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An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures
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In this bold new work of cultural criticism, Ann Cvetkovich develops a queer approach to trauma. She argues for the importance of recognizing---and archiving---accounts of trauma that belong as much to the ordinary and everyday as to the domain of catastrophe. Cvetkovich contends that the field of trauma studies, limited by too strict a division between the public and the
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Paperback, 355 pages
Published
March 14th 2003
by Duke University Press Books
(first published 2003)
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An Archive of Feelings opens with gushing praise for Le Tigre/Kathleen Hanna and Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, which meant that I was wondering from page one if I could take seriously a work about trauma that is brazenly uncritical of sites of significant transmisogynistic trauma such as MichFest. Especially when it casts those sites as arenas where some rituals of healing for (a certain kind of) lesbian trauma survivor can occur. Cvetkovich describes a scene at trans woman exclusionary MichF
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I wanted to read this on the strength of the article that later formed the chapter "in the archive of lesbian feelings", which deals explicitly with grassroots queer archives and the differences between grassroots and institutional archives. in this chapter, Cvetkovich claims that queer archives -- considered in the broadest sense as queer individuals' or communities' attachments to objects/artefacts -- are often formed of attachments to seemingly arbitrary or even homophobic things -- like old
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Absolutely amazing. I had read selected chapters from this before and was impressed, but reading the entire book just solidifies my initial reaction. Cvetkovich is a genius, and her ideas have influenced the way I work with trauma and will influence my future scholarship for sure.
This is really an excellent book, and very teach-able. It, or individual chapters from it could be used in courses on on Holocaust or trauma studies, affect theory, psychoanalytic reading of popular culture, as well as GLBTQ, transnational culture, social movement history, /or gender pop culture more generally. Cvetkovich accessibly presents complicated and nuanced readings of a variety of texts and connects these readings to the way they are part of public cultures of feeling that we all live
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In An Archive of Feeling (2003), Ann Cvetkovich explores trauma through an archive of lesbian artifacts and interviews with lesbians. She is particularly "interested in how these lesbian sites give rise to different ways of thinking about trauma and in particular to a sense of trauma as connected to the textures of everyday experience" (3-4). For Cvetkovich, trauma isn't a single one-time event (such as September 11), but rather part of lived experience. Additionally, part of her goal is to unde
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an important look at trauma from a queer/lesbian perspective. it was very affirming to the ways in which trauma has positive effects within personal and cultural contexts, as well as the negative and the neutral. some of the oral history stuff was really fascinating, and told stories rarely heard even in queer contexts. i had not considered the feelings created by the trauma of AIDs with regards carers and particularly queer/lesbian carers, and the consequent effect on the community's trauma nar
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cvetkovich's text took a while to get started, but after sifting through the first few chapters, it really blew me away. while she begins with a rather repetitive framework, it also helps make the text accessible to those who may have less exposure. i loved several of the chapters in this book though, particularly cvetkovich's really singular analysis of butch-femme relationships in chapter 2, which argues for a necessary convergence of trauma and desire, debasing notions of active/passive binar
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Mar 06, 2007
Laura
rated it
really liked it
Recommends it for:
academics, queer theory junkies, trauma survivors, le tigre fans
Shelves:
non-fiction
I decided to check this book out, after reading about how an article by Cvetkovich helped to inspire Le Tigre to write the song "Keep On Living".
This book deals with the many intersections between the queer community and the current discussions in trauma theory. It especially delves into issues with "confessing" versus "witnessing", and how the queer community's experiences with coming out create a more positive model for trauma survivor's to tell their stories and heal, contrasted with past mo ...more
This book deals with the many intersections between the queer community and the current discussions in trauma theory. It especially delves into issues with "confessing" versus "witnessing", and how the queer community's experiences with coming out create a more positive model for trauma survivor's to tell their stories and heal, contrasted with past mo ...more
In parts I think this book is fantastic, gorgeous, and amazingly done... then at times I get frustrated and think there are so many fissures and incomplete sentences.
