gemini://gemini.estradiol.cloud/~rumblestrips/journal/2024/2024-04-13-stage-whisper.gmi

a university librarian at an ivy league writes for an audience of historians about archival silences, and introduces the notion of a "shouty archive". [2] what? i mean, i suppose it's an imperfect and relatively powerful metaphor, as the author herself notes, but i'm also not sure it's really all that illuminating of a point. "archival silences" do exist, and have been widely theorized based informed by the work of michel-rolph trouillot.

i don't find talking about absolutes all that satisfying. i've been thinking a lot lately about the moral claims around access to information and the subtleties that get bulldozed in the name of impossible perfection. archival discourse, like the piece i reference above, talks about correcting silences, and the work of verne harris introduced the notion of "archival whispers", which trace around the absences and silences.

> if the archive is a remnant, it is one that keeps whispering to me, insisting on its place in my everyday life. what i might have said [to an archivist friend] instead is this: "i am a disquieted archive that fumbles in words. a thing made up of infinite, intractiable traces."

> or, i might have simply said: "the archive is a stimulus between myself and myself." [3]

silence, trace, and voice, and the intersection of those aspects as an expression of power by those represented in the records is an area ripe for further study. this is coming to mind more fully lately for a few reasons: 1) the concerns about access to information and the loss of control some of us feel, 2) how to reclaim power as trans folk, 3) what the state of the trans archive(s) to come will be, and 4) how i (or "some of us") exist on gemini as a parallel space.

given these aspects i feel as though it's only natural to take a step back and think about in some cases why we want to be heard. i don't feel as though i owe everyone — and, in actually, every trans person i know or meet as well — the dignity of a comprehensive narrative about my life. a presumption of access to that kind of detail, trauma, what have you has to be earned. but i might choose to hint at one thing or another as opposed to publicly posting transition photos online.

however, i do shitpost as much as i earnestpost, and shitposts are a way to make a murmur audible for the right audience. similarly, posting on gemini feels like a bit more of a sacred space in that i can be "freer". even if i link to my gemlog posts or other writing here, you /really/ need to want to read it if gemini's not a major part of how you interact with information online. it passes under the radar enough that the average person won't discover it. together, this it is a subtle form of refusal to be present, or simply be.

> since the materiality of the body threatens to eclipse meaning, the voice is neither embodied nor disembodied but /negatively embodied/. that is, the body is incorporated in the voice as a /lack/. whispering, in refusing to surrender the absolute materiality of the body, stages the /lack of a lack/, thus concealing the body from the symbolic scheme. from extreme /intimacy/ to extreme /disembodiment/, whispering constantly oscillates between this pair of dialectic traits, whether in its physiological qualities or its cultural, social, and religious implications. [4]

this kind of stage whisper, in an archival sense, is a symbolic retreat as a way to control that power. it is a refusal to be fully embodied, fully participatory, fully seeking validation. what i want to see, thus, is forms of trans* archival practice that engage with this: ceaselessly becoming a space for selective voice and register, for spectra of embodiment, for spectra of presence, abundance, and lack.

in a stage whisper: silence, embodiment, and trans* archival praxis