Jamie A Lee

This project uses the body as a framework to understand and re-imagine the archives (here referring to the professionally managed repository). It argues that the archives as a body of knowledge, like the human body, does not and cannot fit into normative stable categories. Tracing the shift in archival paradigms from modern to postmodern, I employ the posthuman to argue for a concomitant shift in understanding of the archival body, which I conceive of as comprising both human and non-human corpora of knowledge and knowledge-making practices. These corpora are simultaneously becoming and unbecoming as multiply-situated identities, technologies, representations, and timescapes. Using temporality as a key element in analyzing archival productions, I consider how this body might sediment. This research, written from my insider perspective as an archivist, implements a transdisciplinary approach that draws from the disciplines of archival and queer studies as well as from somatechnics, embodiment and affect studies, and decolonizing methodologies to advocate for a proposed Queer/ed Archival Methodology, Q/M, that is designed to trouble the concepts of archival theory and production. It also employed on-site observation and interviews at the Transgender Archives in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, observation and narrative analysis of recordings held by the Arizona Queer Archives and the Arizona LGBTQ Storytelling Project, and online interviews with the developer of the Skeivt Arkiv, Norway's first state-sanctioned queer archives. Three overarching questions guided the research: 1) How can archives simultaneously hold normative and non-normative stories, materials and practices together as both complementary and also contradictory without subordinating or otherwise invalidating either and so that each can still be considered worthy of archival attention? 2) How might a Q/M be a radical intervention into normative archival practices and structures and to what ends? 3) What might it mean and look like for a queer/ed archives to be a radically open space? For whom? As we encounter multiply-situated subjects in the postmodern approach and follow traces in order to interrogate the force and function of respectability politics within the archival body, the modern and anthropocentric Cartesian statement 'Je pense, donc je suis' (I think, therefore I am) can no longer support the human and records as the central theme of archival endeavors. The posthuman approach offers many possibilities. Through the understanding that human bodies are relational and contingent in complex ways to non-human bodies and each to bodies of knowledges, human and non-human bodies come together in complex relations and assemblages within the archives. Archival productions can thus represent new and emerging thoughts on lived experiences as these are situated in various structures and systems. The Q/M offers a way of thinking and acting with, about, through, among, and at times in spite of traditional as well as emerging archival practices and processes in order to facilitate new, imaginative, irrational, and unpredictable re-configurations of bodies and archives and the many histories and records therein. Its flexible foundation in the theories employed in the research support Q/M's seven key approaches: 1) Participatory Ethos, 2) Connectivity, 3) Storytelling, 4) Intervention, 5) Re-framing, 6) Re-imagining, and 7) Flexibility & Dynamism

This article brings the traditional archival paradigm and the pop-up movement into conversation with each other through a close reading of the POPUP Archive of the Arizona Queer Archives, AQA, in collaboration with FARR, a coalition of feminist scholars, artists, and activists of public scholarship. We trace the interdisciplinary processes of planning and performing the POP-UP Archive while also attending to the pedagogical-political possibilities created by community-university-activist partnerships, more generally, and community-based archival productions, more specifically. The POP-UP decentered institutionalized educational and archival models in a turn towards community-based sites of inquiry and oft-marginalized forms of knowledge production. We contend that the AQA POP-UP Archive facilitated queered feminist rhetorics of (dis)location to provoke unruly, embodied, and sensuous encounters with local bodies of knowledge. Through interconnected readings of POP-UP participant refl...

abstract:This article engages the archives as a space of multimodal truth telling that challenges the traditional understanding of archives as “authorized evidence.” This inquiry, specifically into oral history interviews produced for and within the archives, works to further disrupt the long-standing traditional archival paradigm that advocates for a static and fixed archival record. To recognize an archival record that is neither static nor singular is to recognize how static and singular records have functioned in the archives. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s 1983 essays and lectures on parrhesia–often translated in English as “free speech” and defined as the process of telling and confronting one’s truth–I posit that multiplicities related to subjects and subjectivities offer kaleidoscopic connections between the storyteller and the stories and truths they tell. Through analysis of distinct oral history interviews I conducted for the Arizona Queer Archives and with an emphasis on t...

Video abstract Through hands-on work collecting digital video oral histories for the Arizona Queer Archives, bodies and bodies of knowledge in ongoing affective states of simultaneous becoming and unbecoming can be observed and encountered. Both interviewing and storytelling techniques in select oral histories are considered here to stress the salient and affective processes of mediation and (un)becoming that unfold in front of and behind the camera as part of the production of digital archival stories and subsequent access to streaming technologies. In order to explore the details of archival production, the oral history interview is understood here as a space of both intimate and public storytelling—an affective assemblage. This paper introduces archives as affective multimodalities that work to tenderly hold and structure bodies, technologies, and stories especially as these come together and apart in states of (un)becoming.

