Stains and Remains: Liveliness, Materiality, and the Archival
Lives of Queer Bodies
Marika Cifor*
Department of Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
ABSTRACT
This article places itself at the centre of a complex debate between
scholars of new materialism and feminist theory. Feminist
scholarship has been forcefully critiqued by new materialists for
its ‘flight from the material’ that may have foreclosed vital
attention to ‘lived material bodies and evolving corporeal
practices’ [Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman. 2009. “Introduction:
Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory.” In Material
Feminism, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 1–20.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 3]. Through my own
encounters with bodily remains and stains in LGBTQ archives, I
develop the lens of liveliness to argue that such bodily matter
animates and is animated because of its archival context.
Liveliness offers a novel approach to new materialism as a
productive means for feminist scholars to articulate how matter
itself, including bodily matter, is animate and imbued with a
particular kind of vitality and affective force. Approaching these
archival records as lively emphasises how feminist scholarly
research and practice in archives can be guided by and
interrelated with the materiality of the bodies, objects, and spaces
that constitute them. Liveliness in turn illustrates how archives
themselves are vigorous and changeable.
Introduction
In the small reading room at the GLBT Historical Society, I sift through a records carton that
is awaiting archival processing. The carton is brimming over with artefacts and ephemera
including keys, fliers, t-shirts, and candles for a commemorative march. Here, amongst the
messy residue of lives lived by Harvey Milk and his friend and lover Scott Smith, I pull out a
manila envelope. Handwritten large letters in black marker on the envelope’s fore side is
‘Harvey Milk’s Pony Tail’ (Harvey Milk and Scott Smith Collection of Artifacts and Ephemera).
Perhaps with such an explicit label, it should have felt less surprising than it was
that a peek inside the envelope did indeed reveal the thick, dark brown locks of Milk’s
shorn ponytail. This encounter between my own body, Milk’s bodily matter, and the
archives itself is startling. These locks, seemingly both dead and alive, trouble and move
me because of the queer body that is actually present here in the archives. The disappearance
of human bodies from archives and the things they collect, arrange, describe, make
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
CONTACT Marika Cifor mcifor@ucla.edu
*Present address: Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, USA
AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST STUDIES, 2017
VOL. 32, NOS. 91–92, 5–21
https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2017.1357014
Downloadedby[EP-IPSWICH]at02:4831August2017
accessible, and preserve is not unexpected. Archives hold deep communion with the dead,
but they are not morgues that are literally engaged in anatomising corpses. Touching
Milk’s shorn locks sets off my ongoing hunt for the queer bodily remains and stains in
archives. In this paper, I consider the archival materials – the bodily traces, fragments,
and fluids – that I discovered as lively. Approaching these records as lively emphasises
how my interpretation of these objects is guided by and interrelated with their very materiality.
Liveliness in turn illustrates how archives themselves are vigorous and changeable.
The detritus matter of queer bodies in archives matters quite a lot to feminist scholarship
and practice. Feminist scholarship has been frequently and sharply critiqued for its
‘flight from the material’ (Alaimo and Hekman 2009, 3). A significant group of scholars
aligned with new materialist movements assert that this ‘flight’ has foreclosed the possibility
of sustained scholarly attention to ‘lived material bodies and evolving corporeal practices’
(3) within feminist theory and praxis (Barad 2003; Coole and Frost 2010; Grosz 1994;
Sobchack 2004). There is no scholarly consensus on whether such a flight from material
and corporeal realities has really occurred. Another group of leading feminist scholars
asserts just as vehemently the opposite position. They argue that feminist theorising
and practice has never turned away from the material and that the assertion that it has
is in itself a wilful and dangerous act of forgetting (Ahmed 2008; Bruining 2013; Sullivan
2012). By reading together new materialist works and critiques of new materialism by feminist
scholars, I assert that new materialism can be productively understood as more than
just a mere corrective to a perceived or real lack of attention to the material in feminist
thought. New materialism can instead be generatively understood as a response to and
a means to contend critically with evolving and emerging understandings and forms of
materiality. It also offers an approach to relations that defy textual representation.
Turning new attention to the presence of bodily matter in LGBTQ archives and collections
with a lens informed by new materialist scholarship and its critiques ensures that feminist
scholars are bringing due attention to both the material, the corporeal, the affective, and
to their interrelations. This project takes on a critical urgency amidst a contemporary
moment characterised by frequent and meaningful shifts in understandings and experiences
of the material, the bodily (Stephens 2014, 197), and the affective. Feminist engagements
in archives and the encounters they provide with queer bodily synecdoches – with
their blood and their hair – offer promising possibilities for contending complexly with ‘the
entanglement of matter and meaning’ (Barad 2007) throughout feminist research and
praxis in and with archives.
It is a due attention to the category of liveliness that the presence of bodily matter in
LGBTQ archives and collections contributes to feminist engagements with archives and
materiality. Liveliness articulates how matter itself, including the bodily matter, is
animate and imbued with a particular kind of agential and affective vitality. Through
the lens of liveliness, the relations of archival records, the space of the archives, and the
other actors (human and non-human) involved can be understood as moving, changeable,
and interrelated constructions. This enables a focus to be put on the translations of matter
and meaning that those relations produce. This article begins by developing the concept
of liveliness from a reading of new materialist literature. Then it introduces discussions of
materiality in feminist new materialist literature and in feminist critiques of new materialism.
Next, the article moves through two acts that are grounded in two moments of
encounter between my body, the lively trace elements of queer bodies captured within
6 M. CIFOR
Downloadedby[EP-IPSWICH]at02:4831August2017
LGBTQ archives and collections, and the social, physical, and technological space of the
archives. These are relations that defy simple textual representation. The first act examines
the rusty remains of dried red blood on Milk’s garments in service of addressing the affects
and the intimacy of archival collecting and the significance of the materiality archival
space to feminist archival encounters. In the second act, I return to the presence of hair
in archives. A queer man’s sampling of his sexual partners’ hair allows for an exploration
of the affects of disgust and intimacy wrought by the very materiality of this bodily matter.
In each act, it is the lens of liveliness that opens the possibility of conceptualising these
archival materials, spaces, and the bodies at work in them as agential forces. Liveliness
brings to light pressing concerns around archival collecting, materiality, language and
text, and affect. By embracing in their engagements with archives these uncanny
human remains and stains, feminist scholars can shift and enrich their approach understanding
archival practices and research beyond the linguistic. Through the lens of liveliness,
feminist scholars embrace affect, queer bodies and embodied experiences, and
acknowledge the changeable set of material conditions that constitute archives.
