Ann Cvetkovich in The Archive of Lesbian Feelings 1 PDF

Zoe Leonard, The Fae Richards Photo Archive, 1993 96.
Created for Cheryl Dunyes film The Watermelon Woman

(1996). From a series of seventy-eight black and white
photographs and notebook of seven pages of typed text on
typewriter paper. The accompanying notes in this fictional
archive identify this photograph as Martha and Fae at home.
(mid-1930s). Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
In the Archives of Lesbian Feelings:
Documentary and Popular Culture
Ann Cvetkovich
Every lesbian is worthy of inclusion in history. If you have the

courage to touch another woman, then you are a 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 Dunyes 1996 lm
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 uncov-
ering the life of the mysterious Watermelon Woman, an African
American actress who plays the stereotypical maid roles in old
Hollywood lms 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 docu-
Copyright 2002 by Camera Obscura

Camera Obscura 49, Volume 17, Number 1
Published by Duke University Press
107
108 Camera Obscura
mentary with ction, The Watermelon Woman weaves a visual archive

of old photographs, lm clips, and newsreels into its drama, simu-
lating the look of these genres so well that it is hard to believe that
Fae Richards is Dunyes creation and not an actual historical
gure.1 The most accessible part of the Fae Richards archive
are the materials that connect her to mainstream popular cul-
ture Hollywood lms 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 or a marginal gure. 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 led
or indexed because CLIT is a volunteer-run collective. When
Cheryl discovers some of her rst 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
nd 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 rst housed in the cramped quarters of
Joan Nestle and Deborah Edels Upper West Side apartment, and
stories of visits to their apartments pantry, lled with documents
in every nook and cranny, are legendary in accounts of LHAs ori-
gins, 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 LHAs original missions was to pro-
vide safe space for lesbian-owned documents that might other-
wise be left to neglect or destroyed by indifferent or homophobic
families. Since 1993, LHA has been housed in a Brooklyn brown-
stone purchased not through large grants or public funding but
In the Archives of Lesbian Feelings 109
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 pri-
vate, domestic spaces with public, institutional ones, especially
because it occupies a building that was once a home: the down-
stairs living room serves as a comfortable reading room, the xerox
machine sits alongside other appliances in the kitchen, the entry-
way is an exhibit space, and the top oor houses a member of the
collective who lives there on a permanent basis.4 Visitors can
browse in the ling 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 les-
bian legacy, the LHA aims for an emotional rather than a nar-
rowly 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 lms and
videos Not Just Passing Through (dir. Jean Carlomusto, Dolores
Perez, Catherine Saaleld, 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 documen-
taries use the power of visual media to put the archive on display,
incorporating a wide range of traditional and unorthodox mate-
rials, including personal photographs, videotapes from oral
history archives, innovative forms of autodocumentary, and
archival footage, including clips from popular lm and televi-
sion. 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
110 Camera Obscura
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 difcult 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 remem-
ber, impossible to forget, and resistant to consciousness. The his-
tory 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 Morri-
son, in the context of remembering slavery, has called emotional
memory, those details of experience that are affective, sensory,
often highly specic, and personal.7 Subject to the idiosyncracies
of the psyche and the logic of the unconscious, emotional experi-
ence 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 idiosyncra-
cies, 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 sur-
rounds 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 experi-
ence, 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 sex-
ual 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 poli-
tics 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 acknowl-
edge those who provided the foundations for the seventies gay
movement. Contemporary queer culture, including the lms and
videos investigated in this article, has shown a particular fascina-
tion with the generations of the fties 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
lm and video that has a ready audience at gay and lesbian lm
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, or 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 other-
wise disappear. These archives preserve publicly available mate-
rials that might not be found in libraries or other public institu-
tions, 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 photo-
graphs, which assume additional archival importance when pub-
112 Camera Obscura
lic cultures have failed to chronicle gay and lesbian lives. In addi-
tion 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 cul-
ture, as well as with the legacies of grassroots political activism.
Thus San Franciscos Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender
Society of Northern California (GLBTS) has items such as match-
book covers, the notepads available for exchanging phone num-
bers in gay bars, iers 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 les of activist groups such as ACT UP and Lesbian
Avengers, which include ephemera such as meeting minutes,
publicity iers for demonstrations, buttons, stickers, and nan-
cial records. Their principles of selection and inclusion differ
from those of a public research archive that denes value accord-
ing to historical or research interest. It is LHAs policy, for exam-
ple, not to refuse any donation of materials that a lesbian consid-
ers 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 mem-
ory, fantasy, and trauma make a document signicant. The
archive of feelings is both material and immaterial, at once incor-
porating 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 per-
sonal and intimate spaces and also, very signicantly, within cul-
tural genres. The lms 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 or combining a series of still
images to create a montage that works affectively. Especially strik-
Mabel Hampton photo from Not Just Passing Through.

Courtesy Women Make Movies
114 Camera Obscura
ing 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 lm 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 Brooklyn.12 Com-
posed of a series of four loosely connected episodes, Not Just Pass-
ing Through documents the importance and the challenges of
preserving, representing, and communicating lesbian history,
which, as Joan Nestle puts it in an interview in the video, has often
been [wrested] from piles of garbage. One segment of the video
offers a tribute to the life of African American lesbian Mabel
Hampton, who had close ties to LHA; another tells the story of
Marge McDonald, who willed her personal woman-related
papers to LHA, which had to rescue them from the clutches of a
family bent on destroying the evidence of their daughters les-
bianism. McDonald was condent enough of the historical
signicance of her everyday life that she had taken the time to
retype her handwritten diaries in order to make them more acces-
sible. The other episodes focus on the Asian Lesbians of the East
Coast, an organization engaged with the challenges of document-
ing a lesbian presence within Asian history and an Asian presence
within US history, and New Yorks WOW Cafe theater collective, a
center not only for lesbian performance but for the formation of
lesbian publics. Like the slide shows that LHA presents in order
to tour its collection across the United States for the benet of
those who cannot come to New York, Not Just Passing Through
expands the reach of the archive, using video to make its stories
public. One goal of the slide shows is to facilitate the formation of
community, including the creation of local archives. Documen-
tary video and media serve a similar function, especially when dis-
tributed through lm festivals and other venues that create visible
publics.13 For example, Not Just Passing Throughs episode about
Mabel Hampton demonstrates LHAs distinctiveness as a grass-
roots archive and makes one of its most important contributors

more visible. Hampton had close personal ties to LHA cofounder
Joan Nestle, and she not only was involved in the formation of the
archives, but also served as something of a matriarchal mentor for
the project of preserving history across the generations. As an
African American woman who came of age in the twenties, she is
one of the important voices documented in LHAs oral history
archive.14 Not Just Passing Through not only includes footage from
this video interview, thus circulating it more widely, but it also con-
tains testimony from Nestle, Jewelle Gomez, and other younger
lesbians about Hamptons signicance to them. Like the volun-
teers at LHA who provide oral history as they guide visitors
through the collection, this video segment activates the archive,
bringing its signicance to life. Serving also as a memorial to
Hampton after her death, the segment ends with a vivid contrast
between the ofcial history recorded in her New York Times obitu-
ary she had no immediate survivors and footage from a
memorial in which Gomez reminds those assembled that we are
Mabels immediate survivors.
Especially notable in the segment is Hamptons account of
her pulp ction collection, which is given pride of place in the
LHAs main reading room. Pulp ction can seem to be primarily
a document of homophobia unless it is recognized as evidence of
lesbian existence for consumers in the fties and sixties who had
no access to a lesbian public culture. It resembles celebrity cul-
ture, whose ostensible heteronormativity can be queered by the
machinations of reception and fandom. The archive of lesbian
emotion must include materials such as Mabel Hamptons pulp
ction collection, and it is crucially supplemented by videos such
as Not Just Passing Through, in which Hamptons oral testimony
explains the signicance of the collection. Sentimental value is
taken seriously as a rationale for acquisition in the gay and les-
bian archive.
Equally suggestive of the role of popular culture and affect
in the archive is Not Just Passing Throughs nal segment on New
Yorks WOW Cafe theater collective, which, like so many forms of
live performance culture, is in danger of going undocumented.
The episode adds WOW to its list of archival institutions as a place
116 Camera Obscura
in which a lesbian culture is generated and rendered visible;

