Description
In this study, I analyze the archiving practice of Alok Vaid-Menon, a queer trans and gender nonconforming performance artist, through three of their Instagram posts. Their posts highlight three different forms of trauma that they rhetorically perform to display the exigency of the violence that their communities face. In doing so, this study complicates K. J. Rawson’s “Archive This! Queering the Archive,” which presents three nontraditional archival practices in order to “re-imagine the parameters of our evidence and the sources of our histories.” Rawson relies on Achille Mbembe’s notion of viewing “archives as status” to illustrate how queer communities are often left out of archives and/or misrepresented. While his work demonstrates new possibilities for archiving queer histories, there are constraints to it as it exemplifies a (cis)tematic drive, which is primarily seen in the limited attention on violence that trans and gender nonconforming communities encounter. By not fully displaying the violence they struggle with, he leaves a gap in his contribution to queering archives. My aim here is not to argue that Rawson’s text is completely unacceptable; rather it is to challenge his archival practices to respectfully represent and prioritize trans people of color. My examination of Vaid-Menon’s rhetorical performance of trauma through queer archiving relies on a queer and digital rhetoric methodology. Through these methodological lenses, I begin by assessing one of Vaid-Menon’s Instagram posts that illustrates the trauma of daily harassment that they and their communities face, which leads to a normalization of trauma. Second, I analyze their embodiment of contradiction in their second Instagram post that displays the trauma of erasure. I also examine a third Instagram post by Vaid-Menon that portrays a multimodal enthymeme that alludes to trauma of whiteness. I conclude that my discussion of Vaid-Menon’s queer archiving prioritizes and accurately presents the said groups solely through “archives of trauma[s].” This form of archiving addresses the larger matter of the lack of privilege that trans and gender nonconforming people of color have as violence against them is documented for the sake of documentation and not to actively disrupt and end violence.