Liveliness, or ‘The pulse of the archive’
‘The pulse of the archive’, as anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler so beautifully terms it,
equates the Dutch colonial archives that are her subject with a body whose pulse quickens
and slows in response to colonial fantasies and fears (2010). Here, I take that notion of an
archival pulse quite literally, examining the traces of the blood that once pulsed through
the veins and arteries of queer bodies and the hairs they grew. These materials from
human bodies are transformed into matter when separated from their creators’ living
physical bodies. I propose that these traces of bodily matter are themselves animate,
imbued in a new way with a kind of vitality or liveliness. It is that vibrant liveliness that
I find intriguing, troubling, and provocative about this blood, those hairs. Liveliness as
developed through a reading of new materialist literature reaches beyond conventional
understandings of the concept. Liveliness is most often used to describe the very
quality of being alive. In relation to the liminal cases of human bodily remains in archives
addressed in the following acts, once blood or hair are shed and thus separated from their
role as parts of a living human body, they are not typically understood as living things.
Rather than that being confined to a traditionally accepted living human or non-human
agent, liveliness in this article is employed to describe a larger vigorousness and vivacity
in feeling, activity, intensity, and sensation. Liveliness is understood here to encompass
objects and spaces as well as human and non-human bodies.
Liveliness is a concept that emerges from a reading of new materialist literature. New
materialism names in William Connolly’s (2013, 399) words,
a series of movements in several fields that criticise anthropocentrism, rethink subjectivity by
playing up the role of inhuman forces within the human, emphasize the self-organizing
powers of several nonhuman processes, explore dissonant relations between those processes
and cultural practice, rethink the sources of ethics, and commend the need to fold a planetary
dimension more actively and regularly into studies of global, interstate and state politics.
The movements that together make up new materialism are informed by a number of
theoretical strands including actor network theory (Latour 2005), biophilosophy (AnsellPearson
1999; Massumi 1996), philosophical posthumanism (Braidotti 2013), quantum
AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST STUDIES 7
Downloadedby[EP-IPSWICH]at02:4831August2017
physics (Barad 1996), Spinoza and Deleuze’s monism (Clough 2008; Fox and Alldred 2014),
and feminist and queer theories (Braidotti 2006; Grosz 1994; Haraway 1997). Jussi Parikka
describes new materialism as that which forces scholars, ‘To come up with elaborated
ways to understand how perception, action, politics, meanings (and, well, non-meanings)
are embedded not only in human and animal bodies, but also in much more ephemeral,
but as real, things – even non-solid things’ (2012, 97). As a scholarly approach, new materialism
shifts away from an anthropocentric focus on the implications of social processes
only for human bodies or subjectivities. The ontological focus of social inquiry thus
moves away from purely individual entities to a focus that instead emphasises relationality.
Such a focus on relationality includes an emphasis on movement and transformation.
Nothing remains entirely static. For example, Latour (2005) writes about ‘translations’,
which he describes as the shifts or movements of materials and meanings from one
form or space to another as the product of such ongoing relations among actors. New
materialism is characterised by attention to how the animate and the inanimate affect
and are affected by one another (DeLanda 2006, 4). Work in this vein is often framed as
a return to questions of materiality that have been neglected within contemporary critical
theory, including feminist theory.
It is by bringing together the theorising of agency, vibrancy, movement, and animacy
by Karen Barad, Jane Bennett, and Mel Y. Chen that I develop the concept of liveliness. The
work of these scholars examines the relations between animate life and inanimate matter
as part of the larger conversation of new materialism. Barad asserts that materialities have
‘agential’ force (2003, 812). Matter is transformed from something provided for human
body-subjects to perceive to an understanding of humans and matter as mutually constitutive.
In what she terms an ‘agential cut’ between subjects and objects (2003, 815, 2007,
133), Barad conceptualises meaning as possible only through such relations, rather than in
addition to them. In other words, humans and matter are co-constituted through the
process of ‘making themselves intelligible to each other’ in their inevitable and intraactive
relations (Barad 2007;185 as quoted in Taguchi 2013, 712). This decentring of
human meaning-making means that not only perceiving human body-subjects can act
intentionally, orient themselves, and have agency to know themselves. Intention is distributed
and emerges in complex networks of human and non-human material agents that
include historically specific sets of material conditions (Barad 2007). Barad’s work moves
scholars towards a different kind of interpretation that is ‘provisional and interrelated
with its object’ (Jones 2015, 25). In Vibrant Matter, Bennett (2009) develops a theory of
matter that she terms ‘vital materialism’. As she articulates it, things including dirt, discarded
plastic bottle caps, and landfills act as agents with productive power. ‘Thingpower’,
Bennett writes, is ‘the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to
produce effects’ that are both large and small (2009, 6). Her theorisation frames humans
and nonhumans, or subjects and objects, not as mutually exclusive categories but as fundamentally
cooperative and co-constitutive. In emphasising interactions among the
various and changing human and non-human actors, her work highlights how things,
objects, spaces, and people are in a state of constant flux. Bennett’s work on materialism
serves as an inspiration for Chen. In Animacies, Chen (2012, 2) examines ‘how matter that is
considered insensate, immobile, deathly, or otherwise “wrong” animates cultural life in
important ways’. Chen turns attention to the development of the concept of animacy in
and across fields including linguistics, disability studies, queer theory, gender studies,
8 M. CIFOR
Downloadedby[EP-IPSWICH]at02:4831August2017
and critical ethnic studies. Animacy is ‘a quality of agency, awareness, mobility, and liveness’
(2012, 2). Chen begins from the position that matter is animate. In a chapter titled
‘Lead’s Racial Matters’, Chen employs the example of a recent ‘lead panic’ in the United
States surrounding toys with lead paint made in China. Lead is ‘a highly mobile and poisonous
substance that feeds anxieties about transgressors of permeable borders, whether
of skin or country’ (Chen 2012, 15). Chen shows how in this case animacy actually becomes
transformed into property of the lead itself. This scholarship suggests that there are meaningful
gradations to the category of the living. For Barad, Bennett, and Chen, humans and
objects are fundamentally and crucially interrelated. Liveliness names that complicated
relationality between bodies, objects, and spaces, imbuing all as agents in the productions
of activity, feeling, and sensation. These are relations that encompass, but reach beyond,
the province of textual representation. Liveliness offers a productive non-linguistic
approach to ways that materiality resists language. For the archival realm, feminist
engagements through the lens of liveliness promise new and sustained attention to the
vigorousness and changeability of archives. Such a shift in perspective is crucial while
archives are often and potently associated only with dead things and a state of stasis.
