Performing the Archival Body: Inciting Queered Feminist (Dis)locational Rhetorics Through Place-Based Pedagogies

Performing the Archival Body: Inciting Queered Feminist (Dis)locational Rhetorics Through Place-Based Pedagogies

Peitho Volume 21 Issue 1 Fall/Winter 2018

Author(s): Elizabeth Bentley and Jamie A. Lee with FARR

Abstract: 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. 

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