more than just a theater, WOW has served as a gathering place for
lesbians to work collectively to create a public culture. The video
gives special attention to the work of the Five Lesbian Brothers,
one of the many important theater groups and performers, along
with Split Britches, Holly Hughes, Reno, and others fostered
by WOW. In addition to clips from productions such as Brave
Smiles . . . Another Lesbian Tragedy and Voyage to Lesbos (thus increas-
ing the reach of live performance often difcult to see outside of
New York), the segment includes interviews with the Brothers,
who explain that their work challenges the assumption that les-
bian culture should provide positive images. Instead, they draw
on an archive that includes stereotypical images of lesbians from
classic melodramatic lms, such as Mdchen in Uniform (dir. Leon-
tine Sagan, Germany, 1931) and The Childrens Hour (dir. William
Wyler, US, 1961). Mainstream representations that leave lesbians
sad, lonely, or dead have become part of the archive of lesbian
culture, a repository drawn on and transformed in the Brothers
hilarious and campy reworking of these lms in their play Brave
Smiles.
Like the Five Lesbian Brothers plays, Not Just Passing
Through and LHA embrace the archive of popular culture, even
when it is homophobic, inventing an archival and documentary
aesthetic more interested in preserving affect than in collecting
positive images. Inspired by the Five Lesbian Brothers strategies,
this article takes the fan as a model for the archivist. The archivist
of queer culture must proceed like the fan or collector whose
attachment to objects is often fetishistic, idiosyncratic, or obses-
sional.15 The archive of lesbian fandom and fantasy would need
to include, for example, the pinup photos, gossip, lm clips, and
other memorabilia that serve as the material evidence of fan cul-
ture. The fan cultures that queer certain stars, or the use of pulp
novels as an indication of the existence of homosexuality, are his-
torical practices whose story is not wholly told by the objects and
persons in and around which these forms of reception take place.
In considering fantasys place in the archives, this article thus
focuses in particular on the role of popular culture in documen-
tary lm and video because it reveals how, in the archive of lesbian

feeling, objects are not inherently meaningful but are made so
through their signicance to an audience. Like the arbitrariness
(or ephemerality) of the connections between feelings and
objects, and especially between traumatic memories and objects,
the queer dimensions of popular cultures presence in the archive
are unpredictable because they are so often not intrinsic to the
object.
Pulp Fiction and the Fantasy Archive

The Canadian documentary lm Forbidden Love, which uses les-
bian pulp ction as an organizing visual motif in order to explore
pre-Stonewall lesbian culture, provides one of the best examples
of this queer archival strategy. Forbidden Love combines talking
heads testimony with shots of the novels lurid covers, interspers-
ing four scenes that narrate a ctional coming-out story and
romance in the melodramatic idiom of the pulps.16 Among For-
bidden Loves invaluable contributions to the archive of gay and
lesbian emotional history, is the oral testimony of ten women nar-
rators whose stories provide a sense of lesbian life in Canada in
the fties and sixties from the perspective of those who actually
experienced it.17 The narrators offer important insights about
butch-femme culture, bar culture, racial and ethnic difference
among lesbians, harassment and homophobia prior to the activism
of the sixties, and the specicity of gay and lesbian life in Canada,
as distinct from that in the US, which too often serves as the sole
point of reference for gay and lesbian history.18 Aerlyn Weissman
and Lynne Fernie interviewed thirty women in the course of mak-
ing Forbidden Love, thus in effect creating an oral history archive as
the foundation for the lm. In editing this footage, they make
this archive more accessible, grouping materials under particular
topics and enabling the viewer to construct a cumulative history
from a range of stories. The challenges of making such general-
izations are especially evident in the lms approach to represent-
ing race. The only two narrators marked as nonwhite Nairobi,
an Afro-Latina nightclub entertainer who immigrated to Canada
118 Camera Obscura
from Panama, and Amanda White, a First Nations woman at

once render visible (literally) questions about racial difference
and make it difcult to provide answers since their stories remain
so particular. For example, White explains that her antipathy for
bar culture stems from its role in the oppression of First Nations
people through alcoholism, offering a qualication to the more
enthusiastic reminiscences of some of the other narrators. Her
comments make Forbidden Loves representation of butch-femme
bar culture more heterogenous, but in the absence of other Afro-
Canadian or First Nations narrators (or narrators from other
racial groups), it is difcult to formulate any broad picture of the
patterns of race and racism in this period. Addressing the ques-
tion of how representative their depiction of history is, the lm-
makers include in the credits the disclaimer that Forbidden Love is
not intended to be a survey of lesbians in Canada but is meant
to contribute another fragment, another telling through a focus
on the evidence of lesbian public cultures, especially bar culture,
and the stories of out lesbians.19
But the questions raised by the oral testimonies are given a
different spin by the lms incorporation of other kinds of footage,
especially pulp novel imagery, which suggests an approach to doc-
umenting history and constructing an archive not bound by the
liberal politics of representation, diversity, and inclusion.20 The
dime store pulp novels that constituted one of the all too few pub-
lic representations of lesbianism and homosexuality in the for-
ties, fties, and sixties, serve as inspiration for four ctional fan-
tasy sequences that are intercut with the documentary segments
in Forbidden Love. They narrate the story of a small-town girl who
leaves her best friend behind (in a teary farewell at the train sta-
tion) in order to move to the big city, where she gets picked up for
a night of romance in a lesbian bar. Rewriting the conventions of
the pulps, in which lesbian love is often punished, the nal seg-
ment contains an explicit sex scene (going all the way with the
soft-porn tease of the pulp covers) and a happy ending that sug-
gests that this one-night stand, far from being sordid or perverse,
is just the beginning of both romance and a happy lesbian life.
Even as they erase the homophobia of the pulps, though, the
sequences also exist in loving relation to them, borrowing the
visual style of the lurid covers bold, articial colors, noir light-
ing, and retro fashion. Accentuating their status as pulp covers
brought to life, each of the sequences ends in a freeze-frame that
dissolves from the lmed action to an illustrated portrait resem-
bling a book cover. Largely replaced by photographs in the six-
ties, the illustrated covers of the pulps derive their nostalgic
appeal from the now outmoded aesthetics of drawing, which
allows for melodramatic exaggeration.
Forbidden Love heightens the affective power of its fantasy
sequences by including interviews in which lesbians explain the
signicance of the pulp novels in their lived experience. Their
testimony, along with that of Ann Bannon, who has been justi-
ably celebrated as one of the few lesbian writers of these novels,
offers different, and sometimes conicting, perspectives, as the
narrators alternately joke about the pulps and consider them seri-
ously, revealing that, then as now, lesbians are adept at negotiat-
ing popular culture representations to meet their own needs.21
One might expect the juxtaposition of documentary footage of
real dykes with massmarket stereotypes to result in the privileging
of the former over the latter, as true over false images, or posi-
tive over negative or stereotypical images. However, the montage
of oral testimony, fantasy sequences, stock footage (from both
lm and photographic sources), and shots of pulp novel covers,
along with the musical soundtrack, challenges simple distinctions
between real lesbians and their pulp ction counterparts. The
narrators accounts of their consumption of the paperbacks
reveal that these artifacts form a vital part of the history of lesbian
culture, as does the lms visual engagement with the covers.
Combining the sensationalistic covers of the novels with the
images of the women narrators, Forbidden Love posits the central-
ity of fantasy and ction to the construction of lesbian identity
and community. Homophobic and formulaic as the novels might
have been (in their conventions, for example, for punishing les-
bianism and/or perverse sexuality), they also provided evidence
that there may be other lesbians out there. In the absence of
other forms of public culture, this form of print culture offered
access to lesbianism within the (sometimes stolen) privacy of the
home (Stephanie Ozard describes reading pulps while babysit-
120 Camera Obscura
ting) or for those in small towns that did not even have bars (Ban-
non mentions the signicance of the mass distribution of paper-
back novels for reaching a wide audience).
It is notable that the pulp novels are primarily represented
in Forbidden Love by their covers. This is not just because the trans-
lation from novel to screen privileges the visual over the textual;
as the narrators make clear, the covers of the novels, even when
only tangentially related to the stories, constituted a crucial part
of their value. Ozard explains that novels with lesbian content
could be selected from among the vast displays of genre ction by
looking for a picture of two women. The needs of a mass-market
culture using sensational and titillating representations of women
and/or lesbians to sell books converge with the needs of actual or
incipient lesbians eager for visible evidence that lesbians exist.
Even if the books tend to ignore the reality of butch dykes or even
butch-femme couples in favor of pairs of very feminine women
on the covers, this fantasy has its own power. Reva Hutton remem-
bers that the novels all had great covers that were very sugges-
tive and entrancing. The intersections of the fantastic and the
real in constructions of desire are highly unpredictable, and the
lesbian readers of the pulps feel no pressure to identify mimeti-
cally either with the characters in the novels or with the women
on the covers. Of course, such interpretive skills may be available
only to certain readers and thus constitute a specically lesbian
reading public. Keeley Moll describes with bemused horror her
mothers efforts to understand her lesbianism by reading pulp
ction, which was the worst kind of literature she could read
next to the Kinsey Report. The lm is a remarkable testament to
the value of reception studies, as the women describe the creative
ways that they negotiate the discrepancies between the covers and
real lesbians. Moreover, it proposes an alternative to a cultural
politics of positive images by articulating the ways that pulp novel
covers could become treasured objects in the archive of lesbian
emotion.
One name for this form of reception might be camp, the
aesthetic that governs Forbidden Loves fascinated documentation
of the covers and its narrative homage to their pulp aesthetic.
These mass-cultural texts, threatened with extinction because

