Ask me about my life as a sexualized, gendered body, and I can tell you tales. Endless stories of a woman who was me and is also all of us. Our bodies the flesh metaphor for all human experience. This. This happened to me. This is where I failed. Where I went blind. Where I opened my legs. Where I chewed off my hand. Where I tried to off myself, or offer myself up as useful, or deigned to ask for love, or ventured into pleasure or pain. Or just got drunk and fucked up. Again. Here are the scars. I am a swimmer. My shoulders are broad. My eyes, are blue. 

 

-Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water: A Memoir

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Bodies are not the only designators of oppression, but all oppression is enacted on the body. To discuss oppression as a manifetation of body terrorism is to move the conversation out of the abstract and return it to its site of impact, the body. Otherwise we risk forgetting that oppression in its many variations is a shared experience." 

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-Sonya Renee Taylor, The Body is Not an Apology

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To pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then? / I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea. // There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well, / All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.

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-Walt Whitman, "I Sing the Body Electric"

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I. The Body as Archive 

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When Sarah Ahmed talks about willfulness in Willful Subjects, she calls upon the body. We will a bowling ball into pins by leaning; we stretch a player into the end zone. She tells a story of a young girl, willfully disobedient whose arm rises from the grave to have its last say, only to be beaten by her mother, who finally wins her child’s submission. “Willfulness can be deposited into our bodies,” she says. “[O]ur bodies become part of a willfulness archive” (Ahmed, 19).  

And to be queer is also to be willful, a word that is usually thrown at children and stubborn women (infantilizing us in the process) is reclaimed by the queer speaker. It says, “we refuse to accept.” As Ahmed notes,  

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“And to be in a same-sex relationship is to experience the gendered pronoun as a sign of struggle, one that is both personal as well as political: when your pattern is assumed to be “he” or “she” you have to correct the assumption, and the very act of correction can be heard as a willful imposition on others. It is exhausting, this labor, which is required because certain norms are still at work in how people are assumed to be and to gather; even if we have rights and recognition, the ongoing and everyday nature of these struggles with signs are signs of a struggle” (Ahmed 149).  

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Here are the conclusions I have drawn: the queer body is a willful body. The queer body can be entered into the willfulness archive.  

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Based on this conclusion, I have built my own queer archive, using my body and its experiences. This archive consists not only of the wilful parts of the body (the insistence of traumatic memory, the chaotic nature of attraction, the unpredictability of gender), but also historical memory as it weighs on the body: books, legislation, zine manifestos, and pictures. Because this archive will uses the body as its guide, the selection of the pieces of ephemera used to construct archive will be guided by the personal: I was born in 1988 in the midst of the AIDS epidemic, which defined queerness for a generation, about a month after a major sit-in at the FDA caused them to speed up the approval process for HIV meds. I started dating girls in 2005, the same year that the American Medical Association apologized to the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association for a history of mistreatment toward queer clients and my doctor told me that having sex with women didn’t count and my therapist asked me if I still wanted a family. I moved to New York in 2007, shortly after Tennessee declared marriage to be a heterosexual institution, and started marching in anti-war protests with other queer people. I began seeing queerness itself as political.  

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These are just a few examples of how the body can inform an archive of queerness. Drawing from authors such as Rebecca Solnit, Maggie Nelson, Trisha Low, Lidia Yuknavitch, and Michelle Tea, I have blended research, theory, and personal experience into the queer archive of the self, resulting in a collection that begins to dip its toes into my body’s queer history.  

 

Form 

 

This project is written in three parts. 

 

The first part explores how the body is defined. What are the boundaries of the body? What is corporeality? Incorporeality? What makes up body, and what makes up mind? Where do the body and the mind meet up and where do they diverge? How does the mind determine what happens in the body? Was Descartes full of shit? Should we believe in ghosts? Should I possibly get a therapist who believes in the astral plane? 

 

In the second part, I explore the expression of the body. This section considers queer identity the most heavily, while also thinking of other ways, besides sexuality, the body expresses itself. What does it mean to be touch hungry? Is dancing really a revolutionary act?  

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And lastly, I talk about how the body protests. I use this section to talk more about the ways in which I have used my body as a political object, and how, in some ways, we cannot avoid having our bodies used as political objects. How do you choose an outfit when you’re giving a speech on sexual violence? How do you respond when a man on the street tells you to smile?  

