Promotional Information

Examines trauma in many forms of lesbian popular culture in cultural, political, and depathologized ways

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. The Everyday Life of Queer Trauma 15
2. Trauma and Touch: Butch-Femme Sexualities 49
3. Sexual Trauma/Queer Memory: Incest, Lesbianism, and Therapeutic Culture 83
4. Transnational Trauma and Queer Diasporic Publics 118
5. AIDS Activism and Public Feelings: Documenting ACT UP’s Lesbians 156
6. Legacies of Trauma, Legacies of Activism: Mourning and Military Revisited 205
7. In the Archive of Lesbian Feelings 239
Epilogue 273
Appendix: A Note on Interviews 289
Notes 291
Filmography 327
Bibliography 329
Index 345

About the Author

Ann Cvetkovich is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism.

Reviews

"Avoiding bullshit moralism and sentimentality, Ann Cvetkovich breathes new life into the study of trauma. This is the book I looked for in so many libraries and bookstores, and never found. It is not only brilliant but totally necessary." Kathleen Hanna of the band Le Tigre "An Archive of Feelings makes an extremely important contribution to queer and feminist cultural studies by insisting upon the public, and indeed national dimensions, of sexual trauma. Cvetokovich's book argues for the productive rather than repressive power of trauma and accounts for its role in the production of queer identities and queer counter publics. This is queer cultural studies at its finest!" Judith Halberstam, author of Female Masculinity