Description
Interest in critical affect studies has proliferated across the humanities for the past thirty years, but the majority of scholarship examines only textual or other visual artifacts in an effort to trace the circulation of feeling. Concurrently, queer archival methodologies aimed at historicizing and theorizing marginal and ephemeral queer lives have emerged, challenging traditional archival frameworks for thinking about which and why materials count as evidentiary record while reimagining how those materials can be engaged queerly. Though critical engagement with sound across disciplines is also on the rise, little scholarship has explored the intersection of emotion, queerness, and non-musical sound. In contrast, this project examines archived audio recordings of San Diego activist lesbians reflecting on the local feminist and lesbian scenes of the 1970s through close listening. By systematically attuning the ear toward archivally marginalized but affectively significant sounds—including the material qualities and nonlinguistic activities of the voice, those commingling sounds produced in the spatial surrounds of the original recording and that of the listener, and the sonic residue of the mediating analog and digital technologies at play—the listener locates incidental and ephemeral evidence of queer feeling and life. Distilled to its most basic parts, this study begins to theorize how queer feeling sounds, and, in turn, how queer sounds affectively impress upon the spatiotemporally remote, listening queer body. Specifically, I trace the emergence of an affective economy of queer dis/comfort, a network of bodies, objects, and signs circulating in relation, through sound. Ultimately, I argue that listening in all the wrong places constitutes both a queer archival method and a means of queer knowledge-making particularly suited for picking up on circuitous, unruly queer affects that visual, textual, and ecological approaches do not readily afford.