Neoliberalism, as economic doctrine, as political practice, and even as a "governing rationality" of contemporary life and work, has been encroaching on the library and information studies (LIS) field for decades. The shift towards a conscious grappling with social justice and human rights debates and concerns in archival studies scholarship and practice since the 1990s opens the possibility for addressing neoliberalism and its elusive presence. Despite its far-reaching influence, neoliberalism has yet to be substantively addressed in archival discourse. In this article, we propose a set of questions for archival practitioners and scholars to reflect on and consider through their own hands-on practices, research, and productions with records, records creators, and distinct archival communities in order to develop an ongoing archival critique. The goal of this critique is to move towards "an ethical practice of community, as an important mode of participation." ...

This article highlights the particular - embodied - ways in which the human record can be collected, organized, and preserved. Engaging both archival and queer theories, the understanding of body-as-archives and archives-as-body is instantiated in the oral history record from one genderqueer poet. This…

Deploying feminist notions of embodied, relational archival
practices, this article critically defines and creatively unites both
‘radical’ and ‘hospitality’ as a tool for enacting generosity in
archives. Drawing on the complexities of Derrida’s Of Hospitality
(Cultural Memory in the Present) alongside feminist scholarship
and, what Cherríe Moraga calls ‘theories of the flesh’, it elucidates
the urgent work of imagining archives as spaces of radical
hospitality. The article uses embodied knowledges and
storytelling as an archival methodology to propose a set of
elements of radical hospitality and what it means and does in
and for the community archives. It attends to the creative
possibilities that acknowledging the relational complexities of the
archives, its collections, and its records as integral to establishing
socially just and generative spaces for its records creators and its
visitors. Radical hospitality becomes not only a possibility but also
the lively, animated, and joyous archival body and all of its parts.

This article engages the archives as a space of multimodal truth telling that challenges the traditional understanding of archives as "authorized evidence." This inquiry, specifically into oral history interviews produced for and within the archives, works to further disrupt the long-standing traditional archival paradigm that advocates for a static and fixed archival record. To recognize an archival record that is neither static nor singular is to recognize how static and singular records have functioned in the archives. Drawing on Michel Foucault's 1983 essays and lectures on parrhesia--often translated in English as "free speech" and defined as the process of telling and confronting one's truth--I posit that multiplicities related to subjects and subjectivities offer kaleidoscopic connections between the storyteller and the stories and truths they tell. Through analysis of distinct oral history interviews I conducted for the Arizona Queer Archives and with an emphasis on the narrator, Foucault's parrhesiastes, I argue that truth telling emerges through oral history methods that might best support (un)becoming bodies and bodies of knowledge in the archives to trouble the archival record in a generative way.

This article brings the traditional archival paradigm and the pop-up movement into conversation with each other through a close reading of the POP-UP Archive of the Arizona Queer Archives, AQA, in collaboration with FARR, a coalition of feminist scholars, artists, and activists of public scholarship. We trace the interdisciplinary processes of planning and performing the POP-UP Archive while also attending to the pedagogical-political possibilities created by community university activist partnerships, more generally, and community-based archival productions, more specifically. The POP-UP decentered institutionalized educational and archival models in a turn towards community-based sites of inquiry and oft-marginalized forms of knowledge production. We contend that the AQA POP-UP Archive facilitated queered feminist rhetorics of (dis)location to provoke unruly, embodied, and sensuous encounters with local bodies of knowledge. Through interconnected readings of POP-UP participant reflections and the lesbian feminist oral histories, we delineate the embodied, affective, and temporal capacities of the POP-UP's (dis)locational rhetorics. We provide a " POP-UP Archive Toolkit & Field Notes " as a means of encouraging fellow scholars, activists, and archivists to extend this approach into localized archival and community contexts.

This essay explores human bodies as producing and being produced by mediating and mediated technologies. Drawing from media theorists who are attentive to the body, I engage a queer lens—a queer body—to explore the 1925 silent film, Madame Behave, in order to elicit the transformative possibilities that film can have on audience bodies and desires. I consider the time period within which Madame Behave was produced to focus on the practice of montage as a political tactic that challenges normative social constructs. Considering how LGBTQI bodies have experienced surveillance and regulation for centuries, I argue that engaging film—moving images—as affective border-crossing terrains can pique desires beyond the constraints of the frame to introduce multiply-situated and dynamic subjects. I argue that such a dynamic multiplicity can move viewers to renegotiate their relationships to filmic subjects, to the theater space, and to the screen. The queering at play functions to shift and multiply the focus from the optic to the haptic in order to include more sensual practices so that the body and all of its interconnected parts are working as participants in film.


