The Body in the Library: Archive Work as Caring Labor / Caring Labor as Archive Work

February 24, 2023 -
1:00pm to 2:30pm

So Mayer, PhD 
Author of A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing (2020) 

Abstract: Contemporary historians such as Saidiya Hartman and Hugh Ryan identify ways in which archives do the work of the state and its institutions. Archives serve as sites where marginalized histories are hidden or even erased. These insightful critics identify ways in which we, as radical thinkers, researchers and makers from marginalized communities, can and do use our bodies to challenge those erasures. Building on their work, So Mayer asks what happens to “the body in the library” in all its senses, looking at how performing radical detective work in the archive asks us to care for, and even bring back to life, those bodies and communities who have been suppressed, harmed and hidden in and by the archives. 

Alongside Diana Taylor’s embodied concept of performance, in this talk, So Mayer adds the embodied practices of caring labor that connect the physical and affective, the individual and the communitarian. With a focus is on how we can democratize archive work to overcome traditional “methodologies,” the talk employs a queer feminist “messy-dology,” that acknowledges archive work as caring labor– and caring labor as archive work. 

This talk is offered in relation to the virtual art exhibition—Experience, Integration, Expression: The Work of Norman Klenicki

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