On Body-Archives: Sexual Violence beyond the Paradigm of Evidence
by
Vero Carchedi
This offering is part reflection on body-archives as a concept, part preliminary and intuitive compiling of materials that give rise to this concept. I signal a link between the fraught nature of evidence in contemporary archival theory and in its intersection with feminist and queer theory. While archival theory opens conceptions of the archive beyond textual or legal documents housed in an architectural or physical space, feminist and queer theory considers the body and its materiality as its central episteme. This juncture serves as a basis from which to (re)consider poetics, performance, and protest that enact a politics of refusal at legal appeals to redress the harms of sexual violence.
I use the term body-archives throughout this article, building on Julietta Singh’s auto-ethnographic work titled No Archive Will Restore You. She defines the body archive as “an assembly of history’s traces deposited in me … The body archive is an attunement, a hopeful gathering, an act of love against the foreclosures of reason. It is a way of knowing the body-self as a becoming and unbecoming thing, of scrambling time and matter, of turning toward rather than against oneself. And vitally, it is a way of thinking-feeling the body’s unbounded relation to other bodies” (Singh 2018, 29). This essay considers the body-archive in relation to sexual trauma and assault, where archiving the ephemeral bodily traces of violence can be a way of mutual recognition beyond logocentric demands of legible, linear, individual evidence. Recognizing a collectivity—importantly where certain bodies are more protected, privileged and acknowledged than others—in the redressing of bodily trauma is a crucial aspect of activating a feminist archive. If we think archivally about the following works, we begin to see how their languages unearth different modes of externalizing violence housed in the body archive, always beyond an individual scale.
On the path towards body-archives as a concept, these are my step stones: 1. The body-archive contains a trace—one that often goes un-marked (and un-remarked)—that may not have a direct translation to conventional narrative forms or visible remnants of the act of sexual violence; 2. The body-archive escapes the inscribable, though this does not negate its existence. It may be recorded in non-logocentric registers: sonic, haptic, sensory. It might be activated by unpredictable sensorial intake, by the cyclical lapse of time, by the experience of another. Somatic memory is non-linear, visceral, and transferrable to descendants and kin through physical, emotional and non-verbal modes; 3. The forms of activating this archive mean a necessary recognition of other bodily-archives, helping us understand how individual experiences of sexual violence are inseparable from its systemic manifestations.
The body records, which is different than saying that the body is a record, in the legalistic sense of the word. To part with the notion of the body as a legal document is to reckon with a loss in the way José Muñoz formulates it in his discussion of gesture and queer ephemera: “lost from evidentiary logic of heterosexuality” (2009, 81). Embracing the ephemerality of the body and its way of being marked and traced is a refusal to turn toward the scrutiny of legalism. It tells us that non-normative bodies, and bodies that suffer patriarchal violence were never meant to be read by courts or cops, which is not to say that that the knowledge or memory we have is invalid. Muñoz here is not speaking therefore of loss as resignation to the legal system that demands non-embodied or linear evidence, but rather a refusal of it. Evidence and documentation, though impossible to ignore in terms of sexual assault and its survivors, promises no relief for bodies marked marginal by racism and cisheteropatriarchy. In my search for non-legalistic anchors of feminist theory, I gathered this selection of materials: a 1978 poem by June Jordan, a 1973 performance by Ana Mendieta, a 2016 “Slut Walk” protest in Recife along with the 2019 viral protest-performance by the collective Las Tesis, “Un violador en tu camino.” Though they are from dispersed geographies, socio-political contexts, genres and time periods, they are productively thought through together in the ways that they resonate as a genealogy of bodily epistemologies to archive gendered violence. They are each affected and contiguous to legal systems and evidence, but (in my reading) refuse or exceed them.