they are viewed as disposable trash, become, like so much other
waste (to invoke Nestles words), important artifacts in the
archives of lesbian emotional culture. Forbidden Love fully exploits
the visual appeal of the covers through its use of close-ups, pans
across the covers, and the freeze-frame at the end of each narra-
tive sequence, which is followed by the dissolve from photo-
graphic to illustrated image in imitation of a book cover. The
lms editing creates an interplay between still and moving
images, transforming the visual power of the cover images into
lmic sequences and then condensing the action of the narrative
into one still image that can be fetishized.
This interest in the combined archival and affective power
of the still image is also evident in the lms use of photographs.
In one segment, Forbidden Love incorporates footage from a fties
National Film Board (NFB) of Canada documentary short that
celebrates the postwar role of women as housewives, mothers,
workers, and consumers. The footage is followed by narrator Hut-
tons discussion of the pressures to marry and conform to fties
domestic ideology and her process of coming out after getting
married. From the vantage point of feminism and the present,
the documentary is a lavishly camp artifact of postwar consumer
culture. The voice-over advises that the woman of today is trying
to solve her problems in the way of the twentieth century. Around
her she sees household aids of modern design pressure cook-
ers, freezers, tiny garbage disposal units, lightweight irons, and a
host more and she wants them all. The lms putatively docu-
mentary images show women shopping for furniture, taking care
of babies, working as phone operaters, and marching in beauty
pageants. It also includes propagandistic close-ups of womens
hands operating a sewing machine, shutting off an alarm clock,
washing dishes, cooking, sterilizing baby bottles, and ironing, all
of which look thoroughly fantastic. (One beautifully composed
and framed shot shows people riding an escalator alongside a
sculpture of a rocket juxtaposed at a diagonal with the escalator.)
The lm closes with the comment, Although she will never aban-
don her role as wife and mother, she looks forward to . . . a world
122 Camera Obscura
that can be an adventure in happiness, accompanied by images

of a young bride.
Forbidden Love then cuts to two photographs of Hutton,
one in which she is on the phone and another in which she is pos-
ing by a television set. Even as her coming-out narrative under-
cuts the shorts message of conformity, it also shows her to have
replicated a version of its fantasy; the snapshots of everyday life
are imbued with the conventions of national public cinema. In
documenting Huttons coming-out process from young bride to
young lesbian, these photographs do not necessarily serve as
truth to the NFB documentarys ction. Even when she displays
lesbian fashions and lifestyles, Hutton poses according to conven-
tions dened by movies and commercial photography. In one
snapshot, she lounges in bed with her arm thrown back behind
her head and her bare shoulder revealed, and in another, she
poses in a bathing suit. Her coming-out story begins with her
lover seducing her by giving her copies of pulp novels, and we see
a photo of Hutton tucked in bed reading one.22 As it does with
the pulp novel covers, the camera pans across the photographs in
order to heighten their dramatic effect. Both the documentary
footage and the photographs are archival documents powered by
affect; we look to them after the fact and nd history hidden
there, whether it is the story of a young wife about to become a
lesbian, or the use of apparently innocuous public lms to link
clean dishes, consumption, and heterosexual normalcy to national
prosperity.
Forbidden Loves attention to Greenwich Village as a mecca
for gay and lesbian life also demonstrates the interplay between
ction and realist media and the role of fantasy in structuring
everyday experience. Bannon describes her trips to New York as a
diamond in [her] pocket that provided the inspiration for her
ctional representations of lesbian life and culture. The ction is
in turn read in documentary ways by women such as Hutton, who
describes traveling from Canada to Greenwich Village to nd
the lesbians depicted as congregated in such bohemian neigh-
borhoods. We see the cover of one pulp whose subtitle announces
Greenwich Village where angels and addicts, lovers and lesbians,
bohemians and bawds live and love. Even when Hutton laughs at
her mistaken assumption that she and her lover need to assume
butch-femme postures and clothing in order to be visible in the
streets of New York, thus implying that the novels were mislead-
ing, her testimony articulates pulp as a powerful resource, not a
distorting mechanism.
Taking its cue from its narrators, Forbidden Love draws on
the considerable pleasures of mass culture in its representation of
lesbian life and becomes a documentary that understands fantasy
as part of reality. Its use of the pulps suggests that the desire for his-
tory takes affective forms and that the current fascination with
bar culture, butch-femme roles, and pre-Stonewall homophobia
makes history, like sexuality, the stuff of romance. Forbidden Love is
joined in this recognition by many gay and lesbian archives which,
like the LHA with its Mabel Hampton collection, have extensive
pulp collections. Many of these collections are displayed promi-
nently because of the books visual power as both objects and
images. For example, in the opulently decorated reading room of
San Francisco Public Librarys James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian
Center, which is the spatial point of entry for the librarys gay and
lesbian holdings, pulp ction is displayed in a glass case, and a
selection of the covers can also be viewed in the librarys digital col-
lection available at computer workstations.23 Forbidden Loves visual
and affective power helps explain why the pulp covers are essential
documents in the archive of lesbian feelings.
Queer Signs: The Tourists Archive

Like Aerlyn Weissman and Lynne Fernie, Ellen Spiro transforms
the traditional ethnographic documentary by injecting it with the
power of popular culture, adapting to her own purposes a charac-
teristically masculine and American genre, the road movie. Nom-
inally a documentary about gay and lesbian life in the US South,
Spiros Greetings from Out Here disrupts the urban (and decep-
tively) national focus of most gay and lesbian history by depicting
the rural and regional.24 (Forbidden Loves focus on Canada accom-
plishes a similar goal.) The videos subtitle, A Queers Eye View of
a Strangely Straight (or So We Thought) Southern Universe
indicates Spiros lack of interest in conventional identity politics
124 Camera Obscura
or representation. She has no pretensions about providing a rep-

resentative survey, instead presenting an assortment of old ladies,
drag queens, and other queer eccentrics of uncertain, but
sometimes probably hetero-, sexuality.25 For Spiro, a queer ethnog-
raphy can adopt a queer perspective toward its subjects, rather
than being about queers. More so than gayness, the people she
meets share a creative independence and have gured out
ways to invent their own lives outside of big urban support sys-
tems. Like many uses of the word queer, Spiros denition over-
laps with but is not equivalent to gay and lesbian, but it is also dis-
tinctive because it is not primarily sexual.
Spiro presents herself as both inside and outside the cul-
tures that she documents, framing her interest in her subjects in
terms of her own autobiographical location as someone who grew
up in the South and left it to become an urban gay activist. As
those who stayed, her subjects (or narrators) are other to her, but
they also present fantasies about what she might have been (or
might still become, as Miss Miller, the seventy-ve-year-old woman
with the pet cemetery, prompts Spiro to wonder what she will be
doing in her seventies). Spiro avoids the sometimes problematic
difference between ethnographer and subject that creates a
voyeuristic gaze or an exotic other by claiming a sympathetic
identication with her subjects. This capacity for identication
across difference becomes marked as queer or even gay. Allan
Gurganus, author of The Oldest Living Confederate Widow, articu-
lates this sensibility in his encounter with Spiro: One of the many
advantages of being a gay person is precisely that youre not so
dened in terms of gender that youre fearful of communicating
across the boundary of gender, and if you have that other capac-
ity, it gives you a kind of power, its a kind of passport. It lets
you travel across boundaries and borders, and it encourages you,
and it even insists that you identify with people who are unlike
yourself.
This metaphorical notion of journey is literalized by
Spiros road trip through the South, which allows her imagina-
tively to identify with people who are unlike [herself] in order
to document their queer version of the South. Rather than cast-
ing her subjects as other, Spiro explores how their lack of need
for legitimation in urban communities provides a valuable model

