As part of her quest, Cheryl makes the trip from Philadelphia to New York to visit the Center for Lesbian Information and Technology (CLIT). Novelist Sarah Schulman makes a memorable cameo appearance as the archivist who sternly informs Cheryl and her friend that the huge boxes of relevant materials are not filed or indexed because CLIT is a "volunteer-run" collective. When Cheryl discovers some of her first photographs of Richards in the boxes, she is told that they cannot be reproduced without the consensus-based approval of the collective, which meets only every other month. Not content to wait, she illegally documents the images with her video camera.
Those in the know would recognize CLIT as a parody of the Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA); and while some might not filial the joke funny, its humor can also be considered a form of respect and affection, demonstrating the important place of the archive in the lesbian popular imaginary. The actual LHA inspires the same devotion that draws Cheryl to Fae Richards. Founded in 1974, the archives were first housed in the cramped quarters of Joan Nestle and Deborah Edel's Upper West Side apartment, and stories of visits to their apartment's pantry, filled with documents in every nook and cranny, are legendary in accounts of LHA's origins, especially now that the archives have relocated to a more public space. (2) Conceived more as a community center than a research institution, one of LHA's original missions was to provide safe space for lesbian-owned documents that might otherwise be left to neglect of destroyed by indifferent or homophobic families. Since 1993, LHA has been housed in a Brooklyn brownstone purchased not through large grants or public funding but through many small donations from lesbians around the country: Desiree Yael Vester, a longtime LHA volunteer, notes that the archive serves as a ritual space within which cultural memory and history are preserved. (3) The new site continues to combine private, domestic spaces with public, institutional ones, especially because it occupies a building that was once a borne: the downstairs living room serves as a comfortable reading room, the xerox machine sits alongside other appliances in the kitchen, the entryway is an exhibit space, and the top floor houses a member of the collective who lives there on a permanent basis. (4) Visitors can browse in the filing cabinets and shelves at their leisure rather than having to negotiate closed stacks. Organized as a domestic space in which all lesbians will feel welcome to see and touch a lesbian legacy, the LHA aims for an emotional rather than a narrowly intellectual experience.
Both LHA and its representation in The Watermelon Woman point to the vital role of archives within lesbian cultures and to their innovative and unusual forms of appearance. As one way of exploring the cultural and especially the emotional power of archives, this article investigates recent documentary films and videos--Not Just Passing Through (dir. Jean Carlomusto, Dolores Perez. Catherine Saalfield, and Polly Thistlethwaite, US, 1994), Forbidden Love (dir. Aerlyn Weissman and Lynne Fernie, Canada, 1992), Greetings from Out Here (dir. Ellen Spiro, US, 1993), and Girlpower (dir. Sadie Benning, US, 1992)--in order to show how these works themselves constitute an archive. (5) These documentaries use the power of visual media to put the archive on display, incorporating a wide range of traditional and unorthodox materials, including personal photographs, videotapes from oral history archives, innovative forms of autodocumentary, and "archival" footage, including clips from popular film and television. Film and video can extend the reach of the traditional archive, collating and making accessible documents that might otherwise remain obscure except to those doing specialized research.
But in addition to exploring how these works transform our ideas about what an archive can and must include, this article will argue that they demonstrate the profoundly affective power of a useful archive, especially an archive of sexuality and gay and lesbian life, which must preserve and produce not just knowledge but feeling. Lesbian and gay history demands a radical archive of emotion in order to document intimacy, sexuality, love, and activism, all areas of experience that are difficult to chronicle through the materials of a traditional archive. (6) Moreover, gay and lesbian archives address the traumatic loss of history that has accompanied sexual life and the formation of sexual publics, and they assert the role of memory and affect in compensating for institutional neglect. Like other archives of trauma, such as those that commemorate the Holocaust, slavery, or war, they must enable the acknowledgment of a past that can be painful to remember, impossible to forget, and resistant to consciousness. The history of trauma often depends on the evidence of memory, not just because of the absence of other forms of evidence but because of the need to address traumatic experience through witnessing and retelling. Central to traumatic memory is what Toni Morrison, in the context of remembering slavery, has called "emotional memos," those details of experience that are affective, sensory, often highly specific, and personal. (7) Subject to the idiosyncracies of the psyche and the logic of the unconscious, emotional experience and the memory of it demand and produce an unusual archive, often one that resists the coherence of narrative or that is fragmented and ostensibly arbitrary. (8) Memories can cohere around objects in unpredictable ways, and the task of the archivist of emotion is thus an unusual one.