First, I turn to activist and poet June Jordan’s “Poem about My Rights,” published in 1978, which describes the lived fact or threat of sexual violence as connected to systemic violence of imperialism, war, genocide, and racism that traverses national borders. Jordan writes:
and in France they say if the guy penetrates
but does not ejaculate then he did not rape me
and if after stabbing him if after screams if
after begging the bastard and if even after smashing
a hammer to his head if even after that if he
and his buddies fuck me after that
then I consented and there was
no rape because finally you understand finally
they fucked me over because I was wrong I was
wrong again to be me being me where I was
wrong
to be who I am (2017, 342)
The poem shouts that as a Black, Caribbean-American, non-straight woman there does not exist the possibility of securing legal rights, “because I am the wrong / sex the wrong age the wrong skin” (2017, 344). Jordan’s breathless free verse, caught somewhere between an immanent testimony and scream, demonstrates how legal systems refuse to account for the violence done to this body marked as “wrong.” The traces left behind by a (potential?) act of sexual assault—the screams, begging, wounds, multiple violations—in the absence of ejaculation, which is legible and evidentiary by a crime lab or rape kit, are insufficient to warrant recognition by the state. They elide archival proof status, and yet remain lodged in the body. Jordan continues in her poem to tie this injustice to those of penetrative wars among southern African nations, neo-imperialist projects carried out by the CIA, and racism in the United States. We know that these forms of penetrative violence are interwoven and take place on the scale of land and bodies, though, as archival theorist Ann Cvetkovich remarks “sometimes the impact of sexual trauma doesn’t seem to measure up to that of collectively experienced historical events … Sometimes it doesn’t appear sufficiently catastrophic because it doesn’t produce dead bodies or even, necessarily, damaged ones” (2003, 3). The burden of proof placed on bodies racialized, classed, or gendered as not mattering to the state is impossible and so different forms of making the violence visible becomes necessary.
Jordan’s poem forms a refusal of the legal system that ignores her rights when she writes “I have been the problem everyone seeks to / eliminate by forced / penetration with or without the evidence of slime and/ but let this be unmistakable this poem / is not consent I do not consent.” The fact that a recent opening in post-MeToo US white mainstream feminism orients itself toward making violence visible through the same legal systems that uphold oppression and white supremacy is quite demonstrative in this sense; it discards the early warnings coming from Jordan and other Black, women of color, and queer activists who knew these systems would continue to harm them. Divestment from legal systems that create hierarchies of protection as well as legibility forges a path here for a wider-scale transformation that upends the logic that undergirds the notion of “rights.”
Jordan’s poem uses metonymy to connect her own struggle as a Black woman under the threat of constant sexual violence with the violence of anti-Blackness and imperialism. In another instantiation, Ana Mendieta’s Untitled (Rape Scene) offers a different use of feminist metonymy: a horizontal understanding of the threat of violence through seeing it completed in the body of another. This performance evokes Saidiya Hartman’s foundational archival theory text, Venus in II Acts, where she writes “The knowledge of the other marks me” (2008, 4). Mendieta’s piece emerges in April 1973, when she was enrolled in an intermedia art course at the University of Iowa. In it she stages a reenactment of the rape and murder of fellow student Sara Ann Ottens. The scene, immortalized in a photographic series, shows Mendieta laying naked over a table with her hands tied to it, blood smeared across her legs, leaving the door to the scene ajar, so her invited friends would encounter it. If we think of this photograph as the only archival residue of the act, it is easy to begin to look at it as an appeal to evidence. The photograph is staged exactly as a crime scene would look, with harsh light over the bloodied legs of the “victim,” the dark surroundings only marked by shards of ceramic and blood stains on the floor. Much scholarship has read and continues to read this as a feminist performance through a forensic key, which I find both interesting and problematic. To be sure, the images produce a visceral effect of pain and horror in the viewer, and the making visible of an otherwise shrouded violence; its startling insertion into the banality of everyday life is a political feminist shout.
However, the potency of this political act extends far beyond its visual documentation and forensic visual cues. Mendieta’s embodied scream not only recognizes another body violently silenced, but understands that body as part of her own constitution. Mendieta substitutes herself, face hidden, as a feminist metonymy for the violence done to another woman. Her archive of violence is contiguous to Sara Ann Ottens’ and the activation of this fact creating its own archival deposit (though a much more visible one). Furthermore, Mendieta’s body-archive performance does not pass through verbal language to convey itself. Writes Singh: “In trying to measure the distance between the pain belonging to me and the pain of others, I came face to face with the limited vocabulary and insufficient metaphors we rely on to articulate something that, in the end, does not really have a place in language” (Singh 2018, 58). In seeing the body as a privileged site of archiving through reenactment, and not through turning it into an evidentiary record, we extend the possibilities of archival theory for feminist and queer movements. This piece by Mendieta fits into a genealogy of body-archival work, that is potent in thinking through later transnational feminist actions that also enact a collectivity.