for her. Hers is not the anthropological expedition that uses the
exotic difference of the margins or outposts in order to establish
the metropolitan or civilized center; Spiro nds a dense culture
in the regions she explores, forms of life unimagined by mass cul-
tures version of America. As John Blansett, who speaks about his
experience of being HIV-positive in small town USA, says, The
Cleavers have never been to Okolona [Mississippi]. His extended
family does not t the TV model and challenges urban dwellers,
including gays and lesbians, to examine stereotypes about rural
US culture. Spiro seeks a queer South in stories that are marked
by difference and eccentricity as much as in communities that are
manifestly gay. Although she does chronicle public events and
cultures, including the gay rodeo, Mardi Gras, the Rhythmfest
womens festival, and Atlantas Gay Pride celebration, her invest-
ments seem to lie more with the quirky loners she interviews. (In
her most recent video Roam Sweet Home (1997), Spiro further
reveals this sensibility by documenting people who live in vintage
trailer homes and pursue what she calls nomadic lifestyles.)
Spiro is not the interviewer from on high, either all-know-
ing or all-invisible, but one person talking to others. Avoiding the
apparent seamlessness and objectivity of the talking heads ethno-
documentary, Spiro as videomaker is not the invisible mover
behind the scenes. Instead, she puts herself into the picture,
showing us her hotel room, her car troubles, the view from the
windshield of her van, and her dog Sam. She discusses the possi-
ble dangers of being a woman on the road, indicating that she
may be as vulnerable as those being documented and reminding
us of the material challenges at stake when women take over the
road movie. She presents herself as a dyke; as documenter of
queerness, she takes over the camera from those who might have
made her its object, providing the queers eye view of a terrain
so often rendered by straight or male perspectives. Like lesbian
oral historians Elizabeth Kennedy, Madeline Davis, and Esther
Newton, who are part of the communities they document, Spiro
builds her archive from the intimacy of emotional investment.26
Contributing to Spiros intimate approach is innovative
video technology. Even though her Hi-8 camera produces profes-
126 Camera Obscura
sional quality footage, she uses it like a home video camera to cre-
ate a personal or intimate point of view. Because the camera is
highly portable and gives high-quality footage in available light,
Spiro can work without an elaborate setup or crew, and she is thus
able to develop a spontaneous rapport with her subjects. Less a Q-
and-A session than a conversation, Spiros interviews establish a
relationship with her narrators; it is clear that the fact that she
likes these people and feels she has something to learn from
them generates her interest.
Yet even as Spiros documentary mission resists traditional
ethnography, her emphasis on queer eccentrics and the cultures
that they have created away from the mainstream does have the
familiar resonance of the folklorists effort to preserve authentic
regional cultures. Moreover, as individual self-creations, her sub-
jects in a sense become other to everyone except themselves and
thus embody that quintessential American type, the rugged indi-
vidualist. There is a romantic dimension to Greetings construc-
tion of its subjects, as well as its fantasy that being gay, and thus
queer, enables one, as Gurganus claims, to negotiate other kinds
of difference.
Nowhere are these complexities of Greetings queer sensi-
bility more evident than in its attachment to an archive of emo-
tion comprised of the artifacts of tourist culture. The videos con-
trast between the urban and the rural, and the North and the
South, emerges from Spiros desire to locate something outside of
mass culture and from her nostalgic and retrospective search for
a lost or disappearing version of America. This has long been one
of the functions of the American tourism that emerged out of
postwar automobile culture; Greetings displays a nostalgia for that
earlier era of tourism, now replaced by a landscape of interstates,
chain motels, and mass-produced rest stops. Spiro is fascinated
with the old national highway system, the one-of-a-kind neon
signs of independently owned motels and restaurants, and the
thrift stores that circulate the artifacts and documents of tourist
culture, making them available to collectors who can be thought
of as amateur archivists. Greetings seeks to intervene against the
Wal-Martization of the US that destroys regional culture and
replaces it with a homogenized national culture. This dichotomy
drives its relation to queer and gay and lesbian issues, producing a
resistance to the forms of gay identity associated with urban cul-
ture and commodication and a resistance even to collective
identity itself.27
Spiros interest in this earlier period of American culture
turns Greetings into a visual archive. The video almost obsessively
Publicity image, used for Ellen Spiros Greetings from Out

Here, inspired by tourist postcards. Courtesy Ellen Spiro
128 Camera Obscura
collects images of the material artifacts that affectively, often nos-

talgically, conjure this history of a generation once removed.
Especially prominent are road signs and old tourist postcards in
which, through a fusion of word and image, the names of the
states are intertwined with the iconic symbols of the state. The
postcards recall an era of tourist culture in the US when the
romance of the road was invented for the nuclear family and
spawned a distinctive set of souvenir commodities. Providing evi-
dence that you have been there, the postcard that condenses the
varied experiences of a particular place into a name is a perfect
emblem of tourist culture, which often constructs spectacles by
attaching signs to them. And like Forbidden Loves pulp novel cov-
ers, Greetingss postcards are powerful documents of the past
because they are drawn rather than photographed.
Taking their visual aesthetic as inspiration for her own
images, Spiro uses these place-name postcards to introduce the
different episodes of Greetings in montages that include more
contemporary road signs, both from the national interstate sys-
tem and from more local routes. Like the postcard, the road sign
becomes the object and text that is an emblem of both Southern
culture and rural/road culture, and Spiro also works with these
visuals to expose their queer dimensions. Building a collection of
images on tape, she nds not only the funny signs and objects
such as Christian slogans displayed by car repair shops, the Christ
of the Ozarks statue, or the small-town signs such as Okolona,
The Little City That Does Big Things but also the queer ones,
including the intersection of Camp St and Cherry St, the
Homochitto River, Gaywood Campground, a town called
Beaver, a National Enquirer cover story about Garth Brookss les-
bian sister, signs for Dollywood followed by a big erotic peach
statue, and a boat named Paul N Tony. Even the American ag is
given a humorous twist, shown at one point in tatters, and later as
part of the campy festiveness of a reworks store, another oddity
of the road trips particular brands of consumer culture. Spiro
searches out the quirky icons that give her version of the South its
character, videotaping with a collectors eye and documenting
material objects that serve as emblems of the region. Through a
way of seeing that queers the landscape, Spiro nds that queers
are present everywhere in the homespun ephemera of tourism.
Serving as transitions from one narrator and place to the next,
these visual diaries are a crucial part of Spiros archive, equal in
signicance to the stories she collects for the archives of oral his-
tory. As visual icons turned into documents, they are the counter-
part to Forbidden Loves pulp novel covers mass-produced images
that performed important affective and cultural work in their
own time and that now form an archive of sentimental value for
the lm- or videomaker.
It is important to note, however, that if Greetings is nostal-
gic, it is nostalgic for an earlier version of mass culture, not a pre-
or noncommodied folk culture. Furthermore, its version of the
South is not necessarily a strictly local culture since the archive
that interests Spiro actually results from the commodication of
regionalism for consumption by outsiders and the creation of a
national tourist culture that (literally) paved the way for that
which has displaced it.28 Her love of objects, and images of
objects, as the foundation for history draws her toward an archive
of commodities, but the commodities of the thrift store as opposed
to the mall superstore. The resulting archive queers both US and
Southern cultures, showing them never to have been what a cele-
bratory straight culture might make them. It reveals the queer
possibilities always there in the celebration of rugged individual-
ism, Southern identity, tourism, or consumerism. The archives
meaning emerges from the queer sensibility of its collector rather
than a history intrinsic to its objects. As queer ethnographer, the
archivist builds a collection out of love and intimate connection,
creating an archive in which popular cultures ephemera has the
power to conjure the past.
Sadie Benning: The Bedroom Archives