Liveliness, feminism, and new materialism
Feminist scholarship and new materialism have a complicated and often conflicted
relationship. There is a significant body of often contradictory and disparate feminist
works within new materialism. Bennett’s theorisation of the ‘vibrancy’ of matter and
Barad’s development of ‘agential realism’ are frequently cited as examples of the ‘material
turn’ in feminist theory (Stephens 2014). Much of the new materialist feminist scholarship
critiques earlier feminist work. This critique is centred in the perceived endemic ‘neglect
of … material phenomena and processes’ in critical, cultural, and feminist theories
(Coole and Frost 2010, 3). These fields commonly privileged, according to Diana Coole
and Samantha Frost, ‘language, discourse, culture and values’ over the material (2010,
2). Coole and Frost argue that concentrating on ‘language, consciousness, subjectivity,
agency, mind [and] soul … as idealities fundamentally different from matter’ and sets
them up to be ‘valorised as superior to the base desires of biological material or the
inertia of physical stuff’ (2010, 2). In another example of this position, Elizabeth Grosz
argues that feminist scholars need to ‘“return” to concepts of nature, matter, life’
because ‘we have forgotten the nature, the ontology, of the body’ (1994, 2). These scholars
exemplify the numerous and sharp critiques of feminist scholarship leveraged by new
materialist scholars (Alaimo and Hekman 2009; Barad 2003; Coole and Frost 2010; Grosz
1994; Sobchack 2004). New materialism provides for these scholars a corrective to feminism’s
neglect of the material and the corporeal through ‘materialist modes of analysis’ and
‘new ways of thinking about matter and processes of materialisation’ (Coole and Frost
2010, 2).
Another group of feminist scholars rejects altogether the claim that feminist theory has
ignored the material. These scholars point to feminism’s long engagement in the study of
the complex and mutually constitutive relationship between body and culture, materiality,
and language. Feminist scholars have, for example, engaged in the study of numerous
bodily fluids, including tears (Elkins 2001; Lutz 2001), menstrual blood (Bobel 2010; Rosewarne
2012), breast milk (Giles 2003), and female ejaculate (Bell 2010). Sara Ahmed (2008)
AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST STUDIES 9
Downloadedby[EP-IPSWICH]at02:4831August2017
argues that debates about materialism have never ceased to play a central role in the
direction of feminist theory. She places materiality at the centre of feminist theory’s
self-orientation. The new materialist claim according to Ahmed reproduces a ‘familiar or
even habitual anxiety that feminism and poststructuralism have reduced “everything” to
language and culture … and have forgotten the “real” of the real world, or the materiality
of what is given’ (2008, 25). The claim that feminist theory has ignored, neglected, or forgotten
the body as ‘a real, living, physical, biological entity’, Ahmed argues, is itself an act
of forgetting (2008, 25). She writes that calling for a return to biology, for example, can only
be done by wilfully neglecting the plentiful feminist work already done on the biological
and from the perspective of feminists who have expertise in the biological sciences
(Ahmed 2008, 27). A number of scholars including Nikki Sullivan (2012) and Dennis Bruining
(2013) have built on Ahmed’s problematisation of the claim of feminism’s fight from
the material.
The heated debate about the place of the material within contemporary critical theory,
and within feminist theory in particular, makes this a timely subject for feminist scholars.
Following Elizabeth Stephens, I contend that these seemingly irreconcilable positions can
be ‘productively reframed’ (2014, 197). This reframing is urgently needed while as feminist
scholars we are living and working in a cultural context where materiality, animacy, and
the corporeal are being rapidly redefined in terms both cultural understandings and
lived experiences (Stephens 2014, 197). For example, when considering biopolitics, Paul
B. Preciado writes that the contemporary body is no longer ‘a passive living material
but an techno-organic interface, a techno-living system segmented and territorialised
by different political models (textual, computerised, biochemical)’ (2013, 108). In this
same vein, artists and researchers Catts and Zurr (2011) have examined the new types
of living systems that currently being developed in scientific labs. As they see it, these laboratory
productions are creating entirely novel forms of matter that can best be understood
as ‘semi-living’ or ‘partially alive’. These examples point to a larger argument that
the human body is in the process of ‘being actively remade by new regimes of pharmaceutics
and biotechnologies’ (Stephens 2014, 198). This work calls into question cultural
and scientific understandings, practices, and definitions of matter, materiality, and
animacy. By reading together new materialist works and the critiques of new materialism
by feminist scholars, I argue that new materialism can be understood as more than just a
corrective real or perceived inattention to materiality in feminist scholarship. Rather, new
materialism can be generatively understood as a response to and a means to contend with
shifting forms of materiality and relations. Materiality in this view is considered both as
changeable and as firmly grounded in the contexts of history, culture, science, and politics.
In the two acts that follow, I offer glimpses of my encounters as a queer and feminist
scholar of archives with the remains and stains of queer bodies, their blood and hair,
within the context of LGBTQ archives and collections. Both acts include relations, corporeal,
and material that defy traditional means of textual capture. In each act, it is the lens of
liveliness that opens the possibility for conceptualising these archival materials, the archival
space, and my body as agential forces. Liveliness captures the complex intra-relations
and co-constitution of all these agents and their roles as producers and as productions of
feeling, activity, intensity, and sensation. Considering archival materials as lively emphasises
how my research and interpretations of these records are guided by and related
10 M. CIFOR
Downloadedby[EP-IPSWICH]at02:4831August2017
to their materiality. Liveliness in turn illustrates how archives and its practices are vigorous
and in flux.
Act I: blood relations
It was my encounter with the uncanny presence of Harvey Milk’s ponytail that prompted
me to dig deeper into his collection at San Francisco’s grassroots community-based GLBT
Historical Society. Milk was a gay rights activist and the one of the first openly gay officials
elected to a major office in the United States, that of San Francisco Supervisor. On 27
November 1978, he was assassinated at San Francisco City Hall, along with Mayor
George Moscone, by fellow former Supervisor Dan White. Milk is the subject of a
number of biographies, documentaries, and a major motion picture. He has become a
gay icon. The collection at the GLBT Historical Society is made up of Milk’s personal artefacts
and materials collected about him by Scott Smith. At my first visit to the collection, it
was housed in a series of records cartons awaiting archival arrangement and description,
what is known in the archival practice as processing. It was in one of these boxes that I
uncovered further bodily traces of Milk. The dried rusty red-brown remains and stains
of Milk’s spilled blood mark his white undershirt, boxers, and handkerchief (Harvey Milk
and Scott Smith Collection of Artifacts and Ephemera).