To jump forward in time, in a video clip of the May 28, 2016 Marcha das Vadias in Recife, Brazil, filmed by leftist media group Mídia Ninja, seven protesters along with a crowd of women behind them shout: “Quando eu acordei tinha 30 homens em cima de mim!” (“When I woke up, I had 30 men on top of me”). The protesters—each body adorned differently by its own choice of paint, words, clothing—link arms, the movement of each affecting the rest. One covers her mouth with her hand and headscarf. Another raises her arms in resistance and two other arms, then fourteen, lift in the air. They then each fall to their knees, and begin to writhe on the ground in pain, still repeating the mantra. It is a reference to the testimony of a 16-year-old from Rio de Janeiro who was gang-raped two days before the protest, and I find it important to pause on some crucial aspects of how this polyphonic fusing of protest and performance activates her testimony (O Globo “Quando acordei”). First, this sentence of the testimony itself points to the non-linearity in which the body records sexual violence: the preterite, normally used to recount specific points in a narrative sequence, is here used when the body responds to violence already taking place (eu acordei). The imperfect, non-specific in time and location, describes the violent act (tinha 30 homens em cima de mim). Even under the legalistic demand of recounting, the body holds to its own time. In the march, this sentence is activated as a call not in the third person (quando ela acordou, tinha 30 homens em cima dela) but rather in the first person, each protester claiming their place as the violated body, which asserts how feminized bodies, particularly racialized, working-class, and non-straight or non-gender-normative bodies experience sexual violence daily as a fact or threat.
Furthermore, the protesters raise the pitch of the testimonial phrase, screaming or crying it in a way that would never be acceptable in a courtroom. They scream words, but the effect exceeds them, resonating with what Veronica Gago from Ni Una Menos Argentina writes of the movement and in particular the National Women’s Strike in October 2016: “The movement has words, but it is not made up only of words … a sound of vibrations, not the sound of words, what was brought together the massive vibrating collective body … It was the kind of cry that’s made by a blow to the mouth … In a quagmire that disorganizes the body and moves it. A cry at once very old and brand new, connected to a way of breathing” (Gago 2018, 159). The entangling of the seven bodies through their linked arms and multi-pitched shouting creates a collective, combative body to sexual violence. The shout creates a collectivity where there was initially an individual, exceeds the legibility of the legal record while leaving a sonic residue on the public space, the same one in which feminized bodies experience violence.
I offer these examples as a potential piecing together of the way body-archives may be recognized and enacted. All cases are mediated by writing, photography, or film, but I am more interested, as José Muñoz is, in the ephemeral gestures that leave residue on the spaces in which they are enacted, the effaced bodies who vibrate with them. Thinking through the languages they deploy might help both to amplify the genealogies of these performances and protests in the context of the Americas, and to think about how we can enact body-archives in the present through consideration of these lineages. Here I have delineated some needs for archiving that seek an end to gender violence today: first the recognition of the traumatized and/or feminized body as an archive; second, that the body-archive does not operate in evidentiary/legalistic terms; and thirdly that contemporary archival, queer and feminist theory can help us to open practical and analytical pathways for archives that struggle against sexual violence. Singh is correct in asserting that no archive will restore you, but the recognition and activation of body-archives seeks transformation rather than restoration. The body as archive, enacted through activism, poetics and performance, fusing a minor history with the present (historical) body that is created by it, is a notion that moves me. It forces us to look, listen, hold, and consider documents and histories in way that exceed a logocentric reading of words. I am interested in mutual recognition, excorporation and incorporation, bodily screams and externalizing of rage. This is the first step in healing sexual trauma, understanding that the body holds a memory, that it knows what happened, despite attempts (external or internal) at erasure and denial. In its place, through the divestment from the evidentiary paradigm and the substantiation of body-archives, we find resonance and collectivity.
References
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Cvetkovich, Ann. 2003. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 2002. “Archive Fever in South Africa.” In Refiguring the Archive, edited by Caroline Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid, and Razia Saleh, 38-82. Dordrecht: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0570-8_4.
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Hartman, Saidiya. 2008. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2: 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1.
“Intervenção Na Marcha Das Vadias Recife.” 2016. Facebook, 28 May, 2016. https://www.facebook.com/MidiaNINJA/videos/657823971042418/.
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Mendieta, Ana. 2010. “‘Untitled (Rape Scene)’, 1973.” https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/mendieta-untitled-rape-scene-t13355.
Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009.Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press.
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