As my nal example of documentary that creates a lesbian
archive, Sadie Bennings videos might seem like an unusual
choice. Viewed collectively, Bennings early videos provide a com-
pendium of the everyday life of young girls, especially baby dykes,
130 Camera Obscura
having to establish their sexuality and their life stories without the
benet of public afrmation or representation.29 But rather than
documenting a subculture by interviewing a range of people,
Benning stays at home, focusing primarily on herself and often
venturing no farther than the connes of her own bedroom.
Although her work is often classied as experimental video or as
autobiography, I want to claim it as documentary in order to pro-
mote its value as an innovative archive of lesbian life, one that
includes the material spaces of intimacy, such as bedrooms, and
intimacys imaginary spaces, such as fantasies.30 Insisting on the
value of the narcissistic and the insular, Benning creates the video
counterpart to a young girls diary, chronicling her secret desires,
the intimate details of her body, and her fandoms and fantasies.
(One of her early videos is called If Every Girl Had a Diary [1990],
and It Wasnt Love [1992] includes an image of a diary, on the
cover of which is a drawing of a girl and the words Dear Diary in
feminized handwriting.) Her camera is a childs toy, the Fisher-
Price Pixelvision camera that can capture only a fraction of the
angle of vision of a more standard video camera and that makes
objects look fuzzy and distorted. Although her transformation of
the point-and-shoot real world into an alternately haunting and
comic psychic landscape gives her work its experimental look,
her videos are also easily accessible to a punk generation raised
on video, MTV, and DIY (do it yourself) production values.
Benning documents a culture of girlhood that is even less
publicly visible than the marginal locations recorded in Forbidden
Love and Greetings because it is not public in any conventional
sense of the term. If one imperative of the gay and lesbian and the
emotional archive is to remake the relation between public and
private spheres, then Bennings videos do so by including a
teenage girls bedroom within what Michael Moon has called the
semi-public sphere.31 They reveal that, even when isolated from
the world, such bedrooms are connected to it, offering sanctuary
from the alienation of more properly public spaces through a
queer version of the cultural logic of domesticity. Moreover, the
television and lm footage and the many popular images that
Benning includes, as well as the soundtrack of pop songs that
accompanies her images, bring the world into her bedroom. She
in turn refunctions that world by recording televised images and
combining them with images of herself, turning this archival
resource into her own product, a video that can be circulated in
public. Rewriting studies of popular culture that have sought sub-
cultures in public spaces such as streets and clubs, and that have
hence produced a largely masculinist picture, Benning suggests
that girls culture begins at home.32 The process of documenting
and archiving it by making a video provides testimony to its exis-
tence, breaking out of isolation to build an imagined community
of girls in their bedrooms.
Like Spiros Greetings From Out Here, Bennings It Wasnt
Love shows the inuence of popular culture by reworking not
only the road movie genre, but the gangster movie and the
romance as well. But when Sadie and another teenage girl leave
home in search of romance and adventure, they dont get very
far.33 Sadies head appears in front of the camera (the Pixelvision
version of a talking head becomes surreal in its fuzzy too-extreme
close-up) to explain: We didnt make it to Detroit, much less Hol-
lywood. Instead, we pulled into a fried-chicken parking lot and
made out. After one of the most remarkable sex scenes in con-
temporary lesbian visual culture, in which Sadie wraps her ngers
around the camera lens and sucks on her thumb slowly, her voice-
over explains that this ending is far from a failed version of the
standard plot: I wanted to feel sorry for myself like I was missing
out on something. And yet in that parking lot, I felt like I had
seen the whole world. She had this way of making me feel like I
was the goddamn Nile River or something. We didnt need Holly-
wood. We were Hollywood and that made us both famous. These
girls make a whole world out of a parking lot and kisses, in deance
of what usually counts as fame and fortune in popular fantasy and
world history. Without going anywhere, they are as famous as
Hollywood stars and as adventurous as (but possibly less exploitive
than) the explorers who colonize the world. It Wasnt Love bor-
rows from pop culture narratives, acknowledging their power to
confer the public status that enfranchises one as a citizen. But it
uses those stories to construct forms and spaces of celebrity and
132 Camera Obscura
(counter)publicity that do not require acknowledgment from the

world at large.34
Space constraints do not permit the detailed attention
that Bennings work as archive demands. Composed of a dense
array of images and sounds edited in ways that produce meaning
through juxtaposition and sequencing, they suggest that an
archive that can do justice to the affective dimensions of girls
lives is as lyrical as a dream and as chock-full of images as a day
spent watching TV or reading magazines. Moreover, as Laura
Marks suggests in her work on haptic video, Benning produces
images that ask to be touched rather than seen.35 In fact, Benning
touches her viewers both literally and guratively through what
might be called an aesthetics of intimacy.36 She takes intimacy lit-
erally by getting close to the objects she shoots and thus narrow-
ing the distance between the viewer and the visual eld. The
resulting shots are so unusual, both visually and affectively, or so
ephemeral, that even detailed description can fail to capture
them. I would like to mention briey two kinds of materials in the
Benning archive that reect the affective sensibility shared by the
other documentaries examined in this article old drawings and
archival footage from television. My examples are taken from
Girlpower, one of the most varied of Bennings videos in its range
of archival sources, and the video that, as its title suggests, docu-
ments not only her life but that of girls everywhere.
Girlpower opens with a sequence (with a soundtrack from
Sonic Youth) that includes a drawing of a lineup of girls, each one
at a different stage of developing into a woman. The camera pans
backwards across the row from woman to girl and then moves
quickly across the image in a blur. Like Forbidden Loves pulp novel
covers and Greetings postcards, this imagerys stereotypical, even
archetypal, power is related to its status as a drawing. This found
image is preceded by a shot of a piece of paper on which is written
the title Girlpower in a cursive script, below which we see a
drawing of a girl or woman that looks like the clich image of a
pretty face that a young girl might make.37 Even as she uses
video technology, Benning is drawn to an archive of archaic gen-
res, such as drawing and illustration, echoing Forbidden Loves
Illustration from Sadie

Bennings Girlpower
interest in the illustrations of the pulp novel covers. Drawing

reveals the ideological operations of visual culture in ways that
the apparent realism of photographs or video can obscure.38
Another sequence later in the video also uses a range of
archival images from textbooks, accompanied by a Bikini Kill
song. Most prominent is a line drawing of a girl playing tennis;
her body is rendered as a skeleton whose parts are labeled with
their technical names. In another shot, a male scientist looks into
a microscope, and the camera cuts to a series of drawings of cells.
In the Pixelvisions close-up, the scientic world is aestheticized;
the drawings are hauntingly beautiful, made into something else
by a girls camera and her eye for detail. Interspersed is archival
footage of a bomb exploding and of bombs being dropped from
planes. The video incorporates and remakes the visual archive of
ofcial culture and its documents of femininity. Such archives
must be resisted because, as the video proceeds to show, they can
pathologize a young girls sexual experience in the form of the
case history. Archiving not just images but also text, Bennings
camera pans across the words masturbation in young females,
along with some text from a science book that appears to be
about freaks. We can just catch the words accident of abnormal
birth and considered a disgrace. The inability of the camera to
take in more than a few words at a time twists the words out of con-
text, framing and highlighting them as code and making them
available as slogans for new meanings. The limits of Bennings toy
camera become its strength; by taking in only fragments of the
ofcial archive and blowing them up, she reveals their sinister
134 Camera Obscura
power and makes them the raw material for her own vision. Like
Ellen Spiro, she turns words and signs into her own affectively
charged montage of images.
The sequence climaxes with the end of the song and cul-
minates in a shot of two girls kissing and then one of a mouth
laughing triumphantly in a mirror. The camera moves across
another line taken from the textbook that reads I was a girl, 19
years of age. Benning has remade the case history in her own
idiom, documenting the life of young dykes by reworking an
archive that depicts them in crude and inadequate ways. Like For-
bidden Loves inclusion of archival footage and pulp novel covers,
Girlpowers incorporation of ofcial documents carries nostalgic
and emotional power. The riot-grrrl sensibility that Benning
shares with many musicians and zine makers reappropriates cul-
tural constructions of girlhood that often seem denigrating and
infantilizing, especially those from earlier generations, and con-
verts them into a powerful repository. The fashion and visual sen-
sibility of girls culture, which over the last decade has surged far
beyond its subcultural formations of the early nineties, has
become a new language of feminism.39 Images from the archives
of the fties and sixties and from pseudoscientic sources have
become a resource for the montage and collage aesthetics of
videos and zines.
In its affective response to mass culture, Bennings aes-
thetic draws on another staple of girls culture fandom. Sadie
fashions herself in the image of pop culture icons, reecting the
role of fantasy in shaping gender and sexual identity that Forbid-
den Love also emphasizes. Fantasy takes up the seductions of a
mainstream culture that apparently connes its audience to het-
eronormativity; Sadie can be Matt Dillon from Teen Beat, or Erik
Estrada rescuing young girls (far from being an obstacle for dyke
fantasy, masculinity fosters it), or a medley of girl-band icons.40
And when I sang, I became every member of the Go-Gos. Blondie,
Joan Jett, Devo I did it all, she says, as she samples footage of
Debbie Harry singing Rapture. Voice-over, text, music, original
images, and sampled images are woven together to represent the
intertwining of pop culture heroes and Sadies own iconic power.
Luke Perrys image on a poster waves in front of the camera and
Sadie Benning posing with