Milk had been wearing what had become with political success his usual attire, a blue
suit, the day he was killed (Jones 2011). The bloodstains I found are the result of the two
bullets that violently entered Milk’s brain and the three that entered his body that day in a
City Hall office. The bullets forced their way through the body of the suit and into the body
of the living man (Jones 2011). In turn, Milk’s blood, the synecdoche of his living body,
retraced those same bullets’ routes, emerging outward from the wounds to mark each
layer of his clothing and the outside world indelibly. These bloodstains serve as a material
marker of the violence that transformed Milk’s human body from living to dead. The particularity
of the blood’s materiality and the specificity of the context in which I encountered
it move me deeply. The blood is matter that animates and is animated because of
its archival context.
Strangely enough, this archival encounter was not actually my first meeting with Milk’s
blood. On a visit to the GLBT Historical Society’s then newly opened International Museum
of GLBT History, a few years earlier, I had stood in a gallery stilled in front of Milk’s bloodstained
suit. The Society had staged exhibits in the small galleries connected to their
archives for many years prior to the opening of the new, larger, and much more public
space. It was in this new museum space where I encountered the suit. Located in the
heart San Francisco’s Castro District, the Museum is as noteworthy in its very physical presence
as the exhibitions it holds. The exhibit of the suit in the glass vitrine was three-dimensional
and I could and did position myself multiply around the case. The suit I saw
exhibited under glass was limp without Milk’s body inside. A curatorial hand meant that
it was carefully folded so as to display prominently its bullet holes and traces of blood.
The placard attached to the case included a quote from Milk’s recorded premonition
that read, ‘If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door’.
The visibly fraying fabric around the hole marking each bullet’s entry point and in turn
the blood marking its exit were both shocking and striking in their presence in that
initial moment of encounter. It is quite literally the only object from that gallery I can
AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST STUDIES 11
Downloadedby[EP-IPSWICH]at02:4831August2017
recall seeing now. However, a public encounter behind glass in a busy gallery was one that
allowed for me to distance myself from the object and the encounter’s entanglements.
After exiting back out that afternoon onto 18th Street, it would be years before I
stopped to consider that blood again.
My encounter with Milk’s bloodied once white and now rather dingy undergarments in
the box in the archives was a very different experience of the materiality of Milk’s blood. It
was an intimate experience shaped by the intimacy of the space of the archives. Visitors to
GLBT Historical Society’s location on the third floor of a rather unremarkable office building
were not drawn in by the venue; they came for the records and to see and touch their
history. The users of this archives are often community-based and queer. Like them, I
was there seeking some combination of records and connections. In the archives, the
clothing and Milk’s blood are potentially always available for display. However, unlike in
a gallery setting, the object in the archives is more often on retreat from the collective
gaze in a box on a shelf in closed stacks. In particular, there is an intimacy in doing research
with unprocessed materials. This is a distinct physical experience of lifting items from the
box onto the table one by one for examination. It also opens different kinds of affective
engagement when opening a box without any real preview of what is to be found
there. As I lift this fabric, taking in its bloodstains the materiality of that blood, even
dried and long ago shed, I feel a bit nauseous. Between the intimate contact with undergarments
and the materiality of the blood itself, there is an experience of real horror here.
This is the feeling that lacked in my public encounter with Milk’s remains. I have an intimate
experience of horror in the archives that blatantly refuses pure intellectualisation.
For me, it is this materiality that allows me to feel that this is the real blood of a real
body, of a real man. Touching these garments and the bloodstains is contact that transforms
my understanding and experience of Milk. The materiality of the blood in the
archives transforms him from icon to man, creating a new relation between us.
Blood, the red fluid that flows in the arteries, capillaries, and veins of humans and other
vertebrates, carries oxygen and nutrients to, and carbon dioxide and waste metabolites
away from, the organs and tissues of the body (Oxford English Dictionary). Symbolically,
blood describes a number of embodied and fleshy appetites. Blood also serves as metaphor
for states of passion and heightened emotionality that are characterised by rage,
boldness, and courage. The contextual information, knowing that Milk’s blood had been
violently shed in such an impassioned state, also shapes my reading of these archival
objects. Blood is a substance that is linked both materially and symbolically to life, sex,
disease, and difference. In the additional context of queer history and life, blood is an
oft-pathologised substance intimately linked to the AIDS crisis and resulting paranoias,
hatred, and stigmatisation of LGBTQ persons and persons living with HIV and AIDS.1
Blood is understood both as the inherited characteristic and as the vehicle of hereditary
characteristics that distinguishes members of a particular family from others, making
and marking blood relations. It is a different kind of blood relation, a queerer lineage of
family and community, which relates Smith and Milk, as well as Milk and me.
The liveliness of this blood brings to the fore a complex and an intimate relation that is
defined by something more than shared biology. Smith was Milk’s partner in many of
senses of the term. Together, they founded and ran Castro Camera. They had a romantic
relationship over a number of years that included and was outlived by a close friendship.
Their partnership also extended to the political realm. Smith was a powerful activist in his
12 M. CIFOR
Downloadedby[EP-IPSWICH]at02:4831August2017
own right and played a key role in the Coors Beer boycott. It was the Coors boycott that
put Milk front and centre in one of the earliest public displays of political power and organising
by the gay community. Smith also organised and managed a number of Milk’s campaigns
for public office (Shilts 1982). After Milk’s death, Smith served as one of the
executors of his estate (Sward 1995). He also devoted much of his time to serving as
head of the Harvey Milk Archives (San Francisco Public Library 2003). Smith’s queer collecting
impulses and his appraisal of this bodily material as of enduring value crucially shapes
the collection that is available to me.
Smith’s decision to save the remains of Milk’s body, including his bloodied garments, is
significant. The blood guided his archival impulses as much as it does my interpretations of
the objects and practices at play in the archives. His collecting choices reflect an ongoing
intimate and corporeal relationality with Milk, and Milk’s physical body. After the investigation
into Milk’s death was complete, the clothing in question was released to Smith. It
was then boxed and put to rest beneath Smith’s bed (Jones 2011, 386) for nearly 20 years.
The ongoing intimacy of Smith’s body, sleeping just a few feet above the bloodied garments,
speaks powerfully to an affective relation that extends beyond clear bounds
between life and death. Smith maintained and preserved these traces of Milk’s body in
his home until his own death in 1995. The collection was donated to the Society in
2002 by Smith’s estate. The suit and other clothing arrived at the archives on someone’s
lap, in a non-archival banker’s box, wrapped in butcher paper and threatened with mildew
(Hinton 2011, 22). It is only Smith’s archival practices that enabled its very survival.
Smith’s actions of collecting and preserving the bodily remains of an absent partner are
not without precedent. Maryanne Dever (2010) analysed the similarly queer collecting
practices and materiality that shape aristocrat and screenwriter Mercedes de Acosta’s collection.