KEYWORDS: mediated/mediating technologies; haptic visuality; queer; embodiment; affect; multiply-situated

This article highlights the particular—embodied—ways in which the human record can be collected, organized, and preserved. Engaging both archival and queer theories, the understanding of body-as-archives and archives-as-body is instantiated in the oral history record from one genderqueer poet. This poet's narration can be understood as a nomadic one of multiplicities, undoings, and metamorphoses. The far-reaching possibilities of the ongoing histories of the simultaneous becoming and unbecoming – archived (un)becomings – are at play and embodied throughout this archived oral history. The archives can produce a dizzying effect through which, I argue, archivists can resist the urge to settle, to neatly organize, and to contain the archival records to consider new ways to understand and represent the dynamic (un)becomings. Through the interpretive frame of the nomadic, the archives can be understood as a site of (un)becomings and as a space that can hold moving living histories.

Through hands-on work collecting digital video oral histories for the Arizona Queer Archives, bodies and bodies of knowledge in ongoing affective states of simultaneous becoming and unbecoming can be observed and encountered. Both interviewing and storytelling techniques in select oral histories are considered here to stress the salient and affective processes of mediation and (un)becoming that unfold in front of and behind the camera as part of the production of digital archival stories and subsequent access to streaming technologies. In order to explore the details of archival production, the oral history interview is understood here as a space of both intimate and public storytelling—an affective assemblage. This paper introduces archives as affective multimodalities that work to tenderly hold and structure bodies, technologies, and stories especially as these come together and apart in states of (un)becoming.

LEE, Jamie A.. Mediated Storytelling Practices and Productions: Archival Bodies of Affective Evidences. Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, [S.l.], v. 9, n. 6, p. 72-85, dec. 2016. ISSN 1755-9944. Available at: <http://ojs.meccsa.org.uk/index.php/netknow/article/view/484>. Date accessed: 09 dec. 2016.

This paper explores the nature of the archival body and the ways in which it is temporally situated and yet also always in motion. Applying transdis-ciplinary logics, it argues that the affective nature of archival productions follows the machinations of metamorphoses and (un)becoming. Using two queer/ed and transgender archives as sites of inquiry, the paper explores the erotic and affective nature of accessing the archival body in its multimodal forms. Although touching, smelling and stroking what remains of distinct material lives might elucidate arousal and certain other affective and haptic responses within the visitor to the archives, the records themselves hold and cradle their creators and their storytelling techniques along with their relationships to longing for and belonging in the archival body of knowledge. This approach suggests that understanding of the record and its affects can be enriched by temporal perspectives that acknowledge distinct and diverse temporalities and promote generative understandings of potentially meaningful progressions of time and everyday rhythms embodied within archival materials.

In this chapter, I critically consider the ways that heteronormativity, homonormativity, and the politics of respectability come together to both haunt and produce the digital narratives that constitute the Arizona Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) Storytelling Project, in order to discover how memories are sometimes disciplined to re-produce normative narratives about queer pasts. I look and listen for the queering potentials in shared stories and in the digital and participatory technologies that record them. While conversations about “queering the archive” are not new and are, in fact, taking place transnationally, these conversations are extended here to explore the ways in which conformity to archival norms can be treacherous. I ask whether an archive can be a space of radical intervention or if it must always and only be a repository for stories that reproduce normative iterations of histories that inform powerful and normativizing national imaginaries. For those of us committed to intervening in traditional archival constructs and related practices of collecting and documenting, we can see that such practices run the risk of reproducing sexual normativities and social divisions.We should, therefore, understand the queer/ed archive as always in motion—forming and re-forming itself as we constitute and re-member its collections. Ultimately, this chapter argues for the need to develop a Queer/ed Archival Methodology, Q/M, to help ensure that complex, non-normative, and even contradictory histories have their places in society’s record.

Archival bodies take shape, and reciprocally shape the records creators who engage with the archives, through records, collections, practices, and productions. Utilizing the body as a framework to explore archives and their productions as always-in-motion, flexible, and dynamic, I interrogate the archival body through concepts of ethos and ethics. Beginning with an understanding of ethos as “an atmosphere, climate, disposition, and essence,” I move to make a connection to ethics that draws from political theorist Jane Bennett’s definition of ethics as “a complex set of relays between moral contents, aesthetic-affective styles, and public moods” (2010, p. xii). In this presentation, I question the climates in which hands-on practices might offer proposed archival ethos and ethics that are attentive to diverse, dynamic, and distinct bodies and bodies of knowledge to consider multiple histories, lived contexts, and meaning-making practices throughout archival productions.

Bennett J (2010) Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things. Duke University Press.