a photo of Luke Perry in
Girlpower
then gets cut in two as Sadie, a baby butch who styles herself after
her male heroes, inserts herself between the two halves. Her
voice-over fantasy about being Erik Estrada rushing on my
motorcycle to save the life of some girl who desperately needed to
be rescued is accompanied by home movie footage of a young
girl (quite likely Benning herself) riding a tricycle around the liv-
ing room. The personal archive of the home movie and the pub-
lic archive of television are both resources for an affective archive
shaped by fantasy and by the teenage Sadies nostalgic relation to
herself as an even younger girl.
Benning rewrites the relation between public and private
spheres in her assertion that, In my world, in my head, I was
never alone, whereas the worlds of school, my father, and my
culture produce alienation and isolation. Fantasy is juxtaposed
with reality as a necessary survival tactic rather than a luxury or a
ction: I survived because I created my own heroes. But the raw
material for those heroes is the archive of images available for
scavenging within the connes of her room: textbooks, movies
broadcast on TV, home movies, records. Privatized consumption
becomes a form of public access when the streets are dangerous.
The archive that the girl fan or collector accumulates is the public
archive made personal, a scrapbook in which the feelings that
accompany media events are as important as those events. Private
ownership of images becomes a form of self-assertion in the face
of a mainstream culture that threatens to keep girls feelings inar-
ticulate and invisible. Through a highly personal and intimate
archive, Benning creates an imagined community of girls every-
where who can recognize themselves in her tastes and senti-
136 Camera Obscura
ments. Such self-empowerment is the goal of riot grrrl as a move-

ment and, in the credits, Benning thanks not only Bikini Kill, but
all the secret superstars everywhere. You rule. It is not necessary
that superstars be public to be meaningful; in the archive of les-
bian culture, they are meaningful because the power of the imagi-
nation has made them so: In my imagination I traveled the
world. I was as powerful as a bullet. I survived because I created
my own heroes. Nobody needed to know I was somebody cause it
was my secret. The secrecy of the archive becomes its power;
being a celebrity or a public person is not a necessary prerequisite
for a girl to star as the heroine of her own archive. As Nestle sug-
gests in the comments that serve as the epigraph to this article,
when ordinary girls kiss each other, they merit the fame of inclu-
sion in the archive of lesbian feelings.
Actually Existing Archives

Like Benning, the creators of grassroots gay and lesbian archives
have often turned their bedrooms into safe havens for history.
Both the LHA and San Franciscos Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and
Transgender Society of Northern California started out at home.
Even the very public James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center at
the San Francisco Public Library has its intimate dimensions; the
beautifully designed reading room provides a sanctuary from the
open spaces of the central library. The history of any archive is a
history of space, which becomes the material measure and foun-
dation of the archives power and visibility as a form of public cul-
ture. In so far as their existence has been dependent on the possi-
bility of making private spaces, such as rooms in peoples homes,
public, grassroots gay and lesbian archives constitute another
example of what Moon has called a semi-public sphere. Each of
the archives that preserves gay and lesbian history has a history
that itself belongs in the archives because they have been formed
out of the same queer and obsessional urges to collect that guide
the makers of these documentaries, and the archives histories
are as emotional and idiosyncratic as their collections.41 More-
over, as more institutionalized archives develop gay and lesbian
collections, it will prove increasingly important not to forget the

more queer collections and strategies of the grassroots archives.42
Against the traumatic loss of gay and lesbian history, docu-
mentaries and archives serve a vital task of cultural memory. The
indispensability of popular and mass culture in such an archive
points to the idiosyncratic and necessary ways in which an archive
must preserve affective value. Like the archive of popular culture,
the archive demanded by gay and lesbian history is an emotional
one. It not only demands new kinds of evidence but also requires
that we think about evidence as an emotional category. Because
gay and lesbian history in particular is produced through mem-
ory as much as through documents, those in search of the past
must construct an archive through the work of emotional invest-
ment. Popular culture has much to teach us about this archive
because it is so vulnerable to dismissal as trivia or waste or low cul-
ture and because it is also kept alive through personal history, nos-
talgia, and other queer investments. The documentaries explored
in this article make vivid use of an archive of visual culture, espe-
cially old photographs, the intimate technology for preserving
everyday life, and drawings or illustrations, the archaic media that
threaten to be superceded by new technologies of memory. The
Watermelon Womans fake photographs of Richards, Forbidden Loves
images of pulp ction covers and Not Just Passing Throughs depic-
tion of their presence in the archive, Bennings home movie clips
and textbook drawings of girls, Spiros antique postcards these
objects and the feelings associated with them belong in the
archive.
As part of an archive, these artifacts of popular culture
open up new approaches to histories of trauma and the trauma of
historical absence. They refuse to conform to standards of real-
ism or equal representation. As The Watermelon Woman suggests,
for example, one may have to invent an archive and create a
ction about an African American woman in order to make up
for the fragmented and distorted state of the existing records.
Indeed, looking for racial histories within popular culture reveals
particularly strongly the unpredictable relation between artifacts
and histories. Benning, for example, uses African American pop-
138 Camera Obscura
ular music to articulate her (white) adolescent identity, and Spiro

uses nostalgic postcards of a South whose regional identity emerges
from a dense history of race relations that cannot easily be articu-
lated. An archive of popular culture trafcs in stereotypes and
myths, and its pleasures are often attached to other more painful
emotions. It is energized by the power of the image to preserve a
specically emotional memory and by the idiosyncratic cathexis
that turns old objects into fetishes embodying memory and affect.
Through the ephemeral materials of popular culture, a range of
lesbian documentary makers forge a past for themselves and teach
us to value an archive of feelings that will always remain ephemeral.
Notes
1. Along with pseudolms such as Plantation Memories, The

Watermelon Woman includes a fake archive of photographs of
Fae Richards, which Dunye produced in collaboration with
photographer Zoe Leonard. The photographs have been
exhibited independently (including at a 1997 Whitney Biennial
installation) and have been published as a book, The Fae Richards
Photo Archive (San Francisco: Artspace, 1996).
2. My information about LHA comes from discussions with

volunteers during visits there, and I offer thanks to Polly
Thistlethwaite, Lucinda Zoe, and Paula Grant for their generous
assistance, and especially to Maxine Wolfe and Desiree Yael
Vester for giving me time in which to interview them about the
archives. Other sources of information include the Lesbian
Herstory Archives newsletters; Joan Nestle, A Restricted Country
(Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 1987), especially Voices from Lesbian
Herstory, 110 19, and When the Lions Write History, 178 88;
as well as Polly Thistlethwaite, Building A Home of Our Own:
The Construction of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, in Daring to
Find Our Names: The Search for Lesbigay Library History, ed. James V.
Carmichael Jr. (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998), 153 74.
3. Desiree Yael Vester, interview with the author, Hart, MI, 24

August 1997.
4. According to Vester, there have been proposals that the top oor
be used for the collection, but others think the live-in resident
gives the archives their identity as a home.
5. Not Just Passing Through and Forbidden Love are distributed

through Women Make Movies (462 Broadway, Suite 500WS, New
York, NY 10013, 212-925-0606). Girlpower and Greetings From Out
Here are available from Video Data Bank (37 South Wabash Ave.,
Chicago, IL 60603, 312-899-5172). Women Make Movies also
distributes work by both Sadie Benning (The Works of Sadie
Benning and Me and Rubyfruit Program) and Ellen Spiro (DiAnas
Hair Ego, Party Safe! with DiAna and Bambi, and, with Marina
Alvarez, (In)Visible Women). Both Women Make Movies, founded
by Ariel Dougherty and Sheila Paige in 1972, and Video Data
Bank, founded by Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horseld in 1976,
deserve mention for their important role in developing an
archive of womens work by virtue of distributing and promoting
it. My thinking about Women Make Movies cultural signicance
has been indispensably informed by Patricia Whites Feminist
Reruns: Women Make Movies at Twenty-Five (paper delivered
at Console-ing Passions: TV, Video, and Feminism Conference,
Montreal, May 1997).
6. For her thinking about archives and intimacy, as well as for

conversations about the ideas in this essay, I am indebted to
Lauren Berlant. For discussions of the archive, see 68 or
Something, Critical Inquiry 21.1 (1994): 124 56, and the
section titled I Hate Your Archive in the introduction to The
Queen of America Goes to Washington City (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1997), 10 15. For discussions of intimacy, see
the special issue of Critical Inquiry 24.2 (1998). For their
connections, see Berlants Intimacys Ephemera (paper
delivered at the Modern Language Association, Toronto,
December 1997).
7. See Toni Morrison, The Site of Memory, in Out There:

Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson
et al. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 299 305.
8. A valuable resource for a theory of the archive that takes account

of the unconscious and memory is Jacques Derridas Archive Fever
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Using Freud as his
point of departure, Derrida explores how the challenge posed by
psychoanalysis to the question of memory also transforms what it
means to produce and preserve an archive. Since psychoanalytic
discourse is also bound up with the production of sexual identity,
Derridas argument is suggestive for exploring how gay and
lesbian history redenes the meaning of the archive. Archive
140 Camera Obscura
Fevers concern with the question of whether psychoanalysis can

be considered a Jewish science (and thus read as an archive
of Jewish culture) also contributes to understanding the project
of archiving traumatic histories, including Jewish history and
gay and lesbian history, as idiosyncratic or queer. For a fuller
discussion of the intersections of Derridas notion of the archive
and gay and lesbian archives, see my book An Archive of Feelings:
Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, forthcoming).
9. On the paradigm of one hundred years of homosexuality, see

David Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (New York:
Routledge, 1990), which is inuenced by Foucauldian models of
sexuality as a category with a history. Historian John Boswell
adopts a different historical model, arguing both polemically
and with considerable archival evidence for a continuous
tradition of homosexuality in his books, Christianity, Social
Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1980) and Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (New York:
Villiard, 1994). It can be useful to understand Boswells
scholarship as driven by the affective need for history. For an
interesting discussion of Boswell along these lines informed by
Halperin, Foucault, and others see Carolyn Dinshaws
introduction to her book about the intersections of medieval
studies and queer studies, Getting Medieval: Pre- and Post-Modern
Sexualities and Communities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1999). Dinshaw argues for the affective power of different
historical periods to touch one another through the queer
juxtaposition of past and present.
10. In lesbian culture, the resurgence of interest in butch-femme

cultures has been part of this phenomenon. The popular
interest in gay and lesbian history has been facilitated by the
recent publication of many important scholarly books, including
George Chauncey, Gay New York (New York: Basic, 1994);
Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of
Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community
(New York: Routledge, 1993); Esther Newton, Cherry Grove,
Fire Island (Boston: Beacon, 1993); and Martin Duberman,
Stonewall (New York: Dutton, 1993).
11. Jos Muoz discusses the status of ephemera in the production

of queer history in Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes
to Queer Acts, Women and Performance 16 (1996): 5 18.
12. Jean Carlomusto, Dolores Perez, Catherine Saaleld, and

Polly Thistlethwaite, dirs., Not Just Passing Through (1994).
Thistlethwaite has been centrally involved with the Lesbian
Herstory Archives and also works as a professional librarian.
Bringing the archives to popular attention, she has appeared as
Polly the Butch Librarian in a Dyke TV feature called In the
Archives. (Dyke TV is a weekly cable-access show produced in
New York City.)
13. For more on how lm festivals create publics, see Patricia White,
B. Ruby Rich, Eric Clarke, and Richard Fung, Queer Publicity:
A Dossier on Lesbian and Gay Film Festivals, GLQ 5.1 (1999):
73 93.
14. Mabel Hampton is also one of the oldest lesbians whose story of
life in butch-femme cultures appears in Joan Nestles collection
The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader (Boston: Alyson, 1992),
which is itself a kind of archive. The widespread popularity of the
collection (both ction and nonction) as a gay and lesbian
print genre owes something to its archival functions.
15. In essays such as Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book

Collecting, Walter Benjamin establishes himself as an important
theorist of the archive interested in the connections between
memory, history, and archival objects. See Benjamin,
Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968),
59 67. Benjamins interest in the photograph can be linked to
his interest in modes of historicization that encompass memory
and affect, including the trauma of shock. For more on this issue,
see Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of
History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
16. Produced on lm by the National Film Board of Canadas Studio

D, Forbidden Love has a higher production value than some of the
other documentaries discussed in this article, and, according to
White, is one of WMMs bestsellers. Institutional support for
documentary work often makes the difference between lm and
video format and between short and feature-length product.
Forbidden Love was broadcast on Canadian television as well as
being distributed commercially in movie theaters (which was
possible because of its feature length and lm format).
17. I adopt the term narrators here and throughout this essay from
Davis and Kennedy, and from Newton, who use it in their oral
histories of gay and lesbian communities to indicate that their
142 Camera Obscura
interview subjects are active participants in and contributors to

their projects. See Davis and Kennedy, Boots of Leather, Slippers of
Gold, and Newton, Cherry Grove.
18. For other readings of Forbidden Love, see Linda Dittmar, Of Hags
and Crones: Reclaiming Lesbian Desire for the Trouble Zone of
Aging, in Between the Sheets, in the Streets: Queer, Lesbian, Gay
Documentary, ed. Chris Holmlund and Cynthia Fuchs
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 71 90.
Between the Sheets, in the Streets, which appeared during the process
of writing this essay, has served a valuable function in constituting
an archive of gay and lesbian documentary through criticism.
Three of the works explored in this article receive extended
analysis in the collections essays. Establishing a body of
secondary work on these materials is difcult, as is locating
sources, since many gay and lesbian publications are too
ephemeral to be cited in most indexes. Also published after this
article was largely written is Amy Villarejos outstanding essay,
Forbidden Love: Pulp as Lesbian History, which overlaps with
many of my concerns here. See Out Takes: Essays on Queer Theory
and Film, ed. Ellis Hanson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1999), 316 45.
19. For a fuller discussion of Forbidden Loves representation of race

and these two narrators, see Villarejo, Forbidden Love.
Villarejo is ultimately critical of the romanticization of bar
culture in Forbidden Loves interviews and its use of the pulps,
using a Marxist framework wary of fetishism to argue that the
covers efface material histories. I share Villarejos sensibilities
(both theoretical and cultural), but I would suggest that the
importance of the pulp covers and Forbidden Loves use of them
lies precisely in their capacity to revise Marxist paradigms, as well
as traditional understandings of documentation and
documentary.
20. For an important history and critique of this politics of equal

representation within gay and lesbian publics, see Eric Clarke,
Virtuous Vice: Homoeroticism and the Public Sphere (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2000).
21. Forbidden Love advances the argument of Before Stonewall, one of

the rst and most important documentaries of gay and lesbian
history, which also considers the role of the pulps in history and
includes an interview with Ann Bannon. For more on Bannons

work, see Suzanna Danuta Walters, As Her Hand Crept Slowly
up Her Thigh: Ann Bannon and the Politics of Pulp, Social Text
23 (1989): 83 101 ; and Michele Barale, When Jack Blinks:
Si(gh)ting Gay Desire in Ann Bannons Beebo Brinker, in The
Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Barale, and
David Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 604 15.
22. For an interesting discussion of the archival challenges of

identifying photographs as gay or lesbian, see the section
titled Its Not What You See But Where and How You Look, in
Susan Stryker and Jim Van Buskirk, Gay by the Bay (San Francisco:
Chronicle, 1996), 14 15. A history of gay and lesbian San
Francisco, Gay by the Bay primarily relies on ephemeral artifacts,
especially visual ones such as photographs, posters, and pulp
ction covers, as a way to tell and document queer history.
Important stories emerge from the objects; unlike many other
gay and lesbian histories, this book did not substantially depend
on interviews. On the importance of photographs for the
production of memory and history, see Marianne Hirsch, Family
Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1997).
23. For information about the Barbara Grier and Donna McBride
Pulp Paperback Collection, see sfpl.org. Pulp ction has also
been a rich resource for contemporary lesbian visual culture,
including ephemeral genres such as posters and zines. See,
for example, Nina Levitts refunctioned pulp novel covers
in Conspiracy of Silence, in Stolen Glances: Lesbians Take
Photographs, ed. Tessa Bofn and Jean Fraser (London: Pandora,
1991), 60 66. Levitts work rst appeared in an exhibit curated
by Lynn Fernie, codirector of Forbidden Love. Another sign of the
recognition of the historical signicance of the pulps, and
especially their covers, is the recent publication of a book
devoted to them: Jaye Zimet, Strange Sisters: The Art of Lesbian Pulp
Fiction, 19491969 (New York: Viking Studio, 1999).
24. See Kath Weston Get Thee to a Big City: Sexual Imaginary and
the Great Gay Migration, GLQ 2.3 (1995): 253 77 and John
Howard, Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999) for discussions of the need to
question how urban/rural distinctions structure gay and lesbian
histories and discourses.
144 Camera Obscura
25. For a different reading of Greetings, see Chris Cagle, Imaging the
Queer South: Southern Lesbian and Gay Documentary, in
Between the Sheets, in the Streets, ed. Holmlund and Fuchs, 30 45. I
disagree with Cagles argument that Greetingss narrators
represent different regions and communities, an argument
linked to his criticism of Spiros use of kitsch. A different
understanding of Spiros use of popular culture, I will argue, can
give rise to a different understanding of how she is representing
or documenting the South.
26. See Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold and
Newton, Cherry Grove. For further discussion of how these books
function as archive, critical ethnography, and theory, see my
review of them in Signs 21.1 (1995): 212 15.
27. Spiro thus implicitly responds to the urban focus of scholarship,

such as Chaunceys Gay New York and John DEmilios Sexual
Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in
the United States, 194070 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1983).
28. On the history of US tourism and road culture, see Donna R.