Dever begins with a description of item 80 from Box 23, an envelope ‘on the front
of which is written “Greta’s foot Sept. 1958”’ (163). Inside is a pencil tracing of movie star
Greta Garbo’s foot extending across two small sheets of unlined notepaper. Dever reads
this ‘foot’ along with the letters, telegrams, cards, and ephemeral artefacts for absence,
materiality, and intimacy. Other scholars had been disappointed by the lack of explicit
messages of love between Garbo and de Acosta; however, Dever compellingly argues
that intimacy is not to be found in just such forms. Intimacy here is evidenced in the collection
as a whole and in de Acosta’s ‘obsessive assembling, ordering and preserving of the
unfolding paper trail left by Garbo’ (166). De Acosta not only preserved letters and telegrams
from the star, but also the blank florists’ cards and mailing labels. In short, she
saved nearly anything Garbo’s hand could have been presumed to have touched, including
the ‘aforementioned traced outline of her foot that was sent so that she might buy
Garbo some slippers’ (166). It is archival collecting that gives their often tense, desirous,
and intimate relationship ‘a continuing material form’ (167). Like de Acosta, Smith saved
both the mundane and the extraordinary objects of Milk’s existence. In both cases, a physical
intimacy with an absent loved one is maintained through the acts of collecting and
preserving their bodily traces. The presence of Garbo’s foot and Milk’s blood in LGBTQ
archives and collections also lends credence to Ann Cvetkovich’s assertion that queer cultures
often leave behind ‘ephemeral and unusual’ traces, as they are communities formed
around intimacy, sexuality, and other affects (2003, 8).
Others in City Hall that day heard the shots fired, but Milk and White were alone in an
office. There are no pictures, no video of the event. Transformed in that moment, the
AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST STUDIES 13
Downloadedby[EP-IPSWICH]at02:4831August2017
bloodied garments are the surviving witness. In their materiality, they intervened in the
event and continue to do so in the archives. Milk’s blood brings to life the complex set
of relations that make up any relation. Smith was deliberate in his desire and acts to
ensure that this material evidence was preserved to resonate and relate for posterity.
Milk’s bodily traces survived because a queer and intimate relationality between two
men. In the context of the archives, the blood produces new sets of queerly intimate
relations. The affects produced by the blood’s materiality in the archives and my body’s
ability to be affected disrupt any presumed control of subject over matter.
Act II: locks of love
Vero Romano di Roma. Gladiator. Stalwart. Thief. Cost: ap. 7500 lira, one wrist-watch. Still … it
is nice to think that the band once around my wrist now encircles those strong steel tendons
of his, and that from time to time those sardonic mocking cold young eyes rest on the dial,
where I had looked … (Samuel Steward Papers)
Beautiful face, charming, tall. Link: Wilcoxes’ party. Loved sailors. Joined Merchant Marine,
June 1952. (Samuel Steward Papers)
Both of the entries above are included on the fore side of the index cards that make up
Samuel Steward’s ‘Stud File’. On the reverse of these two particular cards affixed with
now very yellowed scotch tape are small samples of pubic hairs. The tape that has held
these hairs on the appropriate card more than a half-century does not cover them entirely.
In both cases, the curly, coarse, and brown hairs stick out determinedly, leaving space for
them to be caressed or examined. My affective response lies somewhere between disgust
and attraction. I question whether to run my fingers over the curling stands. It is a casual
comment from an equally casual acquaintance about the surprising appearance of this
pubic hair in the archives at Yale University that piqued my interest in Steward’s collection.
Many months later, I travel up to visit the Stud File at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library. The collection does not disappoint. Steward was a writer and English professor
who left academia to become a tattoo artist, erotic writer, and pornographer
(Spring 2011). The Stud File is a card catalogue that is stored in a specially made green
metal file. The index cards within it chronicle in detail Steward’s sexual life from the
1930s through the 1960s. The File is but one relic of Steward’s vast project of documenting,
classifying, and quantifying his queer sexual existence. On the cards, Steward carefully
and meticulously tracked and quantified information about his partners, as well as
locations, dates, sexual acts, accessories, and releases. He developed his own complex,
nuanced, and idiosyncratically queer classification system. On each of the cards, as seen
in the examples above, Steward also offered a narrative comprised of gendered, racialised
and racy remarks on the bodies and personalities of the many men and a few women with
whom he was sexually involved and the activities and pleasures they shared. He included,
on occasion, in the File as well a small trove of hairs trimmed from a partner’s pubic region
and in a single instance from the gentleman’s head as well. The hair itself is material, but
the strength of my reactions to it is also material. As Sara Ahmed theorises, some emotions
have ‘weightiness’ and ‘feelings are, in some sense material; like objects, feelings do things,
and they affect what they come into contact with’ (2004, 85). Affects are thus not an
inherent quality of a particular object, but rather are attributed to them as a result of
the interrelationality between objects and others. The unfixed affects of these hairs
14 M. CIFOR
Downloadedby[EP-IPSWICH]at02:4831August2017
depend upon sensuous contact, touch, and proximity, in this case the relations between
my body and them.
It is the annotations on the index cards that attach the pubic hairs to a narrative. One of
the cards with a hair sample reads in full on the fore, ‘M___, Bob’. Chicago. 28-II-50. Mysterious
past, the Lincoln Blackfoot Club. Actually, a plain-clothes cop and as queer as they
make ‘em. That is, if his sucking my cock makes a man queer. He did – twice’.2
Employing
the code key I found elsewhere in Steward’s collection, I can decipher the details contained
on Bob’s card. On the upper left-hand side the ‘S’ means the subject had a small
penis, while the ‘Tn’ next to it means that it was also thin. The number ‘9’ on the top
right side of the card means that he was classified by Steward as ‘trade’. Another set of
numbers on the card’s right side indicate the order of the card within the File itself. In
the upper middle of the card, the dates of their encounter, 28 February 1950, and the
place, Chicago, are noted. Steward also notes just above the narrative numerically the
activities that they engaged in that day. Here the ‘66’ is code that he was browned and
the ‘69’ means that the sexual actions engaged in were reciprocal. Steward’s brief narrative
description of the person and the encounter occupies the bottom of each card. Though
the inclusion of pubic hair is a less common practice, this single card is in many ways representative
of most in the Stud File in its format, tone, and typed contents.