Through a framework of the body, the archives highlights the particular—embodied—ways in which the human record is collected, organized, and preserved. Engaging both archival and queer theories, the understanding of body-as-archives / archives-as-body is instantiated in the oral history record from one gender-queer poet whose narration can be understood as a nomadic one of multiplicities, undoings, and metamorphoses. The far-reaching possibilities of the ongoing histories and instabilities of such archived (un)becomings—the simultaneous becoming and unbecoming—are at play in archival records, the archival body. The archives produces a dizzying effect through which, I argue, archivists can resist their urge to settle to consider new ways to understand and represent this unsettledness of dynamic (un)becomings and the bodies that produce and are produced by them. Through the interpretive frame of the nomadic, the archives can be understood as a site of (un)becomings and as space that can hold such nomadic living histories.

Critical Librarianship & Pedagogy Symposium (CLAPS), University of Arizona, Tucson, February 2016.

This short paper will expand on my ongoing research to explore the archival body as temporally situated and yet also always in motion. The affective nature of archival productions follows the machinations of metamorphoses and, I suggest, (un)becoming—the simultaneous becoming and unbecoming—that is indicative of transdisciplinary logics and potentially reimagined archival approaches. As certain LGBTQ-identified peoples move through rights-based understandings of their acceptance in society and the nation-state as ‘proper’ citizens, the queer/ed archives embodies the struggling, shifting, and even further queering of those deemed ‘improper.’ In storytelling techniques, the force and function of the politics of respectability is palpable. Discursive self-regulation and normalizing techniques are affectively driven by the urgency to belong. Using Queer/ed and Transgender Archives as my sites of inquiry, I explore the erotic and affective nature of accessing the archival body in its multimodal forms. Although touching, smelling, and stroking what remains of distinct material lives might elucidate arousal and certain piqued, unnamed, and unknown affective and haptic responses within the visitor to the archives, the records themselves hold and cradle the records creators and their storytelling techniques along with their relationships to longing for and belonging in the archival body of knowledge. The record can be enriched by temporal perspectives that acknowledge distinct and diverse temporalities that can thus elicit generative understandings of even the normativized—what has become normal and normative through repetition and consent—progressions of time, everyday rhythms, and those markers that the traditional archival records might embody.

In this presentation, Lee uses the body as a framework to re-imagine the archives (here referring to the professionally managed repository) as un/settling and un/settled spaces. With the reciprocal engagement of bodies-as-archives / archives-as-bodies, she utilizes her hands-on archival and media productions to interrogate the human and non-human corpora of knowledge and knowledge-making practices, preservations, and their lingering effects. Drawing from archival, queer, and critical theories and from theories of embodiment, she extends the concept of bodies as assemblages of stories so far and integrates it with her hands-on work to more deeply understand and develop multimodal archives as sites and processes of simultaneous becoming and unbecoming. Lee traces her practical and theoretical engagements to argue for a shift toward the posthuman to consider the archival body as constituted by and constituting multiply-situated and shifting identities, technologies, representations, and timescapes in order to recognize the unsettling spaces as generative of re-imagined and socially just possibilities.

The Climate Alliance Mapping Project (CAMP) is an interactive digital story map. As a collaborative effort between academics, environmental NGOs, indigenous organizations, and communities, we are working for a socially just response to climate change. By combining scientific data and digital stories produced by affected communities, CAMP aims to educate the public; connect local communities with global activist networks; and inform policy decisions. Visit the website. Circulate. Add your stories.

PI - Tracey Osborne, Assistant Professor, School of Geography & Development, University of Arizona
Co-PI - Jamie A. Lee, Assistant Professor of Digital Culture, Information, and Society, School of Information, University of Arizona

Producing the Archival Body draws on theoretical and practical research conducted within US and Canadian archives, along with critical and cultural theory, to examine the everyday lived experiences of archivists and records creators that are often overlooked during archival and media production.

Expanding on the author’s previous work, which engaged archival and queer theories to develop the Queer/ed Archival Methodology that intervenes in traditional archival practices, the book invites readers interested in humanistic inquiry to re-consider how archives are defined, understood, deployed, and accessed to produce subjects. Arguing that archives and bodies are mutually constitutive and developing a keen focus on the body and embodiment alongside archival theory, the author introduces new understandings of archival bodies. Contributing to recent disciplinary moves that offer a more transdisciplinary emphasis, Lee interrogates how power circulates and is deployed in archival contexts in order to build critical understandings of how deeply archives influence and shape the production of knowledges and human subjectivities.

Producing the Archival Body will be essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of archival studies, library and information science, gender and women’s studies, anthropology, history, digital humanities, and media studies. It should also be of great interest to practitioners working in and with archives

Table of Contents
Introduction: Producing the Archival Body;  Part I: Body Parts;  1. Archival Underpinnings;  2. Time;  3. Bodies;  Part II: Bodies in Action;  4. Relational Reciprocity: Bodies As Archives / Archives As Bodies;  5. Bodies Producing Archives Producing Bodies: The Power of Storytelling;  CODA: The Moving Body