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As I considered these questions, I sifted through historical ephemera, medical documents, and political treatises. My archive includes items such as  a 1995 Newsweek cover story on bisexuality, the DSM V, and a tarot deck. And these are only a few of the forces that have weighed upon my body.  

 

Queering the Archive  

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This archive revels in failure; it looks for objects that willfully declare themselves in opposition to traditional notions of success. Because, in doing so, we question what it means to be successful, how ideas of success have been shaped by a hetero-patriarchal society. As Jack Halberstam notes in his book The Queer Art of Failure,  

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“[U]nmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world. Failing is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well…it can stand in contrast to the grim scenarios of success that depend upon ‘trying and trying again.’ In fact, if success requires so much effort, then maybe failure is easier in the long run and offers different rewards” (Halberstam, Location 127).  

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For this project, I looked to collect those things that suggest these surprising ways of being.  

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I looked for ways that the body has failed, by the capitalist standard, either intentionally or unintentionally. I looked to depression and PTSD and the ways trauma disrupts memory and time. I looked to mass and weight gain and the ways that bodies are made and unmade by laws, prejudices, and ghost stories. The aim of creating this archive is to pick up the transient and give it bodily context. 

 

To do this, I have chosen to operate in the form of the lyric fragment. I think of these fragments as a piece of a larger essay that shifts as the reader clicks and chooses the artifact they wish to examine. Publishing this archive online allows for each new reader to experience the archive in a different way. Since essays have generally been open to different forms: from braided to hybrid, from critical to lyric, I find that the essay easily accommodates this new model of writing. As queerness transgresses gender and sexuality (or, fails at it), the essay transgresses genre. Therefore, as a is to b or as a=b and b=c, the essay is queer.  

And by queer I mean that it sets up expectation, questioning, craving. Queerness is not just sexual desire outside heteronormative lines, but it is a longing for a different way of doing things. The essay offers room for exploration of this longing, allows us to enter into the utopic space of queer imagining. As Jose Muñoz writes, “Queerness is not yet here…Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing” (Munoz 1). 

 

This form of essay builds on a long history of form transgression, just as the body has long transgressed gender, sexuality, and sex. As David Lazar writes in his essay, “Queering the Essay,” gender transgression and the essay are intimately and etymologically linked:  

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"Turn to genre in the dictionary, and you will be pointed to gender. Early uses of genre cited in the OED refer to distinguishing types of people; the first cited, interestingly, by Lady Morgan, says, 'But what is the genre of character . . . which, if in true keeping to life and manners, should not be found to resemble anybody' (1818). How queer, that one of the first uses of genre suggests a person who is impossible to characterize. Genre is a category after all. So is gender. And the gender category difficult to characterize by normative standards is queer. The genre category difficult or impossible to characterize, the essay, is also queer. The essay is the queer genre.” 
 

I imagine the body as whole, not in spite of, but because of its failures. I look for the things that are hidden, that we have hidden from view. I look for the things that haunt us, that are without bodies. I imagine an archive of failure as an archive of justice, waiting to be rendered. I write those injustices on the body and wait for its acceptance or its rejection. I hold the body in the liminal space of the possible, as I also hold the essay, allowing the form to move and stretch as the body does. As Kazim Ali challenges in his “Genre-Queer: Notes Against Generic Binaries,” “But to use one’s own body. To dance—as the feel-good slogan goes—as though no one is watching. What is your movement vocabulary? How does poetic form live in your own awareness, own body, own language? So you might not know what poem, novel, or essay but what writing can make of you” (Ali 37). This project hopes to find out.  

 

​Exploring Narrative Through Trauma 

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Though I do consider my body a site of possibility, I also must recognize my body as a site, and a story, of trauma. Diagnosed with PTSD in my twenties, I had my first flashback at age 14, my first therapy session at age 16, suicidal thoughts from 15 to the age of 27 or so, and many, many nights full of insomnia, depression, and stomach aches. I have mostly recovered from these more overt symptoms, but I still struggle with depression, hypervigilance. The story of my body is a story of disruption. As David J. Morris writes in his book, The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,  

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“[T]rauma destroys the fabric of time. In normal time, you move from one moment to the next, sunrise to sunset, birth to death. After trauma, you may move in circles, find yourself being sucked backwards into an eddy, or bouncing about like a rubber ball from now to then and back again. August is June, June is December. What time is it? Guess again. In the traumatic universe, the basic laws of matter are suspended: ceiling fans can be helicopters, car exhaust can be mustard gas. Another odd feature of traumatic time is that it doesn’t just destroy the flow of the present into the future, it corrodes everything that came before, eating at moments and people from your previous life, until you can’t remember why any of them mattered” (Location 62). 