Hair grows out from individual follicles below the surface of human skin. Taking in nutrients,
the hair bulb produces new hair cells, which divide rapidly in order to produce the new
cells. Maturing those cells move up through the root in a process called keratinisation in
which they are filled with fibrous protein and lose their nucleus. That moment of loss
marks that hair cell as no longer alive (Murphy 1998, 2). By the time the hair shaft
becomes long enough to protrude stubbornly beyond the skin’s boundaries, it is merely
fibre made of keratinised proteins. Hair is thus a waste product of human bodies, much
like urine, menstrual blood, and the other dead skin cells that we shed routinely. The
growth of hair cells requires energy that comes from the burning of glucose, which requires
the presence of oxygen. Once in death the human heart stops pumping oxygen around the
body in the blood, this energy supply ends and so does the cell division that drives hair
growth. Once divorced from the organic life and growth of the living body, the hair is thus
frozen in its materiality as an unchanging thing. It stands out of time as it materialises that
which is past and can survive into perpetuity to be preserved from decay in ways in which
the body in its entirety will not (Hay 2014, 335). Hair has both gendered and sexual associations.
Hair on the head, the face, and the rest of the body carries meaning through its
styling, texture, length, and colour. That the hair in Steward’s Stud File is mostly pubic hair
is also significant. Pubic hair emerges only with the human body’s transition through adolescence
into adult sexual maturity carrying significant connotations of sexuality.
In spite of his detailed sexual recordkeeping, Steward left no notes, or at least none that
has survived both the collections many decades in storage before arriving in the archives
(Spring 2011) and its time in the archives, regarding the hair samples. There is no numerical
code assigned in particular to mark those cards that include hair. Yet, a survey of the
cards that include pubic hair samples indicates that nearly all of them include the code ‘9’
on the card’s top right side. That ‘9’ identified Steward’s partner as ‘trade’ and thus classified
their interaction as having had an economic as well as a sexual exchange.3
It will likely
remain impossible to know precisely what impulse prompted Steward to collect and keep
such samples. However, the hairs serve as enduring and enticing evidence of sexual
AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST STUDIES 15
Downloadedby[EP-IPSWICH]at02:4831August2017
intimacies and sexual documentation practices. In the context of the File, the hair has had
and continues to have both a private and public functionality. The File began as project for
Steward’s private pleasure and writings. It was also source material for his published erotic
works and more public efforts at documenting sexual life (Spring 2011). Steward had
begun the practice of tracking and classifying his sexual life well before he began
working with sex researcher Alfred Kinsey. Through Steward’s long collaboration with
Kinsey, the File becomes public in another sense, transformed into the site of and inspiration
for scientific discovery and production.
When I visited, the Beinecke was closed for renovations and its collections were accessible
in a reading room in the Sterling Memorial Library. The Sterling is a main library befitting
in its grandeur such an esteemed institution of higher learning. Along with its grand gothic
architecture, there is carved into nearly every surface, whether plaster, stone, or wood a
design intended to ‘remind the viewer of the dignity and significance of learning in
general and of libraries in particular’ (Yale University Library 2014). The reading room I
visit thus serves to make the pubic hair even stranger and more pleasing in its uncanniness.
From my place at a long wooden table, I peak at the materials in front of the scholars sitting
around me. As expected, my fellow researchers are here to see items from the Library’s
impressive collections in Medieval, Renaissance, and eighteenth-century Europe, nineteenth-century
imperialism, and American literary culture. This context matters as pubic
hair boxed in an archive is not the same as the strands of hair caught in the bathtub
drain or the wastebasket of a local waxing salon. It is because I am in this archives, and in
an archives at all, that this pubic hair feels notable. Hair as with other body parts is an everyday
object that we are habituated to and thus garners little attention. When divorced from
everyday contexts, hair is ‘made strange as tactile, silent material’ (Lutz 2011, 135).
That the bodily fragments are hair matters to the way I read and the way I am affected
by them. The signifying effects of hair make it seem simultaneously living and dead. That
hair occupies that liminal space between life and death is due to a number of factors. The
visible hair on the living human body is actually made of dead cells. When plucked from
the body, hair maintains visible in precisely its same form. Hair also has the ability to long
outlive the body from which it grew. Hair is also associated with complex and contradictory
affective responses, including notably disgust (Eichhorn 2014, 82). In psychology,
disgust is understood as an experience with four key elements: a facial expression, an
action of attempted distancing from the offending object, nausea, and a feeling of revulsion
(Rozin and Fallon 1987: 23). In this field, disgust is an emotion with a central function.
It is something felt in the service of avoiding contaminant, disease, and pathogens (Curtis,
De Barra, and Aunger 2011; Oaten, Stevenson, and Case 2009; Rozin and Fallon 1987;
Schaller and Park 2011). This perspective is used to explain the objects that become commonly
subjects of our disgust; these include ‘human waste and other effluvium’ as well as
things that are ‘greasy’, ‘sticky’, ‘discoloured’, or ‘malodorous’. All of these factors are
associated with infectiousness (Strohminger 2014). Such physiological work on disgust
is foundational to Ahmed’s cultural analysis of what the emotion of disgust actually
does. She describes disgust as ‘deeply ambivalent, involving a desire for, or an attraction
towards, the very objects that are felt to be repellant’ (Ahmed 2004, 84). This description of
messy space between desire and repulsion describes precisely my own reaction to the
pubic hair in Steward’s File and my protracted debate over whether to reach out actually
and touch the hair itself.
16 M. CIFOR
Downloadedby[EP-IPSWICH]at02:4831August2017
Hair is also associated affectively with the desire for and the pleasures of intimacy.
Desire, in contrast to disgust, ‘pulls us towards objects, and opens us to the bodies of
others’ (Ahmed 2004, 84). Intimacy is most simply defined as closeness, a familiarity in
knowledge, in action, in observation, or in language, that in the words of Lauren Berlant
actually ‘builds worlds’ (1998, 288). Intimacy, whether psychic, emotional, physical, institutional,
or sexual, is a central aspect of queer life. Usually, intimacy is conceptualised
within ‘zones of familiarity and comfort: friendship, the couple, and the family form, animated
by expressive and emancipating kinds of love’ yet intimacy transcends the
private into the public world as something to be protected, manipulated or besieged
by institutions, the state, and the very ideal of publicness (Berlant 1998, 288–289).
Sexual intimacies typically defy archival capture. As Cvetkovich observes, there is an ‘invisibility
that often surrounds intimate life, especially sexuality’ (2001, 110) not least because
‘sex and feelings are too personal or too ephemeral to leave records’ (112). Steward’s collection
of wiry tendrils and their accompanying documentation thus bring rare and valuable
material substance to queer sex and sexuality. These are the remains of men whose
experiences are often silenced by the overwhelming archival preservation of the voices of
the dominant. Each curly hair requires a process of recontextualising through the collection,
that once accomplished allows for a reading of archival absences around sex and intimacy.
As an agent, this hair produces and is produced by an affective relationality. It
documents and demonstrates the ways that bodies come into contact with other
bodies and with objects. Overwhelmed by the intensity of even the sensuous proximity
to these hairs, I pull my hand away from the hairs without actually touching them.