Braden, Leisure and Road Culture in America (Dearborn, MI:
Henry Ford Museum and Greeneld Village, 1988), and James J.
Flink, The Automobile Age (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988),
especially chap. 10, On the Road.
29. The videos If Every Girl Had a Diary (1990), Me and Rubyfruit
(1989), Living Inside (1989), New Year (1989), A Place Called
Lovely (1991), Welcome to Normal (1990), and Jollies (1990) are
available in two compilations distributed by Women Make
Movies. Video Data Bank distributes compilations that include
It Wasnt Love and Girlpower.
30. Holmlund makes a similar point in arguing that Bennings

autobiography should also be understood as ethnography, that
is, as a means of documenting a culture and a collective reality.
See When Autobiography Meets Ethnography and Girl Meets
Girl: The Dyke Docs of Sadie Benning and Su Friedrich, in
Between the Sheets, in the Streets, ed. Holmlund and Fuchs, 127 43.
For more on Sadie Benning, see Alexandra Juhasz, Our Auto-
Bodies, Ourselves: Representing Real Women in Feminist
Video, Afterimage 21.7 (1994): 10 14; and Mia Carter, The
Politics of Pleasure: Cross-Cultural Autobiographic Performance
in the Video Works of Sadie Benning, Signs 23.3 (1998): 745 69.
31. See Michael Moon, Unauthorized Writing: AIDS and the

Revival of Archaic Modes of Literary and Cultural Production
(paper delivered at the Sixth North American Lesbian, Gay, and
Bisexual Studies conference, University of Iowa, November 1994).
32. Benning thus implicitly extends and revises Angela McRobbies

observations about girls and subcultures, exposing the hetero-
centrism of McRobbies assumptions about the gendered
opposition of the bedroom and the street. See Girls and
Subcultures and Settling Accounts with Subcultures in
Feminism and Youth Cultures (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1991),
1 34.
33. Like Carter, I adopt the convention of using Sadie to refer to

Bennings appearances in her own videos. See Carter, The
Politics of Pleasure.
34. For more on mass culture, publicity, and identity, see Michael
Warner, The Mass Public and the Mass Subject, in Habermas and
the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1992), 377 401.
35. Laura Marks, Video Haptics and Erotics, Screen 39.4 (1998): 331.
36. I invoke this term in order to connect Bennings uses of intimacy

with the resonances of the concept as developed in the special
issue of Critical Inquiry 24.2 (1998), devoted to the topic of
intimacy and edited by Lauren Berlant.
37. In Bennings more recent video, Flat Is Beautiful (1997), the

characters wear paper masks made out of these same kinds of
drawings. The centrality of drawing in recent girl and lesbian
cultures is also evident in the visual art of Nicole Eisenman.
See my Fierce Pussies and Lesbian Avengers: Dyke Activism
Meets Celebrity Culture, in Consequences: Feminist Theory for the
New Century, ed. Elisabeth Bronfen and Misha Kavka (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 283 318, for more
on Eisenman as well as the relation between drawing and
advertising media.
38. For more on the ideological operations of drawing, especially

in childrens culture, see Ann Reynoldss discussion of My
Weekly Reader in Visual Stories, in Visual Display: Culture beyond
Appearances, ed. Lynne Cooke and Peter Wollen (Seattle: Bay,
1995), 82 109.
146 Camera Obscura
39. In 1999, for example, the Spice Girls hosted a Girl Power video
event on MTV, and the success of girls culture is now visible in a
range of cultural products from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Sanrios
Hello Kitty line. The commercialization of girl power, like that
of lesbian chic, is, of course, to be expected given its origins in a
subculture fascinated by mass culture.
40. For more on Bennings cross-racial fantasies, especially her

identication with African American popular culture gures, see
Carter, The Politics of Pleasure. It includes a discussion of Ken
Feils treatment of this issue in his dissertation, From Queer to
Hybridity: Questions of Cultural Difference in Contemporary
Queer Film and Video (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at
Austin, 1995).
41. In addition to drawing on time spent at the LHA, my insights are

based primarily on research in and about the Gay, Lesbian,
Bisexual, and Transgender Society of Northern California
(GLBTS) and the James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center at
the San Francisco Public Library. My thanks to Jim Van Buskirk of
the public library, and to Bill Walker and Susan Stryker of GLBTS
for sharing information about the history of these archives and
institutions. Another valuable resource is the collection Daring to
Find Our Names.
42. Also important to examine are the collaborative arrangements

between the two kinds of institutions, such as the agreement
between the San Francisco Public Library and the GLBTS to
share their collections. Another example is the negotiations
between the Mazer Collection and the One Collection, both
grassroots archives based in Los Angeles, with the University of
Southern California regarding the collections removal to the
campus. The Mazer (a lesbian archive) ultimately decided not
to move its collection to USC because the university agreed to
provide only space, not staff. In our interview, Maxine Wolfe also
describes considerable debate within ACT UP about whether to
donate its archives to the New York Public Library, with some
arguing that presence in the public library would provide
legitimacy and visibility, and others arguing that the public
institution would provide no guarantee of safety or access. A
much more extended discussion of these issues appears in my
forthcoming book, An Archive of Feelings.
Ann Cvetkovich is associate professor of English at the University

of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass
Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism and An Archive of Feelings: Trauma,
Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (forthcoming from Duke
University Press).
The reconstruction of pulp ction covers in Forbidden Love.

Courtesy Women Make Movies

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What is the film The Watermelon Woman about?

What is the film The Watermelon Woman about?

What organization does Cheryl visit in her quest to learn more about Fae Richards?

What organization does Cheryl visit in her quest to learn more about Fae Richards?

Zoe Leonard, The Fae Richards Photo Archive, 1993 96.

Created for Cheryl Dunyes film The Watermelon Woman

Every lesbian is worthy of inclusion in history. If you have the

Perhaps to the surprise of those who think of both traditional and

Copyright 2002 by Camera Obscura

mentary with ction, The Watermelon Woman weaves a visual archive

through many small donations from lesbians around the country.

of a useful archive, especially an archive of sexuality and gay and

ence, but of examining documents of homophobia and of earlier

Mabel Hampton photo from Not Just Passing Through.

ing is their use of an archive of popular culture, one that is strongly

The Archive of the Archives

roots archive and makes one of its most important contributors

in which a lesbian culture is generated and rendered visible;

tary lm and video because it reveals how, in the archive of lesbian

Pulp Fiction and the Fantasy Archive

from Panama, and Amanda White, a First Nations woman at

These mass-cultural texts, threatened with extinction because

that can be an adventure in happiness, accompanied by images

Queer Signs: The Tourists Archive

or representation. She has no pretensions about providing a rep-

for legitimation in urban communities provides a valuable model

Publicity image, used for Ellen Spiros Greetings from Out

collects images of the material artifacts that affectively, often nos-

Sadie Benning: The Bedroom Archives

(counter)publicity that do not require acknowledgment from the

Illustration from Sadie

interest in the illustrations of the pulp novel covers. Drawing

Sadie Benning posing with

ments. Such self-empowerment is the goal of riot grrrl as a move-

Actually Existing Archives

collections, it will prove increasingly important not to forget the

ular music to articulate her (white) adolescent identity, and Spiro

1. Along with pseudolms such as Plantation Memories, The

2. My information about LHA comes from discussions with

3. Desiree Yael Vester, interview with the author, Hart, MI, 24

5. Not Just Passing Through and Forbidden Love are distributed

6. For her thinking about archives and intimacy, as well as for

7. See Toni Morrison, The Site of Memory, in Out There:

8. A valuable resource for a theory of the archive that takes account

Fevers concern with the question of whether psychoanalysis can

9. On the paradigm of one hundred years of homosexuality, see

10. In lesbian culture, the resurgence of interest in butch-femme

11. Jos Muoz discusses the status of ephemera in the production

12. Jean Carlomusto, Dolores Perez, Catherine Saaleld, and

15. In essays such as Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book

16. Produced on lm by the National Film Board of Canadas Studio

interview subjects are active participants in and contributors to

19. For a fuller discussion of Forbidden Loves representation of race

20. For an important history and critique of this politics of equal

21. Forbidden Love advances the argument of Before Stonewall, one of

includes an interview with Ann Bannon. For more on Bannons

22. For an interesting discussion of the archival challenges of

27. Spiro thus implicitly responds to the urban focus of scholarship,

28. On the history of US tourism and road culture, see Donna R.