 

Reclaiming narrative after trauma is one way to heal, but sense of time, of place, of object is flexible to the traumatized body. Is that a car backfiring or a gunshot? Or, in my case, is that a fan blowing overhead or a breathing machine? Is this benign or a threat? 

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The form of the lyric fragment helps me to access memory, to tell the story of my body in a way that feels truest to its experience. It allows that bouncing back and forth, that wandering through time and place. And hopefully, it builds a narrative, or, at least, an understanding.  Writing in this form helps me as writer, and you as reader, remember what mattered.  

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Cathy Caruth, in her book Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, broadens the scope and, in the lineage of Freud and Lacan, considers trauma a cultural problem as well as a personal one. “Through the notions of trauma,” she argues, “I will argue we can understand that a rethinking of reference is aimed not at eliminating history but as resituating it in our understanding, that is, at precisely permitting history to arise where immediate understanding may not” (Caruth 12). As I seek to understand the story of my own body, I grab the pieces of transient history that help me to understand its trauma better. What can a magazine article tell me about how my mother’s lungs drowned in fluid? What can an old movie tell me about why “no,” has often not been taken at its word?  

 

By taking this history to build an archive, we also get to another important truth about trauma and memory: that it is not the reenactment itself that triggers memory, but rather the sensory flotsam and jetsam that occupy the amygdala. Caruth reminds us that, “The intricate relation between trauma and survival arises in this text, not, as one might expect, because of a seemingly direct and unmediated relation between consciousness and life-threatening events, but rather through the very paradoxical structure of indirectness in psychic trauma” (62). 

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When I write about trauma, I have no desire to recount events themselves. But like a camera that pans away from an explicitly sexual or violent (or both) scene, I want to concentrate on the walls, on linoleum, on the speech playing on the television in the background, on the bookshelves. The narrative of trauma is indirect narrative. It is a narrative of imagery, of poetry, of language that wouldn’t typically be used. When writing within the traumatized body, we must be willing to be flexible with form as we are flexible with time. We must question the structure of language itself. Because trauma in the body is often where language fails. These fragments represent a gathering of personal and cultural memory in order to grapple with the experiential gap.  

 

Writing Through the Feminine Body 

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I cannot define the feminine body. In the past, I could have written about curves and hips and breasts and vaginas. But our current understanding of gender has evolved. We now understand that there is nothing less feminine about a penis than there is about a vagina if a woman occupies that body. We now understand that femininity is defined as more than body parts, more than biological determinism.  

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And yet, it is still primarily women who are silenced in speaking about our bodies. This can be cisgender women talking about our periods or transgender women talking about their hormones. Both of these have traditionally been rejected as topics of conversation in polite society and in academia. And the law also seeks to silence our bodies, by making laws to control our reproductive choices, to restrict the availability of gender confirmation surgeries. Often, women are pushed aside in these political debates. We are not given space in the room. Only 23.7 percent of the House of Representatives are women.  

It is with this urgency that Helene Cixous urges women to write.  

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“Because so few women have as yet won back their body. Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reserve-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word ‘silence,’ the one that, aiming for the impossible, stops short before the word ‘impossible’ and writes it as ‘the end’” (Cixous 886). 

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This project takes that charge to heart. As I gather my archive, I am figuring out how to break silence. This project seeks to eliminate the notion that the experience of the body is less valuable than academic treatise. It trusts that the reader understands that there is no such thing as objectivity, that what we generally call objective is simply the experience of the white, masculine body, his experience defined as universal.  

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And all archives are political. As Terry Cook reminds us in his essay, “Archival Science and Postmodernism,”  

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“Facts in texts cannot be separated from their ongoing and past interpretation, nor author from subject or audience, nor author from authoring, nor authoring from context. Nothing is neutral. Nothing is impartial. Nothing is objective. Everything is shaped, presented, represented, re-presented, symbolized, signified, signed, constructed by the speaker, photographer, writer, for a set purpose” (Cook 7).   

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And so I understand that my archive is also political. And so, before I can proceed, I must determine its purpose. What narrative am I trying to shape? What is the narrative I wish to push about trauma? About queerness? Silence? Are the materials that would help me to tell my story even accessible? 