The potential of liveliness for feminist engagements with archives
My encounters with the stains of Milk’s blood on his suit and undergarments and the pubic
hairs cultivated and collected in Steward’s collection begin to illustrate the potential of
liveliness for feminist engagements in archives. Liveliness as a lens is developed though
a reading practice that draws together new materialism and feminist critiques of new
materialism. Liveliness calls for a consideration of these queer bodily traces in LGBTQ
archives and collections as material, agential, animate, and vibrant actors. Considering
the records as such in turn leads to a rethinking of the interrelations and mutual constitution
of my body, the archival space, and the objects themselves though our relations.
Decentring humans as the sole source of agency brings to light the importance of the
intra-relations of actors, objects, infrastructures, and discourses in producing matter and
meaning. Approaching archival records as lively agents emphasises how a researcher’s
interpretations, my interpretations, of these objects are shaped by and interrelated with
their very materiality. As a lens, liveliness also illuminates how archives as spaces are vigorous
and in flux. A rereading of bodily and other matter through liveliness holds the
potential to extend feminist engagements with archives into vital concerns of feeling,
activity, intensity, and sensation.
By bringing together new materialist literature and critiques of such scholarship in this
article, it becomes clear that new materialism has productive potential for feminist scholars.
New materialism offers more to feminist scholars than just a means to counter to a paucity of
attention, whether it is realor imagined, to matter in feminist research and theorising. Rather,
new materialism can be better understood as a powerful response to and a means for
AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST STUDIES 17
Downloadedby[EP-IPSWICH]at02:4831August2017
scholars to contend critically with evolving and emerging understandings and forms of
materiality in this contemporary moment. The material structures through which matter,
including our human bodies, is constituted are rapidly shifting. Techno-scientific and biomedical
‘progress’ has exceeded human intentions and narrow interpretations of animacy. As
Felix Guattari put it, we are in the midst of a period marked by ‘profound and irreversible
changes’ to understandings of what constitutes life (2009, 29). These changes are taking
place across global and intimate scales. Such shifts promise not only to redefine the
human, the corporeal, and the animate, but also to redefine the conditions for thought
and practice. Feminist scholars, including those engaged with archives, will need to be
deeply engaged with questions of matter and materiality in such a landscape. New materialism
offers a platform for such feminist work. As it attends in a deliberate and significant way
to the agency of material, including especially that of non-human actors, new materialism
offers a means to developing insight on the constitution and meaning of worlds, social
and physical.
Inbothacts above, itis an engagement withmaterialitythat offersme a means to contend
with affect in my archival engagements. Through a lens of liveliness, archival affects can be
taken up more impactfully by feminist scholars. New materialism develops an understanding
of affectas a relational force thatis notjust the province of human actors. Affect is essentialto
the project of rethinking agency, as it animates the full ‘multiplicity of relations that necessarily
go into the make-up of any given relation’ (Woodward and Lea 2010, 159). Affect disrupts
the notion of an intentional and agential human subject in full control of the matter
with which they engage. This happens across scales of engagement, whether at the level
ofmy disgust anddesire to touch the pubic hairs,the circulations ofaffects between andconstituting
non-human agents or the mutual formation of archival records and the space. Liveliness
holds the promise of reframing both subjects and objects in terms of their relations, of
their volatile capacities to affect and to be affected.
Additionally, the lens of liveliness pushes feminist scholars to do more than just consider
the agency of archival objects. As becomes clear in the acts above, the archives
itself is an agent. Conceptualising the archives as agential in the relations that co-constitute
matter and meaning leads to novel understandings of them as vigorous and changeable.
This perspective challenges the common conceptualisation of the archives, even by
scholars deeply engaged in them, as static, dusty, and the collectors of dead things and
past times. Through new materialism, it is possible to understand that archives are actually
in a state of constant flux, shifting with each new intra-action of the various and changing
actors that constitute it. Feminist work has frequently focused only on the objects that are
contained within the archives. A sole focus on objects happens at the detriment of considering
the archives as a space, a set of practices, and a site for the intervention of
agents, both human and non-human. Rethinking the power and potential of the archives
as a space offers immense potential for newly understanding the archives as a vital space
for contending with the ‘legacies, epistemes, and traumas pressing down on the present’
(Eichhorn 2014, 5). Within the archival turn in feminism, scholars have already begun to
look to the past for new ways of negotiating a present in which political agency has
been eroded. As shown by this line of inquiry, archives can serve as an important alternative
source for legitimising alternative forms of knowledge, cultural production, and politics
in the present (Eichhorn 2014, 5). However, it will require a scholarly engagement with
the materiality of archival space to harness such potential.
18 M. CIFOR
Downloadedby[EP-IPSWICH]at02:4831August2017
Notes
1. Men who have sex with men and who are sexually active are still banned from donating blood
in the United States out of AIDS-related fears (Bennett 2009).
2. Full names are included in the File. To protect their privacy, I have omitted last names of subjects
in this article.
3. As a term, trade sometimes also is used to indicate a conflict between sexual orientation
versus sexual activities engaged in.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Marika Cifor is a Consortium for Faculty Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender, Sexuality and
Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College. She earned her PhD in Information Studies at the University
of California, Los Angeles in 2017. Her research interests include affect, community archives, bodies
and embodiment, and digital cultures. Together with Anne J. Gilliland, Cifor guest edited a special
issue of Archival Science on ’Affect and the Archive, Archives and Affects’. Her work has been published
in Transgender Studies Quarterly, The American Archivist, Archival Science, Library Trends, and
InterActions.
References
Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Ahmed, Sara. 2008. “Open Forum Imaginary Prohibitions.” European Journal of Women’s Studies
15 (1): 23–39.
Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman. 2009. “Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist
Theory.” In Material Feminism, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 1–20. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Ansell-Pearson, Keith. 1999. Germinal Life. London: Routledge.
Barad, Karen. 1996. “Meeting the Universe Halfway; Realism and Social Constructivism Without
Contradiction.” In Feminism, Science and the Philosophy of Science, edited by L. H. Nelson and
J. Nelson, 165–194. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Barad, Karen. 2003. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes
to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (3): 801–831.
Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter
and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bell, Shannon. 2010. Fast Feminism. New York: Autonomedia.
Bennett, Jeffery A. 2009. Banning Queer Blood: Rhetorics of Citizenship, Contagion, and Resistance.
Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Bennett, Jane. 2009. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press.
Berlant, Lauren. 1998. “Intimacy: A Special Issue.” Critical Inquiry 24 (2): 281–288. http://www.jstor.
org/stable/1344169.
Bobel, Chris. 2010. New Blood: Third-Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation. New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press.