Understanding gay and lesbian archives as archives of emotion and trauma helps to explain some of their idiosyncracies, or, one might say, their "queerness." They address particular versions of the determination to "never forget" that gives archives of traumatic history their urgency. That gay and lesbian history even exists has been a contested fact, and the struggle to record and preserve it is exacerbated by the invisibility that often surrounds intimate life, especially sexuality. Even the relatively short history (roughly "one hundred years") of homosexuality as an identity category has created the historiographic challenge not only of documenting the wide varieties of homosexual experience, but of examining documents of homophobia and of earlier histories of homoeroticism and same-sex relations. (9) As another legacy of Stonewall (itself an important and elusive subject for the archive), gay and lesbian archives have sought to preserve not only the record of successful efforts to combat homophobia and create a public gay and lesbian culture, but also the evidence from periods "before Stonewall" of many different forms of sexual public cultures. The last decade, in particular, has seen a marked historical turn, as historians, documentary makers, and average citizens have been drawn to historicizing not just the politics of a gay movement, but earlier generations of struggle that threaten to become lost history; they are affectively motivated by the passionate desire to claim the fact of history and to acknowledge those who provided the foundations for the seventies gay movement. Contemporary queer culture, including the films and videos investigated in this article, has shown a particular fascination with the generations of the fifties and early sixties, which immediately preceded gay and lesbian movement activism. (10) This trend is especially evident in the popularity of the documentary genre; the groundbreaking Before Stonewall: The Making of a Gay and Lesbian Community (dir. Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss, US, 1985) has been followed by an explosion of documentary film and video that has a ready audience at gay and lesbian film festivals.
The stock in trade of the gay and lesbian archive is ephemera, the term used by archivists and librarians to describe occasional publications and paper documents, material objects, of items that fall into the miscellaneous category when catalogued. (11) Gay and lesbian archives are often built upon the donations of private collectors who have saved the ephemeral evidence of gay and lesbian life--both personal and public--because it might otherwise disappear. These archives preserve publicly available materials that might not be found in libraries or other public institutions, such as pornographic books, short-run journals, and forms of mass culture that are objects of camp reception. Also collected there are personal materials, such as diaries, letters, and photographs, which assume additional archival importance when public cultures have failed to chronicle gay and lesbian lives. In addition to accumulating these textual materials, gay and lesbian archives are likely to have disproportionately large collections of ephemera because of their concern with sexuality and leisure culture, as well as with the legacies of grassroots political activism. Thus San Francisco's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Society of Northern California (GLBTS) has items such as matchbook covers, the notepads available for exchanging phone numbers in gay bars, fliers for club events, personal photo albums, condoms packaged for special events, and vibrators. LHA has a collection of T-shirts with political slogans, the hard hat with a lambda sign on it worn by a lesbian construction worker, and posters from political and cultural events. Both archives also house the files of activist groups such as ACT UP and Lesbian Avengers, which include ephemera such as meeting minutes, publicity fliers for demonstrations, buttons, stickers, and financial records. Their principles of selection and inclusion differ from those of a public research archive that defines value according to historical or research interest. It is LHA's policy, for example, not to refuse any donation of materials that a lesbian considers important in her life and actively to encourage ordinary lesbians to collect and donate the archival evidence of their everyday lives.
In insisting on the value of apparently marginal or ephemeral materials, the collectors of gay and lesbian archives propose that affects--associated with nostalgia, personal memory, fantasy, and trauma--make a document significant. The archive of feelings is both material and immaterial, at once incorporating objects that might not ordinarily be considered archival and at the same time resisting documentation because sex and feelings are too personal or too ephemeral to leave records. For this reason and others, the archive of feelings lives not just in museums, libraries, and other institutions, but in other more personal and intimate spaces and also, very significantly, within cultural genres. The films and videos explored in this article use the power of the moving image to conjure and preserve emotion, and they often seek to "move" by moving of combining a series of still images to create a montage that works affectively. Especially striking is their use of an archive of popular culture, one that is strongly visual in form, to create an archive of feelings.
The Archive of the Archives
One of the ways that documentary film and video expands the archive is by documenting the archive itself. Archives make an explicit appearance not only in The Watermelon Woman, but also in the 1994 video Not Just Passing Through, which opens with footage from the inauguration of the new LHA space in...
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