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Charles Morris writes, “Scholars in [the history of sexuality] . . . have to contend with the problem of silences: silences created by the censorship of archival and educational institutions, silences created by historians’ refusal to acknowledge the sexualities of individuals they study, and silences created by authors of the documents historians use to reconstruct the past” (147).  

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If we are to view trauma as a cultural problem. And if history is being used in order to reinstate and heal the narrative, then we must contend with silence. Many of the materials that a queered archive might wish to include have either been mislabeled, erased, or written out of history. Queer women, especially, have been, as we have seen through Cixous, the victims of this silencing.  

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So how can I tell my body’s story, build my body’s archive, when my foremothers, both queer and not, have had their history hidden? How can we re-interpret this feminine/queer history? 

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We can start by understanding that, since every archive pushes a narrative, they can also be a site of innovation. As Erin Rand writes in “Queer Critical Rhetoric Bites Back,”  

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“By understanding the archive as a site only of representation—where what matters is whether all voices are given space and time proportionate to their demographics—we neglect to consider the archive as a space also of invention, a space of theory production (Biesecker, ‘‘Of Historicity’’ 124). As such, even the most ostensibly welcoming and accessible of forums often enact a stunning willingness to miss the point of queer rhetoric, to view its purpose as purely critical or its archival work as merely additive, thereby taking the teeth out of what might be a radically queer torsion of theory” (Rand 535). 

I would like to posit that by building an archive of the queer feminine body, that I am contributing to the work of building theory. By choosing the medium of the creative, by eschewing the “objectivity” of the academic, I am looking to open an archive against silencing, that helps heal wounds of historical trauma that silence keeps open.  

 

​The Body as Rhetoric

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When we talk about the archive of the body as theory-making, then we also need to acknowledge the role that the body itself plays. The body is a tool of rhetoric, a means of persuasion that this project hopes to document and explore.

  

The phrase “body rhetoric” was first used by a Professor Leland Griffin as a way to critique physical protest, in order to “express the thesis that much of the new rhetoric is not persuasion at all…but instead constitutes the ‘holding of a gun at the head’ of those to whom the protests are directed” (Haiman 17). My guess is that Griffin would not be much of a fan of Black Lives Matters protests I participated in in New York that shut down the Manhattan Bridge, the Brooklyn bridge, the FDR, the Holland Tunnel, the West Side Highway (and these were just the ones I saw). I do not suppose he would have been a fan of civil rights sit-ins, Grand central station die-ins, or the way I used my body to block other protestors so that women could access an abortion clinic in the South Bronx.  

I was out to brunch the other morning, to celebrate a friend’s birthday. There was another person there, a straight, white man, who was listing off his liberal bona fides, but admitted that he was scared to be the vanguard of anything. A little drunk on mimosas, and dreaming of a better world, he said, “When the revolution comes, I’ll be right behind you.” I replied that it was always the people who are marginalized that are putting our lives on the line. We would benefit if more people like him were willing to do it.  

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Herbert Simons defines “body rhetoric” as, “designed to dramatize issues, enlist additional sympathizers, and delegitimize the established order. The targets of sit-ins, sleep-ins, and other confrontational activities are invited to participate in a drama of self-exposure” (40). In another word, performance. Where is the line between protest and art? How can the movement of my body create an essay? A form? A manifesto? A theory? 

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Those who resist the body as rhetoric often think of these methods of protest as coercive and obstructive, as uncivil. But with the cry of civility, we often hear a call for keeping the status quo. My body understands that the status quo is not good enough. I have not been able to afford food, medical bills. My brain has been rerouted to consider danger around every corner. I have been discriminated against because of my sexual attraction. As Robert Scott and Donald Smith write, “A rhetorical theory suitable to our age must take into account the charge that civility and decorum serve as masks for the preservation of injustice, that they condemn the dispossessed to non-being, and that as transmitted in a technological society they become the instrumentalities of power for those who ‘have’” (Scott and Smith 33). Using the body in protest is a means of persuasion against the status quo. By documenting it here, in my archive of the body, I am allowing the archive to do the work of theory production, as explored by Rand.  

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This also helps me to draw a more direct line between theory and lived experience. Halberstam and Muñoz might say that queer failure is liberation, but what happens when I document the hunger my body experiences when I fail? My arm might embody my willfulness, but what action did it take to demonstrate it? Can I use the recording, or remembering, of that action, as narrative and theory building? Can the body, and the rhetoric it produces, be exhibit A? Can I collect the remnants of bodily memory in order to tell a broader story?