I guess my main issues would be (1) the use of trauma as an analytic category without a clear context for how she is talking about power... namely, who has more access to trauma? and correspondingly (2) do we try to then describe the shape of oppression through the lens of trauma-- doesn't this pathologize race, gender, sexual, clas ...more
I guess my main issues would be (1) the use of trauma as an analytic category without a clear context for how she is talking about power... namely, who has more access to trauma? and correspondingly (2) do we try to then describe the shape of oppression through the lens of trauma-- doesn't this pathologize race, gender, sexual, clas ...more
An incredibly engrossing, quick read--although it's ~300 pages, I finished it in less than a day. Highlights for me included the chapter on butch-femme touch and trauma, and the oral histories of lesbian AIDS activists. Cvetkovich does an incredible broad sweep of a number of lesbian public cultures and readings of things that are really valuable for establishing a framework of how trauma studies might interact with other fields to be truly interdisciplinary. For a book with a somewhat imposing
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I'm frustrated with the effusive praise Cvetkovich repeatedly gives Michfest - she even devotes an entire section to the "controversies" of Michfest without once mentioning that it excludes trans women, which I wouldn't have thought would even be possible - and I'm also a bit uncomfortable with the way she talks about Brandon Teena in the epilogue. So, on the whole, not the most trans-friendly book, but I'm still giving it four stars because it was a really good, really cathartic read. A lot of
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ok, at first reading I was excited about this book but wished it was less academic language. now I'm working on this project that is about queer archives and yiddish archives and this book is SO HELPFUL and relevant so yay I'm so glad this book exists!
Oct 08, 2013
Kate
rated it
really liked it
Recommends it for:
grassroots archivists, counterprotestors
Recommended to Kate by:
Melanie
Shelves:
ischool
"To deny sickness and death is to deny the reality of the present."
"Every life is worthy of preservation."
"Every life is worthy of preservation."
This book has some categorical problems. HOWEVER, it is really excellent (and innovative) with regard to its treatment of trauma and archives. Both very personally and academically impactful.
love all the parts about the Lesbian Herstory Archives
brilliant!
transphobic in content, underachieving in theoretical ambition.
The frame story as I understand it is interpreting trauma as generating an enormous range of affects as well as archives that capture, represent, run on, and themselves continually (re)produce affects. Cvetkovich aims to reshape at least two definitons. 1) Trauma is not only clinical, or defined by its global or national scale, but also part of everyday experience. 2) Moving away from thinking about archives as strictly institutional or a matter of "general logic" (bye, Derrida) and towards a de
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Mar 02, 2020
i.
rated it
really liked it
Shelves:
academia,
affect-theory,
feminist-thought,
sex-and-sexuality,
theory,
methods,
archival,
queer-studies
Cvetkovich seeks to explore trauma, and in doing so, she approaches a new mode of archive, arguing that, “…trauma challenges common understandings of what constitutes an archive…[it] puts pressure on conventional forms of documentation, representation, and commemoration, giving rise to new genres of expression” (7). Trauma, through affect, produces public culture or ways of life/lived experiences that are “frequently inadequate to the task of documentation” (9); thus, an archive of feelings, “…i
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This is a book I did not read from front to back. I preferred skipping around and focusing on a few different chapters. I used this book as a part of my research for my senior thesis on Queer Archiving. Now that I am done with the thesis I would definitely go back to this book and read it again.
This is a book with far broader appeal than any short summary could convey. When I was investigating trauma theory in connection with my graduate thesis on trauma in the 19th Century, I discovered Cvetkovich wrote a book on this topic. I had a hard time finding a library copy and it was too expensive to buy, so I bought this instead. I knew nothing about this author or this text.
I felt an instant affinity for this book. Cvetkovich's thesis is that gay and particularly lesbian culture commemorat ...more
I felt an instant affinity for this book. Cvetkovich's thesis is that gay and particularly lesbian culture commemorat ...more
A critique of Judith Herman's idea that S/M expresses past traumas. Encourages greater intention to sexual experimentation as a way through trauma.
Lesbian public culture approaching trauma in performance art, memoirs, punk bands instead of medicalized narratives.
Discusses Berlant's "intimate public sphere" in which citizens of the U.S. count as citizens because they have suffered from a trauma of the state.
Lesbian public culture approaching trauma in performance art, memoirs, punk bands instead of medicalized narratives.
Discusses Berlant's "intimate public sphere" in which citizens of the U.S. count as citizens because they have suffered from a trauma of the state.
I really appreciate Cvetkovich's exploration of the ways trauma is differently experienced.
I'm no expert in the field, but I have been disappointed by other critics who insist on systematic, axiomatically reductive accounts of trauma and mourning.
Props, dude.
I'm no expert in the field, but I have been disappointed by other critics who insist on systematic, axiomatically reductive accounts of trauma and mourning.
Props, dude.
I might be the only person on earth who thinks that this book fell way to short of what could have been a really productive mark. Interesting, just not as meaty as it should be. Maybe a better point of departure than a destination.
i'm in LOVE with this book so far.
what i learned from this book: feelings are political, and important to collective memory.
just starting to read this book, and it is powerful. ann cvetkovich is a smarty-pants and i am ready to learn!
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Ann Cvetkovich is Ellen C. Garwood Centennial Professor of English and Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. She is the author of Depression: A Public Feeling, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures, and Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism; a coeditor of Political Emotions; and a former editor of
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