Braidotti, Rosi. 2006. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bruining, Dennis. 2013. “A Somatechnics of Moralism: New Materialism or Material Foundationalism.”
Somatechnics 3 (1): 149–168.
AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST STUDIES 19
Downloadedby[EP-IPSWICH]at02:4831August2017
Catts, Oron, and Ionat Zurr. 2011. “Introduction.” In Partial Life, edited by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr.
Open Humanities Press. Accessed 10 October 2016. http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/
Partial_Life
Chen, Mel Y. 2012. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering and Queer Affect. Durham: Duke University
Press.
Clough, Patricia T. 2008. “The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia and Bodies.” Theory, Culture
& Society 25: 1–22.
Connolly, William. 2013. “The New Materialism and the Fragility of Things.” Millennium: Journal of
International Studies 41 (3): 399–412.
Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost. 2010. “Introducing the New Materialisms.” In New Materialisms:
Ontology, Agency and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 1–45. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Curtis, V. A., M. De Barra, and R. Aunger. 2011. “Disgust as an Adaptive System for Disease Avoidance
Behaviour.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 366 (1563):
389–401.
Cvetkovich, Ann. 2001. “In the Archives of Lesbian Feelings: Documentary and Popular Culture.”
Camera Obscura 49 (1): 107–147.
Cvetkovich, Ann. 2003. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham:
Duke University Press.
DeLanda, Manuel. 2006. A New Philosophy of Society. London: Continuum.
Dever, Maryanne. 2010. “Greta Garbo’s Foot, or Sex, Socks and Letters.” Australian Feminist Studies
25 (64): 163–173.
Eichhorn, Kate. 2014. The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order. Philadelphia, PA: Temple
University Press.
Elkins, James. 2001. Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings.
London: Routledge.
Fox, Nick J., and Pam Alldred. 2014. “New Materialist Social Inquiry: Designs, Methods and the
Research Assemblage.” International Journal of Social Research Methodology 18 (4): 399–414.
http://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2014.921458.
Giles, Fiona. 2003. Fresh Milk: The Secret Life of Breasts. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Guattari, Felix. 2009. Soft Subversions: Texts and Interviews 1977–1985. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).
Haraway, Donna. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.Femaleman_Meets_Oncomouse:
Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge.
Harvey Milk and Scott Smith Collection of Artifacts and Ephemera, 1973–1993, #2002-43.
San Francisco, CA: GLBT Historical Society.
Hay, Daisy. 2014. “Hair in the Disraeli Papers: A Victorian Harvest.” Journal of Victorian Culture 19 (3):
332–345.
Hinton, Gregory. 2011. “Artifacts of Love and Violence.” Convergence: 16–25.
Jones, Jordy. 2011. “A Martyr in the Archive: The Life and Afterlife of Harvey Milk’s Suit.” Somatechnics
1 (2): 372–387.
Jones, Amelia. 2015. “Material Traces: Performativity, Artistic ‘Work,’ and New Concepts of Agency.”
TDR/The Drama Review 59 (4): 18–35.
Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lutz, Tom. 2001. Crying: A Natural and Cultural History of Tears. New York: Norton.
Lutz, Deborah. 2011. “The Dead Still Among Us: Victorian Secular Relics, Hair Jewelry and Death
Culture.” Victorian Literature and Culture 39: 127–142.
Massumi, Brian. 1996. “The Autonomy of Affect.” In Deleuze: A Critical Reader, edited by P. Patton,
217–239. Oxford: Blackwell.
Murphy, Pat. 1998. “Exploring Hair.” The Exploratorium Magazine 22 (2). http://www.exploratorium.
edu/exploring/hair/.
Oaten, M., R. Stevenson, and T. I. Case. 2009. “Disgust as a Disease-Avoidance Mechanism.”
Psychological Bulletin 135 (2): 303–321. doi:10.1037/a0014823
20 M. CIFOR
Downloadedby[EP-IPSWICH]at02:4831August2017
Oxford English Dictionary. “Blood.” Oxford English Dictionary. Accessed 29 September 2016. https://
en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/us/blood.
Parikka, Jussi. 2012. “New Materialism as Media Theory: Medianatures and Dirty Matter.”
Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 9 (1): 95–100. http://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2011.
626252.
Preciado, Beatriz. 2013. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era.
Translated by Bruce Benderson. New York: Feminist Press at CUNY.
Rosewarne, Lauren. 2012. Periods in Pop Culture: Menstruation in Film and Television. Plymouth:
Lexington Books.
Rozin, Paul, and April E. Fallon. 1987. “A Perspective on Disgust.” Psychological Review 94 (1): 23–41.
Samuel Steward Papers, GEN MSS 987, New Haven, CT: Yale University Library, Beinecke Rare Books
and Manuscript Library.
San Francisco Public Library. 2003. “Harvey Milk Archives-Scott Smith Collection 1919–95.” https://
sfpl.org/pdf/libraries/main/sfhistory/GLBT/Harvey_Milk_ArchiveScott_Smith_Collection.pdf.
Schaller, M., and J. H. Park. 2011. “The Behavioral Immune System (and Why It Matters).” Current
Directions in Psychological Science 20 (2): 99–103.
Shilts, Randy. 1982. The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk. New York: St. Martin’s
Press.
Sobchack, Vivian. 2004. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Spring, Justin. 2011. Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and
Sexual Renegade. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Stephens, Elizabeth. 2014. “Feminism and New Materialism: The Matter of Fluidity.” Interalia 9:
186–202.
Stoler, Ann Laura. 2010. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Strohminger, Nina. 2014. “Disgust Talked About.” Philosophy Compass 9 (7): 478–493.
Sullivan, Nikki. 2012. “The Somatechnics of Perception and the Matter of the Non/Human: A Critical
Response to the New Materialism.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 19 (3): 299–313.
Sward, Susan. 1995. “Scott Smith--Harvey Milk Friend.” San Francisco Chronicle, February 7. Accessed
29 September 2016. http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Scott-Smith-Harvey-Milk-Friend-
3046027.php.
Taguchi, H. L. 2013. “Images of Thinking in Feminist Materialisms: Ontological Divergences and the
Production of Researcher Subjectivities.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education
26 (6): 706–716.
Woodward, K., and J. Lea. 2010. “Geographies of Affect.” In The Sage Handbook of Social Geographies,
edited by S. J. Smith, R. Pain, S. A. Marston, and J. P. JonesII, 154–175. London: Sage.
Yale University Library. 2014. “Sterling Memorial Library.” July 7. Accessed 12 October 2016. http://
web.library.yale.edu/building/sterling-library/history.
AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST STUDIES 21
Downloadedby[EP-IPSWICH]at02:4831August2017
Copyright of Australian Feminist Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not
be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's
express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for
individual use.